This is interesting and worthwhile. It's more academic than I would like, but it's mercifully brief. Apparently the term Anthropocene has to be defineThis is interesting and worthwhile. It's more academic than I would like, but it's mercifully brief. Apparently the term Anthropocene has to be defined in geological terms. That is, how does the purported new period manifest itself in rocks? Geologic time. These quotes give a sense of the tone.
"Paul Crutzen had tied the Anthropocene to the late 18th century and the Industrial Revolution, with combustion of fossil fuels causing an initial uptick in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations above those typical of the Holocene. Will Steffen, building on this earlier proposal, came to argue for the mid-20th century as the main point of onset for the Anthropocene marked by the 'Great Acceleration' in human activities around that time. And geologist Bill Ruddiman even suggested that the Anthropocene might be recognized thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution as the result of widespread land clearing fo agriculture, causing releases of carbon dioxide and methane, and potentially global climate change. All of these proposals offered the prospect for an Anthropocene GSSP [Global Boundary Stratotype Sections and Points], and yet from a pragmatic, stratigraphic, point of view, only one proposal presented a relatively straightforward, unambiguous, basis for a global, isochronous, stratigraphic marker: the spread of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing, beginning with the Trinity Test of 1945." (p. 51)
This can seem a bit erudite at first, but eventually the reader is drawn into the urgency of the problem. And it's a monster.
"Atmospheric carbon dioxide has always varied substantially over time. Nevertheless, anthropogenic changes in carbon dioxide concentrations are well beyond their geologically recent natural range of variability . . . Today's levels of carbon dioxide (>400 ppm) are almost certainly higher than they have been at any time for the past 4 million years or even longer. Rates of atmospheric temperature change are also exceptionally rapid, and are accelerating together with rates of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions since 1950." (p. 66)...more
Margaret Atwood reminds us in her introduction here of just how beloved The Island Of Dr. Moreau was by the inimitable Jorge Luis Borges, who called iMargaret Atwood reminds us in her introduction here of just how beloved The Island Of Dr. Moreau was by the inimitable Jorge Luis Borges, who called it an “atrocious miracle.” “Speaking of Wells’s early tales—The Island Of Dr. Moreau among them—he said ‘I think they will be incorporated, like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.’” Just for the record, the last time I checked there were 370 million native English speakers, and another 1.7 billion who use it as a lingua franca. I’ll say this much for the novella, the onset of suspense is far subtler than Frankenstein, which I recently reread. Frankenstein moves relatively quickly to a kind of full-bore hysteria and remains there for the duration. Here, the building of suspense is more gradual and then it modulates as the danger falls and rises once more. Commendable too is the novella’s compressed action and vivid description. ”Colour vanished from the world, the tree tops rose against the luminous blue sky in inky silhouette.” Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness seems the only peer I might cite. And like both Heart of Darkness and Frankenstein it is a Chinese-box narrative—a story within a story. The novella must be read as a product of its time, like Frankenstein. The reprehensible science here is vivisection between species. It’s a given of the narrative that such exchanges of tissue can occur. So swallow the Kool-Aid, and allow Wells his conceit. Frankenstein was about vivisection, too, and it first appeared in 1818. This novella was published in June 1895, which tells us something about how long these erroneous ideas of monster creation were popular with the general public. (Now we’ve got CRISPR and scads of far, far more horrifying technologies. The Chinese, it’s reported, are creating supermen, and so on.) Dr. Moreau is a part of our SF heritage. The prose is on the whole quite wonderful. The end is heartbreakingly sad and moving, especially if one loves animals and nature....more
Interesting so far is the early collapse of Elyn’s social world. The early adulthood onset of schizophrenia is so brutal. She’s barely 19 and attending Oxford on a Marshal scholarship when she turns resolutely inward, meaning silent. She’s a philosophy major. Saks has a rich emotional memory. She remembers strings of dialogue but also the succession of her emotional states. I have that skill, too. Every humiliation is so readily recalled. Her first experience of any sort of mental health care was in England, where she was never restrained. In England she found affordable psychoanalysis from a talented woman. It saved her. She graduated Oxford with honors, finished her treatment with Mrs. Jones, the analyst, and returned to the U.S. just as she was about to undergo a severe intensification of her illness.
