Stephen Jay Gould - The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History

Stephen Jay Gould

Penultimate Reflections
in Natural History

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All of the essays contained in this work were previously published by Natural History magazine

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 2000

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I E PISODES IN THE B IRTH OF P ALEONTOLOGY
The Nature of Fossils and the History of the Earth

II P RESENT AT THE C REATION
How Frances Three Finest Scientists Established Natural History in an Age of Revolution

III D ARWINS C ENTURYAND O URS
Lessons from Britains Four Greatest Victorian Naturalists

For Jack Sepkoski (19481999),
who brought me one of the greatest possible joys
a teacher can ever earn or experience:
to be surpassed by his students.
Offspring should not predecease their parents,
and students should outlive their teachers.
The times may be out of joint,
but Jack was born to set the order of lifes history right
and he did!

ALSO BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD

Ontogeny and Phylogeny

Ever Since Darwin

The Pandas Thumb

The Mismeasure of Man

Hens Teeth and Horses Toes

The Flamingo Smile

An Urchin in the Storm

Times Arrow, Times Cycle

Illuminations

(with R W Purcell)

Finders, Keepers

(with R W Purcell)

Eight Little Piggies

Dinosaur in a Haystack

Lifes Grandeur

Questioning the Millennium

Leonardos Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Wonderful Life

Bully for Brontosaurus

Stephen Jay Gould is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology at Harvard University, and the Vincent Astor Visiting Professor of Biology at New York University. His publications include Ever Since Darwin, Eight Little Piggies, Lifes Grandeur, Questioning the Millennium, Leonardos Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, Bully for Brontosaurus and Wonderful Life. Wonderful Life won the Science Book Prize for 1991.

In the fall of 1973, I received a call from Alan Ternes, editor of Natural History magazine. He asked me if I would like to write columns on a monthly basis, and he told me that folks actually get paid for such activities. (Until that day, I had published only in technical journals.) The idea intrigued me, and I said that Id try three or four. Now, 290 monthly essays later (with never a deadline missed), I look only a little way forward to the last item of this extended seriesto be written, as number 300 exactly, for the millennial issue of January 2001. One really should follow the honorable principle of quitting while still ahead, a rare form of dignity chosen by such admirable men as Michael Jordan and Joe DiMaggio, my personal hero and mentor from childhood. (Joe died, as I put this book together, full of years and in maximal style and grace, after setting one last recordfor number of times in receiving last rites and then rallying.) Our millennial transition may represent an arbitrary imposition of human decisions upon natures true cycles, but what grander symbol for calling a halt and moving on could possibly cross the path of a mans lifetime? This ninth volume of essays will therefore be the penultimate book in a series that shall close by honoring the same decimal preference lying behind our millennial transition.

If this series has finally found a distinctive voice, I have learned this mode of speech in the most gradual, accumulating, and largely unconscious manner against my deepest personal beliefs in punctuational change and the uniquely directive power (despite an entirely accidental origin) of human reason in evolution. I suppose I had read a bit of Montaigne in English 101, and I surely could spell the word, but I had no inkling about the definitions and traditions of the essay as a literary genre when Alan Ternes called me cold on that fine autumn day.

I began the series with quite conventional notions about writing science for general consumption. I believed, as almost all scientists do (by passively imbibing a professional ethos, not by active thought or decision), that nature speaks directly to unprejudiced observers, and that accessible writing for nonscientists therefore required clarity, suppression of professional jargon, and an ability to convey the excitement of fascinating facts and interesting theories. If I supposed that I might bring something distinctive to previous efforts in this vein, I managed to formulate only two vague personal precepts: first, I would try to portray all subjects at the same conceptual depth that I would utilize in professional articles (that is, no dumbing down of ideas to accompany necessary clarification of language); second, I would use my humanistic and historical interests as a user friendly bridge to bring readers into the accessible world of science.

Over the years, however, this mere device (the humanistic bridge) became an explicit centrality, a feature that I permitted myself to accept (and regard as a source of comfort and pride rather than an idiosyncrasy to downplay or even to hide) only when I finally realized that I had been writing essays, not mere columns, all alongand that nearly five hundred years of tradition had established and validated (indeed, had explicitly defined) the essay as a genre dedicated to personal musing and experience, used as a gracious entre, or at least an intriguing hook, for discussion of general and universal issues. (Scientists are subtly trained to define the personal as a maximally dangerous snare of subjectivity and therefore to eschew the first person singular in favor of the passive voice in all technical writing. Some scientific editors will automatically blue-pencil the dreaded