One is tempted to say "Good as Gould" and be grateful for this
latest compilation of columns that the Harvard paleontologist has
turned out every month for Natural History - in spite of a fight
against cancer. Yet he himself admits that the essays have grown
longer. They have also taken on a more didactic tone. Gould is
brimful with knowledge he uses to illustrate Larger Themes. He is
also ever ready to take up the lance to defend someone old or
something new. And he is unrestrained in his spleen against
ignorance or evil, whether manifested as creationism or a new
racism. All this makes for essays that are eminently commendable,
but tipped toward the heavy side. Gould the righteous inveighs
against the sterilization laws that meted out unjust punishment on
three generations of a family of Virginia white women. He is
determined to set the record straight in dethroning claims to
modernism made for the 17th-century Englishman Edward Tyson,
ridiculing Arthur Lovejoy's attempts to stratify the human races in
the Great Chain of Being (with you-know-who on top), or in telling
the compelling story of the Hottentot Venus, a woman ignominiously
exhibited in a cage for the prurient delectation of white
Europeans. Elsewhere, Gould resurrects the reputation of geologist
William Buckland, who first explored caves for evidence of a
universal deluge and later recanted in favor of successive waves of
glaciers. In this and other instances, Gould uses the essay to
reveal the contingent nature and historical context of science -
its dependence on the times and on data and theory that can be
altered or refuted by later Findings. In this context, Gould
discusses Lord Kelvin's incorrect estimates of the age of the earth
and also provides some original insights from a 17th-century French
savant, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Gould's explorations of
scientific personnae and what shaped their thinking include
(inevitably) Darwin and Wallace, as well as Alfred Kinsey, Philip
Gosse and the black biologist Ernest Everett Just. The title essay
is one of the few where Gould turns his fine eye to nature's
curiosa, in this case the flamingo whose characteristic of eating
upside down has led to corresponding anatomical changes in jaw and
mouth parts. There is also a pleasing essay suggesting that we are
misled in believing that females mantises and black widows devour
their mates. About the only essay that strays from nature proper is
an amusing takeoff on why 400 batting averages have declined (and
what this means in terms of trends in evolutionary history).
Gould's concluding essays have him supporting earth-bound searches
for extraterrestrial life, lamenting the threat of nuclear winter,
and, finally, exalting the "dull" field of paleontology as it
summons the evidence for cataclysmic extinctions and births of
species at 26-million-year intervals. A gamut of moods, styles and
substance - but plenty of gems withal. (Kirkus Reviews)
Reflections in Natural History
"Gould himself is a rare and wonderful animal—a member of the endangeredspecies known as the ruby-throated polymath. . . . [He] is a leading theoriston large-scale patterns in evolution . . . [and] one of the sharpest and most humane thinkers in the sciences."—David Quammen, New York Times Book Review
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