“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
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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.
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
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
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