At that time, 1981, psychoanalysis — though it was the only treatment she responded to — was out of favor, and the next generation of antipsychotics had yet to come along. (Oliver Sacks, who blurbs this book enthusiastically, wrote Awakenings which discusses the dreaded side effects of some of the first-generation antipsychotics like L-DOPA.) Author Elyn Saks was finally diagnosed with “chronic paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation.” Her prognosis was termed “grave.” She was now attending Yale law school and spending much time in its mental health facilities. It was Yale-New Haven Hospital that Saks was brutally restrained for the first time. She argues convincingly that such restraints were for the convenience of the staff, not for her own well-being. She suffered inordinately. (Ironically, it was also in a Yale-operated psychiatric hospital that Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias, would be ruthlessly manhandled more than a generation later.)
It’s when Saks begins to help mentally ill people like herself, that the story becomes doubly interesting. Today she is a professor at USC’s Gould School of Law. Please look for her TED Talk. Astonishing is her achievement when you consider that many with schizophrenia spend their adult lives playing with their feces or babbling or screaming much of the time. An early lesson. Working with a fellow student, she advocates for a young man to be released from some back ward somewhere who then goes on to burn his mother, father and sibling to death in their trailer. So she has herself gone from powerlessness to being the possessor of formidable legal skills that can be used in the interests of the unwell, but which have an unknowable downside as well.
The prose here is very flat, direct, without subtext. Everything is on the surface. The primary objective is communication. One tires of her up and down struggle with her medication, of her refusal to believe she is mentally ill despite the Mt. Everest of evidence. Yet her prescribed medication has the possible side effect of Tardive Dyskinesia, a wretched jerking and plodding manner of walking and bodily movement that is irreversible. She rightly fears her meds because of this. So she keeps going off her them whereupon she has a psychotic break. It’s a dreary repetitive cycle that lasts for years. In the meantime—I love this!—she completes all the publications necessary to be awarded tenure at USC.
Yet her psychiatrist is dismayed at her stubbornness. Finally, he threatens to end treatment with her if she goes off meds again. She has an epiphany about her “maladaptive stubbornness.” Thankfully the new generation of anti-psychotics appears — voila!. It has its downside, too, but it’s minimal compared to the older drugs. She subsequently suffers breast and ovarian cancer in two separate episodes. This woman’s will despite madness and grave illness is astonishing. This is the first story about high-functioning schizophrenics I have ever read. It’s a remarkable document that changes one’s thinking entirely....more
The book reads like a memoir. It possesses a mastery of tone that’s deeply satisfying. I think I may have found a substitute—not a replacement!—for DrThe book reads like a memoir. It possesses a mastery of tone that’s deeply satisfying. I think I may have found a substitute—not a replacement!—for Dr. Oliver Sacks, who was a dreamy writer on subjects neurological. Author Esmé Weijun Wang’s perspective though is that of a patient. She suffers from schizoaffective disorder, which I have just learned has a manic aspect. She has been involuntarily institutionalized three times, and her last psychotic episode in 2013 lasted 7 months. How she comes out of that with a gift for fine expository prose is a mystery indeed. There’s a lurid exposé aspect to the book, too, it’s in part the story of how mentally ill students are treated at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. My God, it’s draconian, with huge female security guards attacking sick students—just beyond belief! Clearly the squeaky clean university will do anything to limit its liability, including indulging in discrimination against people with mental illnesses. It’s this sort of injustice, you might say, that constitutes Wang’s territory or beat. She also touches succinctly on mental health policy, involuntary institutionalization, life on the asylum ward, the depiction of mental health issues culturally—misperceptions, stigma, etc—and the myriad dangers of bearing children. (What if a schizophrenic