I HAVE LANDED
The End of a Beginning
in Natural History
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
JONATHAN CAPE
LONDON
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Published by Jonathan Cape 2002
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The essays in this book were previously published in magazines and newspapers.
First published in the United States of America in 2002 by Harmony Books
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by
Jonathan Cape
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Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
By the Same Author
Preface
I. Pausing in Continuity
1. I Have Landed
II. Disciplinary Connections: Scientific Slouching Across a Misconceived Divide
2. No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts: The Lepidoptery of Vladimir Nabokov
3. Jim Bowie’s Letter and Bill Buckner’s Legs
4. The True Embodiment of Everything That’s Excellent
5. Art Meets Science in The Heart of the Andes: Church Paints, Humboldt Dies, Darwin Writes, and Nature Blinks in the Fateful Year of 1859
III. Darwinian Prequels and Fallout
6. The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx’s Funeral: Resolving Evolution’s Oddest Coupling
7. The Pre-Adamite in a Nutshell
8. Freud’s Evolutionary Fantasy
IV. Essays in the Paleontology of Ideas
9. The Jew and the Jewstone
10. When Fossils Were Young
11. Syphilis and the Shepherd of Atlantis
V. Casting the Die: Six Evolutionary Epitomes
DEFENDING EVOLUTION
12. Darwin and the Munchkins of Kansas
13. Darwin’s More Stately Mansion
14. A Darwin for All Reasons
EVOLUTION AND HUMAN NATURE
15. When Less Is Truly More
16. Darwin’s Cultural Degree
17. The Without and Within of Smart Mice
VI. The Meaning and Drawing of Evolution
DEFINING AND BEGINNING
18. What Does the Dreaded “E” Word Mean Anyway?
19. The First Day of the Rest of Our Life
20. The Narthex of San Marco and the Pangenetic Paradigm
PARSING AND PROCEEDING
21. Linnaeus’s Luck?
22. Abscheulich! (Atrocious)
23. Tales of a Feathered Tail
VII. Natural Worth
24. An Evolutionary Perspective on the Concept of Native Plants
25. Age-Old Fallacies of Thinking and Stinking
26. The Geometer of Race
27. The Great Physiologist of Heidelberg
VIII. Triumph and Tragedy on the Exact Centennial of I Have Landed, September 11, 2001
Introductory Statement
28. The Good People of Halifax
29. Apple Brown Betty
30. The Woolworth Building
31. September 11, ’01
Illustration Credits
Index
Praise
TO MY READERS
Fellow members of the ancient and universal
(and vibrantly continuing) Republic of Letters
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Ontogeny and Phylogeny
Ever Since Darwin
The Panda’s Thumb
The Mismeasure of Man
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes
The Flamingo’s Smile
An Urchin in the Storm
Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle
Illuminations (with R. W. Purcell)
Wonderful Life
Bully for Brontosaurus
Finders Keepers (with R. W. Purcell)
Eight Little Piggies
Dinosaur in a Haystack
Full House
Questioning the Millennium
Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
Rocks of Ages
The Lying Stones of Marrakech
Crossing Over (with R. W. Purcell)
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
Described by the Sunday Times as ‘the greatest living scientist’, Stephen Jay Gould’s writing remains the modern standard by which popular science writing is judged. Ever since the mid-1970s, his monthly essay in Natural History – ‘written without a single interruption for cancer, hell, high water, or the World Series’ – and his full-length books have bridged the yawning gap between science and wider culture.
Throughout his work Gould has developed a distinctive and personal form of essay to treat great scientific issues in the context of biography. In this fascinating collection, his tenth and last volume of essays from Natural History, Gould has once again applied biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts and their history, ranging from the discovery of the new scourge of syphilis by Fracastero in the sixteenth century and Isabelle Duncan’s nineteenth-century attempt at reconciling scripture and palaeontology to Freud’s weird speculations about human phylogeny and recent creationist attacks on the study of evolution. As always the essays brilliantly illuminate and elucidate the puzzles and paradoxes great and small that have fuelled the enterprise of science and opened our eyes to a world of unexpected wonders.
