Stuart Kauffman '61, comfortably stretched out on the sofa in the Montgomery House overlooking the frozen Occom Pond, seemed at peace with the landscape.
"There's something awfully honest about these hills," said Kauffman, renowned theoretical biologist and one of this term's Montgomery Fellows.
Kauffman arrived at the College on Monday and will be on campus until Feb. 14.
It has been four years since Kauffman, a resident of Santa Fe, N.M. has visited Hanover, a town he feels grounded in and one he called "one of those magical places in the world."
He said it brought back memories of cold air, swinging on birch trees and adventures with the Dartmouth Mountaineering Club, of which Kauffman was president as an undergraduate at the College.
Stanley Bates '61, philosophy professor at Middlebury College, said what always stood out about Kauffman was his love of the outdoors and his intellectualism.
"He has the most creative mind I have ever encountered," Bates said. "Stu was always a person who was just bursting with ideas." Even after 19 years teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Kauffman's soul is inextricably tied to the Hanover Plain.
The great lessons he learned from Dartmouth are intellectual honesty and "the fun of challenging whatever the authorities said intellectually," something he said he has always carried with him during his scientific career.
And the most important lesson Kauffman said he has learned from a long scientific career, is to "trust you own sense of what a good question is."
Asking the questions no one else has asked before is more important than finding the answers to other people's questions, Kauffman said.
He said he knows many colleagues in his field consider his ideas controversial, but he likes his "bi-modal review." If only half of his intellectual peers are opposed to his ideas, not more, Kauffman said it means he must be moving in the right direction.
On the other hand, Kauffman said, to be a scientist, sometimes "you have to be willing to live with the chaos of not knowing where you are going."
For 19 years, Kauffman taught biology at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1986 he taught while at the same time doing research at the Santa Fe Institute. He retired from Penn in 1993.
After receiving his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth in philosophy, Kauffman studied philosophy, psychology and physiology for two years at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship.
In his six years combined at the College and in England, Kauffman said he never pursued serious studies in biology.
After leaving Oxford, Kauffman said he wanted to become a doctor and in 1963, found himself enrolled in pre-med classes at the University of California at Berkeley.
It was at Berkeley where he took a course in developmental biology and became fascinated with the question of how the genes in one cell reproduce in an ordered way until they eventually make up a living creature.
In 1968, Kauffman received his M.D. from the University of California at San Francisco. He interned at the University of Chicago from 1969 to 1973, and then worked for the National Institute of Health and the National Cancer Institute for two years before joining the Penn faculty.
Kauffman's visit to the College this month was made possible by the Montgomery Endowment, which was established in 1977 by Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth F. Montgomery '25 to enable visiting scholars to interact with students in the classroom.