mother should go mad? Who would care for her child? What if the child should become schizophrenic due to its genetic inheritance? How would a parent care for such a high-maintenance child over its entire lifespan? It could not be done. Eventually the child would be institutionalized, perhaps against his or her will. What if both the child and the parent should go mad? It’s not unknown. This is just the tip of the iceberg.) The book feels well grounded in our cultural moment. Wang is a gifted writer but, my God, talk about having to pay your dues to find your subject matter! Wang regularly deals with hallucinatory corpses lying in the streets, or monsters running her down so she has to jump or duck to avoid being body slammed, or believing that everyone around her has been replaced by robots identical in appearance to the missing, or that she is, in fact, dead, and that whatever existence she now leads is part of the afterlife. The distressing news though is Wang’s prognosis. She’s likely, she says, to get worse. She’s on a deadline of sorts, as we all are, but hers is more unrelenting. This leaves the reader with the sense of having come across a priceless rarity, a jewel hewn from the very substance that kills articulacy. It seems an impossibility that you’re holding such a treasure in your own hands. I’m recalling the decent or well written memoirs of mental illness I’ve read over the years. I can count them on my fingers. This is one of them. But why the author didn’t call it a memoir, I wish I knew. Read it, please.
PS Wang here mentions favorably Elyn R. Saks memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, which is brilliant; but from the perspective of vividly showing the reader the depredations of schizophrenia, Wang’s writing is the more deft. Saks is a brilliant academic; her concern is mental health law. Wang is, by contrast, more of a prose stylist....more
“The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with error“The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors.” —Current Affairs
——
This book is a superficial gloss on human history. Nice try but it excludes too much subject matter in favor of an overarching conceptual view to be deeply interesting. Stopped reading for reasons detailed below at p. 304 of 416.
Considering the outlandishness of some of its claims—the downside of the Agricultural Revolution, the joys of Empire—the book seems weirdly under-sourced. The bibliography is beyond meagre. Don't get me wrong, I like a little informed speculation as much as anyone. Take for example the claim that houses, their advent, "became the psychological hallmark of a much more self-centered creature." (p. 99) I, for one, would be delighted to know how one can discern the psychology of someone who lived more than 9,000 years ago. The apparently relevant note cited is "2 Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative". But when one looks up Mr. Marks' book one sees that it pertains only to the 15th to the 21st centuries CE.
Another thing, the book seems all biological determinism—and we know what that sort of thinking led to: the Konzentrationslager. The life of the mind is nothing here, the intellect nothing, all because it has no discernible basis in biology—so reductive and materialist, too. I'm hoping this is just a rhetorical device. Please, let it be. Moreover, the author cherishes a certain sneering and glib tone which I find annoying. Well, yes, now he's changing his tune, isn't he? But not before thoroughly pissing me off. Was that necessary? Ah, now he's starting to celebrate the very social constructs—the law, the state, joint stock corporations, etc.—that he so glibly belittled as "imaginary myths" a few pages back. So his earlier arguments were disingenuous. That's not something I prize in a writer.
Notwithstanding the questionable attempt to raise the reader's hackles, just mentioned, I find myself on p. 170 and 95% of this is material I already know. Granted, the author tries to package it as felicitously as possible, but it's still stuff I know and, no doubt, material my well read GR friends will also know. What I had hoped for on cracking this formidable spine was something far more intellectually challenging, like Naipaul. Still, I find myself nursing a hope that this is just an overly long introduction to a thrilling thesis. At the same time I fear it will turn out to be another tedious read for a far less learned general reader than myself. Am I overqualified for this book? Trepidation abounds. 2.0 stars so far, inauspicious.