Preface
A Suffix to Begin a Preface
THE HEADING for this opening paragraph sounds contradictory, but stands as a true description of sad necessity and proper placement. The material is suffixial, both in actual chronology and in obviously unintended, but eerily seamless, fit as an unavoidable ending, knitting this book together by recursion to
the beginning essay and title piece. I wrote the following preface in the summer of 2001, beginning with some musings about numerical coincidences of my own career, including the completion of this series of essays at an even 300, fortuitously falling in the millennial month of January 2001, also the centennial of the year that my family began its American journey with my grandfather’s arrival at Ellis Island—as he wrote in the English grammar book that he purchased, at age thirteen and just off the boat: “I have landed. September 11, 1901.” I need say no more for now, as no one, living and sentient on the day, will ever forget the pain and transformation of September 11, 2001. I have added—primarily because duty compelled in the most general and moral sense, but also because the particular joy and hope of Papa Joe’s words in 1901 must not be extinguished by the opposite event of spectacular evil on the exact day of his centennial in 2001—a closing section of four short pieces tracing my own emotional odyssey, and the message of tragic hope that an evolutionary biologist might legitimately locate amidst the rubble and tears of our present moment.
The Preface Itself
In 1977, and quite by accident, my first volume of essays in Natural History for general readers (Ever Since Darwin) appeared at the same time as my first technical book for professional colleagues in evolutionary theory (Ontogeny and Phylogeny). The New York Times, viewing this conjunction as highly unusual, if not downright anomalous, featured me in their Book Review section as a “freak” of literary nature on this account—and I cannot deny that this article helped to propel a career then mired in infancy. I suppose that I also viewed this conjunction as both strange and fortuitous. (The technical book, for reasons beyond my control, had been delayed by more than a year, causing me only frustration, untempered by any inkling of potential advantage in simultaneity along these different pathways.)
Now, exactly twenty-five years later, and again with frustration rather than intention (this time entirely of my own making, for I failed to finish the technical book in time for an intended and truly millennial appearance in 2000 or 2001, and had to settle instead for the merely palindromic 20021), this tenth and last volume of essays for general readers from my completed series in Natural History magazine also appears at the same time as the technical “life work” of my mature years, twenty years in the making and 1,500 pages in the printing (The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Harvard University Press). But I have undergone a significant change in attitude during this quarter-century (as well, I trust, as an equally significant improvement in writing and thinking). I no longer view this conjunction of technical and “popular” as anomalous, or even as interesting or unusual (at least in principle if not in frequency of realization among my colleagues). For, beyond some obvious requirements of stylistic tuning to expected audiences—avoidance of technical jargon in popular essays as the most obvious example—I have come to believe, as the primary definition of these “popular” essays, that the conceptual depth of technical and general writing should not differ, lest we disrespect the interest and intelligence of millions of potential readers who lack advanced technical training in science, but who remain just as fascinated as any professional, and just as well aware of the importance of science to our human and earthly existence.
Coincidence and numerology exert an eerie fascination upon us, in large part because so many people so thoroughly misunderstand probability, and therefore believe that some deep, hidden, and truly cosmic significance must attend such “unexpected” confluences as the death of both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (no great pals during most of their lives) on the same day, July 4, 1826, coincidentally the fiftieth anniversary of the United States as well; or the birth of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln on the same day of February 12, 1809. Scholars can also put such coincidences to good use—as Jacques Barzun did in a famous book (Darwin, Marx, Wagner) by centering a contrast among these three key figures upon a focal work completed by each in the same year of 1859, a technique that I have borrowed in a smaller way herein (see essay 5) by joining Darwin with a great painter and a great naturalist through an even more tightly coordinated set of events in the same year of 1859. And yet, I would argue that these numerological coincidences remain fascinating precisely because they can boast no general or cosmic meaning whatsoever (being entirely unremarkable at their observed frequency under ordinary expectations of probability), and therefore can only embody the quirky and personal meaning that we choose to grant them.
Thus, when I realized that my three-hundredth monthly essay for Natural History (written since January 1974, without a single interruption for cancer, hell, high water, or the World Series) would fall fortuitously into the millennial issue of January 2001, the inception of a year that also marks the centenary of my family’s arrival in the United States, I did choose to read this coincidence of numerological “evenness” as a sign that this particular forum should now close at the equally portentous number of ten volumes (made worthy of mention only by the contingency of our decimal mathematics. Were I a Mayan prince, counting by twenties, I would not have been so impressed, but then I wouldn’t have been writing scientific essays either). When I then felt the double whammy of an equally “exact” and notable twenty-five years (a quarter of the square of our decimal base) between two odd and fortuitous conjunctions in life’s passage—the yoking of my first essay and first technical book in 1977, followed by a similar duality in 2002 of this tenth and last essay book from Natural History and my life’s major technical “monstergraph” (as we tend to call overly long monographs in the trade), well then, despite my full trust and knowledge of probability, how could I deny that something must be beaming me a marching order to move on to other scholarly and literary matters (but never to slow the pace or lose an iota of interest—for no such option exists within my temperament).
