Odd Jobs (150 page)

Gould’s prose pebbles make addictive reading in part because of his unabashed enthusiasm for evolutionary theory, which “beautifully encompasses both the particulars that fascinate and the generalities that instruct.” In
The Panda’s Thumb
, he explained, “[Evolutionary theory] is, in its current state of development, sufficiently firm to provide satisfaction and confidence, yet fruitfully undeveloped enough to provide a treasure trove of mysteries.” His essays, far from being lecture notes recited out of a store of settled knowledge, have the fresh zeal of self-education. Footnotes cheerfully acknowledge demurs and amplifications that their magazine publication attracted. His titles are lively, even jazzy—“The Titular Bishop of Titiopolis,” “Bathybius and Eozoon,” “Death Before Birth, or a Mite’s
Nunc Dimittis
,” “Of Wasps and WASPs,” “Hannah West’s Left Shoulder and the Origin of Natural Selection”—and our interest is further piqued by the illustrations, which have often been fetched from their obscure source like a paleontological treasure in their own right. The pages on Carrie Buck, for instance, reproduce the first-grade report card of Carrie’s daughter Vivian, who was born just before her mother was sterilized (indeed, her birth prompted the sterilization) and who died at only the age of eight; the poor child, the third generation of alleged imbeciles, got A’s in deportment and B’s and C’s in academic subjects. She even made the honor roll one term. The look of her homely old report card cries out like a wounded voice. Mr. Gould has a salutary ethical feel for the actual detail, the exact quotation. He firmly lets us know, “All these essays are based on original sources in their original languages: none are direct reports from texts and other popular summaries.” Not only a historian of life, he teaches the history of science at Harvard, and is never more interesting (or ingratiating) than when he delves up some long-buried theory and dusts off its key paragraphs and makes it, as it were, still tick. Philip Henry Gosse, in his
Omphalos
(1857), argued that God had loaded the geological strata with “prochronic” indications of time-spans older than the Biblical Creation so as not to violate the cyclical integrity of natural processes, just as He fashioned animals with feces already in their intestines; the Reverend William Buckland (1784–1856) argued that the gravel and loam deposits found throughout England were evidence of Noah’s Flood, but he had
the grace and scientific wisdom eventually to see that they were in fact evidence of glacial ice sheets; the German Lorenz Oken and the British William Swainson, in the decades just before Darwin’s
Origin of Species
(1859), propounded grandly fallacious taxonomic systems based, with cabalistic intricacy, upon the number five. These mistaken theorists were all excellent descriptive naturalists; but, until Darwin took the not unknown principle of natural selection (it had been expressed in 1831 by the Scots fruit-grower Patrick Matthew, in an obscure work called
Naval Timber and Arboriculture
, and even earlier by another Scotsman, William Charles Wells, in a posthumously published paper on skin coloration) and showed this fortuitous mechanism to be the creative force transforming organisms in the vastness of geological time, the nineteenth century was one of accumulating heaps of evidence being shuffled about along anthropocentric and quasi-theological lines. God the Master Mechanic died slow, with many a confusing deathbed word.

Gould’s evangelical sense of science as an advancing light gives him a vivid sympathy with thinkers in the dark. The great Lord Kelvin, the discoverer of the second law of thermodynamics, for forty years proposed ages of the earth and sun too brief to allow organic evolution; but, then, how could anyone calculate the sun’s thermal life before the discovery of radioactivity and nuclear fusion? How could the energetic debates over embryology carried on in eighteenth-century France, by such savants as Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, be less than grotesquely simple-minded two centuries before DNA was analyzed, and fifty years before the jacquard loom offered the first analogous instance of programmed instructions? Science not only produces technology but must wait upon it. We forget how tangled things looked to those who first tried to sort them out; as the record of the strata emerged, catastrophism (which is now having a revival of sorts) was the logical conclusion to reach, as Gould has pointed out in an essay on Georges Cuvier:

Gould chastens us ungrateful beneficiaries of science with his affectionate and tactile sense of its strenuous progress, its worming forward through fragmentary revelations and obsolete debates, from relative darkness into relative light. Even those who were wrong win his gratitude.