Meh. It's really an undergraduate survey course, if that. It's a great review of common knowledge that seeks to find new linkages and epiphanies. It sometimes works. But often the linkages are specious. As when he terms liberal humanism a religion. It isn't, though it's a neat shorthand for his minimalist theories. Now I'm reading about how religions are unifiers. The author certainly has a flair for the obvious, I'll say that much. Here's an example of author Harari's reductiveness, which is inevitable in a book skirting so many vast subjects. On p. 232 we read: "The Aryan race therefore had the potential to turn man into superman." Nietzsche is nowhere mentioned. The statement is wholly lacking in context—the Nazis are glossed but that's all. It really doesn't make coherent sense. Gloss, that's the word that best describes this book. A gloss.
The writer is careless with metaphors. We're told that cultures are "mental parasites," that "history disregards the happiness of individuals" and that "history made its most momentous choice." (p. 243-244). To say such things is to give agency to the non-sentient and adds to the narrative's by now utterly grating superficiality. Here's yet another bizarro statement:
Had the Aztecs and Incas shown a bit more interest in the world surrounding them – and had they known what the Spaniards had done to their neighbors – they might have resisted the Spanish conquest more keenly and successfully. (p.292)
Nonsense. The Spaniards had guns, germs and steel. Reread Jared Diamond and William H. Prescott, Mr. Harari. Foreknowledge would have availed the indigenous peoples little or nothing. The author goes on to admit as much in the paragraphs to follow, but why then wasn't that earlier sentence cut? But it gets better:
If the subject peoples of the Inca Empire had known the fates of the inhabitants of Mexico, they would not have thrown in their lot with the invaders. But they did not now....[Thus] the native peoples of America...[paid] a heavy price for their parochial outlook.
It's astonishing the author should use that ecclesiastical word. For what was the ostensible motivation of the conquerors but the glory of Christendom. Harari is blaming the victims. The world view of the Aztecs and Incas and others was limited. Harari blames them because they had not yet advanced beyond that basic if incomplete awareness. He then goes on to excoriate all of Asia and Africa for not having had the wherewithal to explore the world and conquer others. But these are cultural predilections, not standardized goals applicable to all. This leads to an unseemly West is the Best argument that's right out of Niall Ferguson's Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order.
Is this book popular because it essentially functions as the West's cheering section? It's lovely we have developed science and technology and historiography etc. I'm glad I live in the West. But it's absurd to say that earlier cultures, because they did not develop in a timely manner our own particular brand of curiosity, were deficient. All cultures are blood soaked, our own included. The world is only what it is, not some counter-factual supposition.
An excellent overview of the work of Diego Velazquez and his standing among the Old Masters. It's also the story of one man transfixed to the point ofAn excellent overview of the work of Diego Velazquez and his standing among the Old Masters. It's also the story of one man transfixed to the point of monomania by one of Velazquez's works, John Snare, a 19th century bookseller and collector. Highly recommended....more
For me, this book was — like Why Nations Fail, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers— a keystone narrative that linked up many For me, this book was — like Why Nations Fail, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers— a keystone narrative that linked up many formerly disparate threads of my personal reading. Such books are rare pleasures. I had always known that Alexander von Humboldt’s story was a link missing from my general knowledge. The praises of Oliver Sacks and Stephen Jay Gould alone told me as much. But I didn't know this was generally due to anti-German sentiment so powerful in the U.S. and Europe after World War II.
During his Latin American explorations (1799-1804), Humboldt was front page news in the West. He and his team climbed volcanoes, pressed plants, murdered fascinating new animal species, reset the coordinates, often grossly incorrect, for scores of cartographic features (rivers, mountains, etc.), slept on the shores of the Orinoco River, dodged leopards, crocodiles and other predators, and were eaten alive by mosquitoes. This was a time when his name was a byword for adventure on the lips of every schoolboy, even in the U.S.