In trying to epitomize what I have learned during these twenty-five years and ten volumes, I can only make a taxonomic analogy based upon locating a voice by finer subdivision toward my own individuality. That is, I grew and differentiated from a nondescript location on the bough of a biggish category on the tree of writers into unique occupancy of a little twiglet of my own true self. At the very start, for reasons both ethical and practical (for otherwise I would have experienced neither pleasure nor learning), I opted for the family of “no conceptual simplification,” as stated above—in other words, for the great humanistic tradition of treating readers as equals and not as consumers of “easy listening” at drive time under cruise control. I then, if you will, entered a distinctive genus of such general writers, a taxon that I have long called Galilean—the intellectual puzzle solvers as opposed to the lyrical exalters of nature, or Franciscans. I then cast my allegiance to a distinctive species within the Galilean genus—writers who try to integrate their scientific themes into humanistic contexts and concerns, rather than specializing in logical clarity for explaining particular scientific puzzles. (Incidentally, when I claim that I no longer like my regrettably still popular first book, Ever Since Darwin, I say so not primarily because much of its content has been invalidated (a necessary consequence of scientific health and progress for any book written twenty-five years ago), or because its stylistic juvenilities now embarrass me, but rather because I now find these essays too generic in lacking the more personal style that I hope I developed later.)
If I have succeeded in finding a distinctive voice for a subspecies of humanistic natural history, my interest in how people actually do science guided my long and tortuous path. How do scientists and other researchers blast and bumble toward their complex mixture of conclusions (great factual discoveries of enduring worth mixed with unconscious social prejudices of astonishing transparency to later generations)? When my method works, I fancy that I can explain complex interfaces between human foibles and natural realities through the agency of what might be designated as “mini intellectual biography”—the distilled essences of the central motivations and concepts of interesting and committed scholars and seekers from
all our centuries and statuses—from the greatest physician of his age (essay 11) who could only name, but could not cure or characterize, the new scourge of syphilis (Fracastoro in the sixteenth century), to an unknown woman with a wondrous idea for reconciling scripture and paleontology with all the fervor of Victorian evangelicalism (Isabelle Duncan of essay 7), to solving the mystery of why the greatest stuffed shirt of Edwardian biology had, as a young man, attended Karl Marx’s funeral as the only English scientist present (essay 6), to a biological view, then legitimate but now disproved, that led Sigmund Freud to some truly weird speculations about the course of human phylogeny (essay 8). Each mini intellectual biography tells an interesting story of a person and (if successful) elucidates an important scientific concept as well.
The eight categories for parsing the 31 essays of this final volume follow the general concerns of the entire series, but with some distinctive twists. (Perhaps the author protesteth too much, but I am always happily surprised to find, when the time comes to collate these essays into a volume, that they fall into a tolerably coherent order of well-balanced sets of categories, even though I write each piece for itself, with no thought of a developing superstructure made of empty rooms crying out for verbal furniture.) The first essay, and title-bearer of the book, stands alone, as an end focused upon a beginning, all to exalt the continuity of personal life through family lineages and of earthly life through evolution.
The second group expresses my explicit commitment to meaningful joinings between the facts, methods, and concerns of science and the humanistic disciplines, one per essay in this case: to literature in essay 2, history in essay 3, music and theater in essay 4, and art in essay 5. The third group includes three of my mini-intellectual biographies, each in this case devoted to a person and a controlling idea that Darwin’s revolution made compelling and relevant. In the fourth group, I try to apply the same basically biographical strategy to the much “stranger” and (for us) difficult intellectual approach to the natural world followed by thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before “the scientific revolution” (the term generally used by professional historians of science) of Newton’s generation fully established the notions of empiricism and experimentation that continue to feel basically familiar to us today. By grappling with this “intellectual paleontology” of fascinating, potent, but largely extinct worldviews held by folks with exactly the same basic mental equipment that we possess today, we can learn more about the flexibility and limitation of the mind than any study of any modern consensus can provide.