The majority of academic journals tend to avoid controversial items, especially in the scientific essay format. This is a shame, because that format can open debate on important and thought-provoking issues that are generally impossible to express within the constraints of conventional journal papers. However, it is possible for a good writer to make some very serious points highly visible, just by hiding them within a deceptively simple, easy-to-read style.
Steven J. Gould was a master of the art of the scientific essay. Many of us have happy memories of being enlightened, infuriated, stimulated and entertained, by turns or all at once, by his facility with words. He had an unusual ability to make a good story—always with cast-iron academic credentials and wide implications—out of the most surprising and apparently unpromising material.
Very few New Zealand scientists can claim to follow in Gould's rather large footsteps, but one who can is John Flux. Like Gould, Flux is devoted to good science, and has strong and independent opinions and is good at expressing them. Like Gould, Flux is a perceptive reviewer, a fearless critic of poor science and worse management, and is willing to say things that others only think. His essay on the human implications of his decades of work on the starlings of Belmont Hill was shortlisted for the Royal Society's Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing in 2008. It deserves a much wider readership.
The New Zealand Journal of Zoology would like to encourage the art of essay writing, by occasionally publishing an invited contribution of that genre. We have chosen Flux's informative and stimulating item as the first of what we hope could become a new series.