From a recent New Yorker article about Stephen Jay Gould:

Major progress, Gould seemed to believe, demands major risk. And, even if you get things wrong, science may ultimately gain. People ask questions and make discoveries that would otherwise have gone unasked and undiscovered. (Gould quotes the economist Vilfredo Pareto with approval here:

Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.)

Gould might well then represent something new in the historical strata of science: the first self-consciously revolutionary scientist--the first scientist who set out to create a revolution at least in part because he felt that the field just needed one.