Afterward Humboldt returned to Europe, settling in Paris, where he wrote up his findings. What resulted was a series of paradigm-smashing publications for both scientists and general readers. He is the first true naturalist as we understand that term today. It helped that Humboldt was a writer of startling clarity and concision. Until then, it seems, writing for the masses was not considered a career-expanding opportunity by men of science. Author Andrea Wulf does not say why, but I think it probably had something to do with the presumed loss of reputation for so craven an act of moneymaking. Humboldt changed all that. Sacks and Gould and countless other writers would become beneficiaries of his breakthrough.
But his insight into the unplumbed market for science writing is secondary to his real achievement. Humboldt’s revolutionary act was to view nature as a unified force dependent upon myriad interactions and mutual reciprocities, not reduced to mind-numbing categories as taxonomists and other systematists were then doing. Humboldt saw the full ecological impact of forests; therefore, he was the first to warn about deforestation. He saw how greedy cash crops (monoculture), cleared needed forest, leeched the ground of minerals and emptied aquifers, thus touching the fates of countless animal species, including humans. Moreover, he saw the importance of expressing one’s personal emotional responses to nature and he wrote with a passion that repelled some cold men of science, but enlisted scores of readers from all walks of life.
He had as personal acquaintances Simón Bolívar, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and Napoleon Bonaparte, who had him arrested briefly as a German spy. They all read him. His works constituted an epiphany for Charles Darwin, who took Humboldt’s Personal Narrative on board H.M.S. Beagle with him and who later met his hero. Henry David Thoreau could not have written Walden without Humboldt's example. The English Romantic poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron all read and were influenced by him; as was Edgar Allan Poe, who dedicated his Eureka: A Prose Poem to him.
The major figures succeeding Humboldt and carrying his torch, if you will, include George Perkins Marsh, whose Man and Nature coalesced Humboldt’s environmental warnings, previously scattered throughout many volumes, into a clarion call for the conservation of the natural world; Ernst Haeckel, the prolific marine biologist, who virtually broadcast the Humboldtian sensibility to countless millions through his own popular books and articles; and John Muir, the almost comically ecstatic naturalist largely responsible for creating the U.S. federal parks system.
P.S. Humboldt was almost certainly homosexual. He usually had some slender young man with him in the guise of assistant. He avoided women like the plague, except those who could talk science, and he was said, if we are to believe Wulf (I do), to have disappointed entire cities of women who thought he'd make a fine match. His life was, in part, another bullet to the gizzard of that ridiculous fiction, the celibate bachelor....more
For a long time it was believed that scientists could only study quantum mechanics at absolute zero in their labs. Yet in recent years excellent evideFor a long time it was believed that scientists could only study quantum mechanics at absolute zero in their labs. Yet in recent years excellent evidence of quantum mechanics at work in humans, birds, plants and other living things has come to the fore. Who knew? This book is a fascinating and very accessible introduction for the general reader. It uses virtually no math. Rather, the writers possess a neat gift for metaphor. Stephen Jay Gould had this gift too, and while Life on the Edge isn't SJG, that paragon of science writing, it does the job and does it well....more
Interesting. Gould wrote these essays around the time that the Alvarez meteoric impact theory was being published. This is something that we now know Interesting. Gould wrote these essays around the time that the Alvarez meteoric impact theory was being published. This is something that we now know to be beyond doubt. But at the time, when it was just being introduced, the theory, and especially its association with the Cretaceous extinction, was not immediately embraced on the part of paleontologists. This led Luis Alvarez, no doubt in his frustration, to call paleontologists "not very good scientists." Oh dear! But Gould's coverage of the developing story is very fine and can be followed here and in his subsequent books, especially The Flamingo's Smile....more
This book is 30 years old and still highly readable. It's about biology, more specifically about Darwinian evolution and the history of science. QuiteThis book is 30 years old and still highly readable. It's about biology, more specifically about Darwinian evolution and the history of science. Quite good and gripping writing explaining what is still pretty much the current state of our knowledge.
