Tag Archives: Stephen Jay Gould

After rerereading Ever Since Darwin I figured I’d continue through Stephen Jay Gould’s work. His second book, THE PANDA’S THUMB: More Reflections on Natural History came out in 1980 and it feels like science is going through a transition.

In various essays Gould discusses the growing arguments for birds as direct descendants of dinosaurs and that “Down’s syndrome” is replacing “mongoloid” as a scientific term (the essay explains why the latter term was every in use). It also has an essay emphasizing a belief Gould would lean into more over the years, that intelligence is a fluke that would never have existed if things had been even slightly different. He also discusses dubious theories about brain size and intelligence which would play a larger role in his next book.

As always Gould’s a fascinating science historian. Here’s where I learned exactly what Lamarck’s theory of heredity was, who might have faked the legendary Piltdown man (a supposed missing link) and that no, the legendary geologist Charles Lyell, who argued that slow gradual processes could explain the world, was not entirely right. The title essay refers to the panda’s thumb — not a thumb like ours but an extension of its wrist bones — as an example of how natural selection and adaptation can only work with the materials they’re given.

When I first read GROWING UP WITH DICK AND JANE: Learning and Living the American Dream by Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman, I found it fascinating as a look at the once legendary readers and a parallel look at childhood through the decades from the 1930 debut until they gave up the ghost in 1970 (like a lot of older “timeless” material they couldn’t keep up with the changes in society). Rereading recently, I discovered it had been hit by the suck fairy, as they say.

Partly that’s because it’s analysis of childhood and America isn’t that deep — I’ve seen much better elsewhere. Partly that’s because of how much time they spend writing profiles of the characters (Dick, Jane, baby sister Sally, their dog, their parents) when they’re two-dimensional creations who don’t need that much deep thought. Not that this is a flaw in the books — they were written to teach reading, not as literature — but they just ain’t that interesting.

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In COMPLICIT: How Our Cultures Enables Misbehaving Men, Reah Bravo (one of Charlie Rose’s harassment victims) acknowledges she’s stepping into a minefield by discussing how women enable harassers — however she’s very clear she doesn’t mean “she asked for it” but that women have internalized lots of myths. That they should give a guy emotional support and not confront him. That being a jackhole is “part of his creative process.” That being able to succeed in a challenging field requires being tough so just grit your teeth and endure the harassment.

While Bravo’s persuasive and the many first-person accounts she offers are compelling, she also invokes bullshit science such as paleofantasies of how all these behaviors were hardwired into us in the stone age. And I’ve read accounts from women who say they sucked it up because they needed the job or they were terrified of retaliation and Bravo doesn’t get into that very much. Interesting and worth reading, even though uneven.

My friend Ross rereading Stephen Jay Gould’s EVER SINCE DARWIN: Essays in Natural History a while back convinced me to dig out my own copy. Gould, a paleontologist, wrote a natural history column for years and this was the first collection of his essays. In it he discusses why Darwin was on the HMS Beagle (to provide educated company to the captain), the errors of sociobiology (an early example of the paleofantasy), the flaws in Immanuel Velikovsky’s science, why natural selection is not “survival of the fittest” and the impact of Cesare Lombroso’s 19th century theory criminals are evolutionary throwbacks (something I’d been meaning to reread for its obvious relevance to Jekyll and Hyde).

Gould’s an excellent writer but what draws me back to him is that he’s so good at showing science is the product of fallible human beings, not some inexorable natural force, and that it’s messier than we realize. The geologist Charles Lyell is praised for rejecting catastrophism — geological change comes in spectacular, epic upheavals — in favor of slow gradual change; in reality his view was more complicated, and wrong, than history paints it.

Gould also refuses to mock crackpot theories of the past such as preformationism, which believed every egg in a woman’s womb contains the seed of her predestined children, her children’s predestined children, her children’s children’s … Yes, it’s wrong, yes it’s absurd but Gould is more interested in how the idea developed and why its supporters thought it made sense. I’ll be rereading more Gould down the road.

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