In a day of perhaps excessively professional and instrumentalized research, Gould loves with the ardor of a boyish amateur the dispassionate scientific method. This method, he keeps insisting, must be resolutely non-mystical and isolated from human wishful thinking—what he several times calls “hope.” “Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought,” he writes in a discussion of the “anthropic principle,” which is a new name for the venerable human idea that things must have been designed for us, since here we are. It has taken new life lately from the realization of what extremely fine balances were apparently struck among the fundamental physical forces to provide a universe as stable and locally congenial as it is; but an earlier version was advanced in 1903 by Alfred Russel Wallace, who ranks alongside Darwin in the discovery of natural selection but who later drifted, unlike the ever-empirical Darwin, into spiritualism and anthropocentricism. Wallace, working with turn-of-the-century astronomy, demonstrated to his own satisfaction that “the marvellous complexity of forces which appear to control matter, if not actually to constitute it, are and must be mind-products.” Mark Twain ridiculed Wallace’s thesis (“According to these figures, it took 99,968,000 years to prepare the world for man, impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see him and admire him”) and Gould tartly says of it, “I, for one, will seek my hope elsewhere.” He does not say where, unless it be in the hope of ever-newer scientific ideas.

Though a devout disciple of Darwin, he is no slave to the gradualism that Darwin conceived to be the pace of adaptation and that makes the larger steps of evolution very hard to picture. Gould has written on, and written a new introduction to, the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt’s controversial
The Material Basis of Evolution
(1940), which argues that, though Darwin’s gradualism satisfactorily accounts for, say, the prevalence of white rabbits in snow country, the large mutations can only be explained by the hypothesis of the “hopeful monster”—the rare freak whose malformation has a survival value and who finds (here’s a rub) another hopeful monster to mate with. Gould has offered, as a way of
coping with the embarrassments of discontinuity in the paleontological record, a theory of “punctuated equilibria” that has, to his annoyance, given some comfort to creationists. As the last essays in
The Flamingo’s Smile
show, he is considerably excited by the recent so-called Nemesis hypothesis, which holds that mass extinctions have been caused every twenty-six million years by the return of a star that comes close enough to the solar system to stir up the Oort cloud of comets and thus precipitate collisions and climate-altering dust-storms on earth. This might be called catastrophism with a heavenly face.

As he sifts through biological riddles, however, whether in the fossil record (conodonts, the banana-shaped
Tullimonstrum
, the pre-Cambrian Ediacaran fauna) or the living world (sexual cannibalism among insects, sequential hermaphroditism in
Crepidula
, identity problems in Siamese twins and Portuguese men-of-war), or fends off cladists and creationists, advocates of eugenics and of the anthropic principle, Gould has Darwin’s example ever before him. He has read the books Darwin wrote in addition to the two notorious ones,
On the Origin of Species
and
The Descent of Man
(1871), and has written separate essays on
The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits
(1881) and
On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects
(1862). Patient and scrupulous observation are as important to the naturalist as worms and pollination are to nature; Darwin’s slowness to generalize and the detailed concreteness with which he substantiated his generalizations are of a piece with his unique powers of insight into the workings of nature. The proper observer must not be hasty to impose order, or to demand too much neatness of nature. Gould frequently delights in nature’s intricate dishevelment, in the waywardness of adaptation:

The word “evolution,” with its connotation of onrolling or progressive development, was not favored by Darwin; he preferred for his theory the bleak string-phrase “descent with modification through variation and
natural selection.” The pure fortuitousness and physicality of nature’s workings must not be polluted, Gould reaffirms, by human thought-habits or wishful thinking. “The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.” To lock out old notions of divine planning and human singularity, the notions of randomness and fortuity and contingency are stressed as if themselves sacred: “Random processes do produce high degrees of order—and the existence of pattern is no argument against randomness.” The shattering effect Darwin’s theory had upon the Victorians did not concern its allegations of “nature red in tooth and claw,” to which every farmer and soldier could already attest, but, rather, its description of how intricate organic design would arise without any divine intention. “Evolution,” Gould stated with relish in the prologue to his first collection, “is purposeless, nonprogressive, and materialistic.” In the essay upon Darwin’s worm studies, he cited as exemplary “the materialistic character of Darwin’s theory, particularly his denial of any causal role to spiritual forces, energies, or powers.” Even such a mild, almost furtive suggestion of the supernatural as vitalism’s hint that there exists in life a “spark” or “special something” must be rejected—even the plausible notion that
Homo sapiens
’s high intelligence crowns an evolutionary trend. “Human brains and bodies did not evolve along a direct and inevitable ladder, but by a circuitous and tortuous route carved by adaptations evolved for different reasons, and fortunately suited to later needs.”