Gould has a fondness for rehabilitating scientists who were wrong for interesting reasons. In this volume those figures include: Edward Tyson (who sought to place chimpanzees next to humans as the next link in the great chain of being theory), the Rev. William Buckland (who misinterpreted evidence of past glaciation as proof of The Flood), Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (who straddled the epigenicist/preformationist embryology debate of the 18th century), and the father of taxonomy himself, Carolus Linnaeus (whose work was also skewed by the false great chain of being theory).
Gould is always careful to point out that no science is without its limiting cultural or social preconceptions. Scientific knowledge, moreover, is conditional, never fixed, and changes with our ever modifying understanding of it. He writes:
Good arguments don't provide nearly as much insight into human thought, for we can simply say that we have seen nature aright and have properly pursued the humble task of mapping things accurately and objectively. But bad arguments must be defended in the face of nature's opposition, a task that takes some doing. The analysis of this "doing" often provides us with insight into the ideology or thought processes of an age, if not into the modes of human reasoning itself. (p. 284)
I enjoy these collections of Natural Science magazine essays by Stephen Jay Gould, but this is not his best one. Of the five I've read so far -- thereI enjoy these collections of Natural Science magazine essays by Stephen Jay Gould, but this is not his best one. Of the five I've read so far -- there are 10 altogether -- this is my least favorite. At his best SJG's essays play off a number of seemingly unrelated topics and then slowly, often dazzlingly, he weaves the disparate threads together. He still does that here. And the best essays, "The Diet of Worms and the Defenestration of Prague" and "Non-Overlapping Magisteria" are right up there with his very best. But too often the essays are flat and lacking in the discursive fun that is his hallmark. I intend to read the other five books. But if you're going to read only one let me recommend either Dinosaur in a Haystack or Bully for Brontosaurus. Gould's Wonderful Life, about the Burgess Shale, is brilliant, too, but it's a stand-alone title and not part of the essay series. See my review for each of these....more
A book about wonder and a wonderful book. The story of the Burgess Shale—from its initial misinterpretation to its reassessment 50 years later—is mindA book about wonder and a wonderful book. The story of the Burgess Shale—from its initial misinterpretation to its reassessment 50 years later—is mind blowing. This limestone outcropping, which sits at an altitude of 8,000 feet in the Canadian Rockies, near British Columbia, was at equatorial sea level 530 million years ago. Its shale has revealed about 150 previously unknown arthropod genera and entirely new species with anatomies that would be unimaginable to us today had Charles Doolittle Walcott not discovered them in 1909.
Gould calls these animals with their diverse anatomies "weird wonders" and explains that their broad proliferation was possible because the middle Cambrian was a time of filling the so-called "ecological barrel." In other words, it was a time of low ecological competition among animals which ultimately permitted unsuccessful anatomies to flourish for a few million years before the full panoply of evolutionary pressures (natural selection) began to eliminate the less successful designs.
Another thing learned from the Burgess Shale is the imprecision of the concept "survival of the fittest." Certainly, adapting to environmental change is vital, but it's not the whole ballgame. The adapted animal also needs luck on its side, luck that it cannot possibly have any direct role in affecting. I refer to the importance of contingency. Gould calls it "decimation by lottery," and given its sway, unyielding adherence to classic evolutionary principles like gradualism etc. reveal their short sightedness.
Finally, if you will accept my argument that contingency is not only resolvable and important, but also fascinating in a special sort of way, then the Burgess not only reverses our general ideas about the source of pattern – it also fills us with a new kind of amazement (also a frisson for the improbability of the event) at the fact that humans ever evolved at all. We came this close (put your thumb about a millimeter away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel. Replay the tape a million times from a Burgess beginning, and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life. (p. 289)
If you're like me, one who wonders why we were set down on a speck of interstellar dust in the midst of a universe so vast we daily fail to comprehend its age and scale, this book is for you. Gould is a fabulous writer. He writes with a minimum of jargon, and concepts of any complexity he is careful to explain. But he does this without being tedious; he does it, in fact, while sharing his own boundless sense of fascination. Gould was a brilliant man, a rare amalgam of top-flight scientist, science writer, and teacher. When he died 10 years ago he left a great hole in the landscape of writers who could engagingly write for the general reader about evolutionary biology and paleontology. There is simply no one else like him working today. I'm in the process of reading all of his books. There are about 20. Highly recommended for those with an interest in science, particularly the life sciences....more
The mirror test for dolphins (and elephants) demonstraTAIJIとFUTO JAPANの陸上でのイルカの季節的な移動を停止する。請願書に署名してください。ありがとうございました。savedolphins.eii.org/campaigns/sjd
The mirror test for dolphins (and elephants) demonstrates their ability to recognize a live image of themselves, thus proving the animal’s self-consciousness, a sign of advanced cognition. Dolphins are actually the only animals on earth who have brains bigger than ourselves. The book is an overview of recent research into dolphin cognition. It’s a really decently written popular science title. The grounding story surveys biologist Diana Reiss's fascinating thirty years of research into the spectacularly inquisitive minds of bottlenose dolphins. She’s emotional here in a way that she can't be in her data-driven scientific papers— she’s written many—and the anecdotes are astonishing. I especially liked the brief history of dolphin-human interactions from antiquity to the present day. Brief online videos augment the text. Moreover, the book contains a conservation argument the world desperately needs to hear.
Stephen Jay Gould was adept at reviewing scientific missteps and errors and building telling lessons from them. His essays are highly discursive, ofteStephen Jay Gould was adept at reviewing scientific missteps and errors and building telling lessons from them. His essays are highly discursive, often taking twists and turns through little known bits of history and popular culture, as a means of explicating complex concepts. He was a brilliant man and one of those writers--like neurologist Oliver Sacks, say, or biologist E.O. Wilson--who could take abstruse subject matter and make it intelligible to the general reader. Though, it should be noted, no one's style was quite so freewheeling and idiosyncratic as Gould's.
A few favorite essays include:
"The Panda's Thumb of Technology" In which Gould illustrates the evolutionary principles of contingency and incumbency by way of a history of the QWERTY keyboard. This is certainly among the volume's quirkiest and most brilliant essays.
In "Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples" he discusses how male nipples are homologues of female nipples and remnants of embryology, just as the female clitoris is a homologue of the male penis. Dr. Freud's absurd theory of vaginal orgasm and the unfortunate suffering it caused countless women during the mid-20th century is discussed.
"To Be A Platypus" reviews the immense puzzle this monotreme presented to 20th-century scientists because of its melange of seemingly contradictory characteristics: large brain and inner ear like mammals, egg laying like reptiles, duckbill like the eponymous wildfowl, etc. Because of its paradoxical nature, the platypus was viewed for a long time as a primitive outlier that had never really caught up with the high and mighty mammals. Gould shows not only why this isn't so, but why the creature is, as he puts it, "one honey of an adaptation."
The section titled Intellectual Biography I found especially interesting.
In "Kropotkin Was No Crackpot" Gould rehabilitates that fin de siècle Russian anarchist's much maligned reputation. Petr Kropotkin (see Mutual Aid) believed cooperation was more responsible for the perpetuation of species than violent struggle, a concept far more popular in the West. Many Russian evolutionists tended to agree. Why? Was it just their collectivist, socialist culture? In part, yes, but it also turns out that the concept of exploding populations, which Darwin learned in the teeming tropics (see Voyage of the Beagle), was conceptually almost impossible for Russians to grasp, living as they did in a harsh and underpopulated land. At the center of the essay is the question of cultural biases in science, an area in which Gould excelled as a writer and a teacher. Fascinating.