Mammals developed in size and capability because, in large part, the dinosaurs died out. But, one wonders, might not reptiles have developed superior intelligences? Gould’s own essay “Were Dinosaurs Dumb?” discusses small, flesh-eating, necessarily quick and agile dinosaurs, such as
Stenonychosaurus
, heading in this direction. Is not intelligence so formidable a weapon for survival as to develop inevitably? In the sea, are not the cetaceans—the whales, porpoises, and dolphins—its newest considerable citizens and also its brightest? Gould does not entertain these questions, asserting instead that “Conscious intelligence has evolved only once on earth, and presents no real prospect for reëmergence should we choose to use our gift for destruction.” This closed outlook comes oddly from the man who marvelled at how the panda, needing a thumb to grip his bamboo shoots, evolved one from a wrist bone, or who points out how flight has evolved four times on earth, the wing derived
each time from different body elements. Gould regards human intelligence as in the same class—ornately evolved oddity—as the flamingo’s upside-down beak, which gives him his title. Our brains are a kind of unintended smile on the surface of the
bellum omnium contra omnes
—the war of all against all, as Marx called Darwin’s nature. A stark view, but a lucid and, it would appear, an invigorating one. As a constant writer (who has not in ten years, he tells us, missed a deadline), Stephen Gould is fortunate to possess an approach and a theme that cast a clarifying light upon such a wide variety of facts and texts. He is additionally fortunate in having, in Darwin, a hero to serve as a point of reference and a standard of honor.

T
IME
’
S
A
RROW
, T
IME
’
S
C
YCLE:
Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time
, by Stephen Jay Gould. 222 pp. Harvard University Press, 1987.

T
IME
W
ARS:
The Primary Conflict in Human History
, by Jeremy Rifkin. 263 pp. Holt, 1987.

European man, who once dwelt with a certain unsanitary snugness on a flat world hedged in by Vikings and Saracens and enclosed by the chiming celestial spheres, has suffered a series of traumatic widenings of consciousness. First—and perhaps least unnerving, since it was accompanied by triumphs of conquest and trade—was the increased awareness of the earth’s actual geography, as Italian merchants, Portuguese sailors, Spanish conquistadores, and British explorers brought back word of the vast Asian landmass, the long African coast, the two unsuspected continents of the New World, the watery vastness of the Pacific Ocean, and the icebound polar regions. Then there was astronomy, which showed the fixed nightcap of stars with its seven “wanderers” (the sun, the moon, and the five observable planets) to be the visible fraction of unthinkable extents of space and energy. The Copernican revolution removed the earth from the center of the universe but did not alter its scale; this the
telescope, first used astronomically by Galileo, was to enlarge inexorably, until in the 1920s Edwin Hubble demonstrated that our Milky Way, with its billions of stars, was but one of countless galaxies, which are generally flying from one another like shrapnel in a gargantuan explosion. In the direction of the small, lenses, as microscopes were developed in the seventeenth century, revealed a teeming sub-world of animalcula and microbes, beneath which lay an even finer world of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles—dizzying depths of active complexity beyond the reach not only of the eye but of all direct observational apparatus. And in the dimension of time another abyss was uncovered by the geological sciences, whose early theorists include Leonardo and Descartes: by the late eighteenth century it had become clear that only huge amounts of elapsed time could account for the stratified, folded, eroded, fossiliferous state of the earth’s rocks, which the Bible had declared to have been created only at the outset of its own historical record, in a year calculated to have been 4004
B.C
.