Of the four Stephen Jay Gould collections I've read, this may be the best one. The essays on positive publication bias (#10) and evolutionary stasis aOf the four Stephen Jay Gould collections I've read, this may be the best one. The essays on positive publication bias (#10) and evolutionary stasis and punctuated equilibrium (#11) may be the best in the book.
The title essay "Dinosaur in a Haystack" (#12) is a very interesting tale about how loathed Luis Alvarez's 1980 meteoric impact theory--with its link to the Cretaceous-Palogene extinction event that killed off all the dinosaurs and made way for the expansion of mammal life--was by paleontologists generally when it was first published. The reason for this stubbornness was a long standing belief in geologic gradualism first espoused by the great Lyell. Gould counts himself among the sceptics and its intriguing to get his account of the fall of this well established theory. He then moves onto a discussion of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts on Jupiter in July 1995 and how this hammered home the Alvarez extinction theory, by then already confirmed by much earthly evidence. The thing about Gould is the way he can make the most recondite material not only understandable, but cogent.
In "Left Snails and Right Minds" (#16) he runs down why pre-1700 conchologists printed their snail illustrations in mirror image. This seems abstruce at first but ultimately provides insight into how conventions among 16th century conchologists have changed over time. For science, as Gould tells us, is as much bound by cultural preconceptions and personal worldview now as it was then. "Dinomania" (#17) is fun because it's a real palentologist's review of what Steven Spielberg got wrong and right in his film version of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. For example:
An amalgamated code of, say, 80 percent dinosaur DNA and 20 percent of frog DNA could never direct the embryological development of a functioning organism. This form of reductionism is simply silly . . . Moreover, frogs and dinosaurs are not even close evolutionary relatives, for their lines diverged in the Carboniferous period, more than 100 million years before the origin of dinosaurs. Jurassic Park's scientists should have used modern birds, the closest living kin to dinosaurs.
Another favorite essay is "The Most Unkindest Cut of All" (#24) in which Gould discusses his reading of the Wannsee Protocol which was inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of that document's promulgation by Adolph Eichmann in 1942. The perspective of a modern-day evolutionary biologist of conspicuous intellectual gifts who happened to be Jewish on the oft overlooked Part 2 of the protocol--with its horrible requirements for the treatment of so called half-Jews and quarter-Jews (Mischlinge)--I found riveting and fresh.
A few of these essays, I can see now, will require a second reading. "Speaking of Snails and Scales" (#27), for example, combines observations from linguistics (with regard to Creole languages), multivariate statistical analysis of the snail genus Cerion, narrative conventions, and fractal geometry. Such wild discursiveness is what I've always found so thrilling in Gould, but this bucking bronco has left me a bit discombobulated. Oh well, it's late....more
It's easy to think that we are the most ephemeral of creatures, our lifetimes but a blink in the overall scheme. One of the things I get from reading It's easy to think that we are the most ephemeral of creatures, our lifetimes but a blink in the overall scheme. One of the things I get from reading Gould is the knowledge that we are very ancient creatures. I am an ancient creature. On the cellular level "mitochondria and chloroplasts look uncannily like entire prokaryotic organisms (they have their own DNA and are the same size as bacteria). Almost surely, they began as symbionts within cells of other species and later became more highly integrated to form the eukaryotic cell (so that each cell in our body has the evolutionary status of a former colony.)" (p. 320)
So, not only are we each a living record of hundreds of millions of years of ancestry, but the so-called "junk" DNA--the seemingly useless, nonfunctional copies upon copies of genes we possess--may actually permit the evolution of complexity. We are very ancient yet our species contains the mechanism for further evolution. In light of this, it becomes difficult for me to feel for very long any sense of dislocation from my time and place in the world. Such knowledge grounds one in a complex universe. "Life is continuous in the crucial sense that all creatures form a web of unbroken genealogical linkage." (p. 327)
Here, too, is a reason I love reading. Highly recommended....more
Loading...
