LEONARDO’S
MOUNTAIN OF
CLAMS AND THE
DIET OF WORMS
Essays on Natural History
Stephen Jay Gould
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All of the essays contained in this work were previously published in Natural History magazine
First published in Great Britain in 1998
by Jonathan Cape Ltd
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* * *
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, Wonderful Life, Eight Little Piggies, Life’s Grandeur and, most recently, Questioning the Millennium.
ALSO BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD
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
Life’s Grandeur
Questioning the Millennium
TO RAY SIEVER
AND TO THE MEMORY OF BERNIE KUMMEL,
two dear colleagues and friends
who nurtured (and protected)
a young pain in the ass
and helped him to become a scientist
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Pieces of Eight: Confession of a Humanistic Naturalist
I. ART AND SCIENCE
1. The Upwardly Mobile Fossils of Leonardo’s Living Earth
2. The Great Western and the Fighting Temeraire
3. Seeing Eye to Eye, Through a Glass Clearly
II. BIOGRAPHIES IN EVOLUTION
4. The Clam Stripped Bare by Her Naturalists, Even
5. Darwin’s American Soulmate: A Bird’s-Eye View
6. A Seahorse for All Races
7. Mr. Sophia’s Pony
III. HUMAN PREHISTORY
8. Up Against a Wall
9. A Lesson from the Old Masters
10. Our Unusual Unity
IV. OF HISTORY AND TOLERATION
11. A Cerion for Christopher
12. The Dodo in the Caucus Race
13. The Diet of Worms and the Defenestration of Prague
V. EVOLUTIONARY FACTS AND THEORIES
14. Non-Overlapping Magisteria
15. Boyle’s Law and Darwin’s Details
16. The Tallest Tale
17. Brotherhood by Inversion (or, As the Worm Turns)
VI. DIFFERENT PERCEPTIONS OF COMMON TRUTHS
18. War of the Worldviews
19. Triumph of the Root-Heads
20. Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?
21. Reversing Established Orders
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Introduction
PIECES OF EIGHT:
CONFESSION OF A HUMANISTIC NATURALIST
I CAN EASILY UNDERSTAND WHY, FOR MOST NATURALISTS, THE HIGHEST form of beauty, inspiration, and moral value might be imputed to increasingly rare patches of true wilderness—that is, to parcels of nature devoid of any human presence, either in current person or by previous incursion. When we recognize that all but the last geological eyeblink of life’s history evolved in competence and fascination (but to whose notice?) before humans intruded upon the scene—and when we acknowledge that most of our substantial incursions cannot be viewed as fortunate either for local organisms or environments—why should we not glory in bits of space that have perpetuated a 4.5-billion-year tradition of noninterference by any self-conscious agency? (As I do not wish to engage the theological dimensions of the last sentence, I will restrict my meaning to overt “footprints” of undeniable physical presence.)
I do have a confession to make in this context. My odd attitude may arise only from the happenstance of my birth and happy childhood in New York City, when safe subways cost a nickel, museums were free, and the Yankees, led by Joe DiMaggio, ruled the world. Wordsworth’s wisdom cannot be gainsaid. Childhood’s sense of wonder cannot be sustained in the same manner through life, but the child is father to the man. So childhood’s “splendor in the grass” and “glory in the flower” must set a lifelong prototype for aesthetic wonder. And my early epiphanic moments included the view of Lower Manhattan’s buildings at sunset, seen from the magnificent walkway in the center of the Brooklyn Bridge; the growing tip of Manhattan as the Staten Island Ferry (also only a nickel) passes the Statue of Liberty and heads for the Battery; the lobbies of the Woolworth and Chrysler buildings (each, in turn and temporarily, the tallest skyscraper in the world); and the building line of the surrounding city, seen in winter from the middle of Central Park through bare tree branches.
I am not speaking here, by absurd dichotomy, of city versus wilderness, with a personal preference for the former based on accidents of upbringing. Rather, the dichotomy itself has no meaning, if only because “pure” examples of either extreme scarcely exist when plastic flotsam pervades the seas, and twisted jetsam washes up on t
he beaches of every isolated and uninhabited Pacific island; and when almost every spot perceived with rapture as “virgin” wilderness (at least here in northeastern America) really represents old farmland reclaimed by new forest. No satanic “purity” marks the other end either, except in science fiction scenarios. We do not build cities without parks, streets without trees, homes without gardens. At a bare minimum, bits of nature’s diversity still burst through, if only as rats by the garbage piles, cockroaches in the kitchen, mushrooms through the pavement, weeds galore in the lot, and bacteria everywhere—to cite all major kingdoms of life in the big city.
For whatever reasons of childhood’s happenstances and gifts of temperament, I am a humanist at heart, and I love, best of all, the sensitive and intelligent conjunction of art and nature—not the domination of one by the other. We want, in our wondrously diverse world, a full spectrum of interactions from near wilderness to near artificiality, but I will seek my own aesthetic optimum right in the middle, where human activity has tweaked or shaped a landscape, but with such respect and integration that a first glance may detect no fault line, no obvious partitioning: the wooded hillslope adjoining Kiyomizudera in Kyoto, where the gorgeous scene looks so perfectly “rustic” and untouched until you realize that every tree has been selected, pruned, and trained; the genius of Olmsted’s big city parks, with their sculpted diversity of “natural” landscapes crisscrossed by a respectful system of constructed pathways, built of local stones artificially rusticated if necessary; the smooth transition between a Chinese “scholar’s rock” (selected for calming contemplation based on the fortune of naturally formed beauty, but usually sculpted a bit to enhance the appearance), and the wooden stand expressly carved to accommodate every random bump and crevice of the stone above; and the Hopi pueblo towns, built of local rocks as a layer on the tops of mesas made of horizontal strata, so that the town, from a distance, can hardly be distinguished from the natural layers below, a village marked as a human construction only by vertical ladders protruding from the tops of kivas.
I even believe—though I would not push the point, for the concept can too easily cede to human arrogance and a discounting of natural forms—that intelligent reconstruction can “improve” upon natural design (though only by the criterion of human aesthetic preference, the most parochial of all possible judgments). I do ally myself with the most famous quatrain of Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát (in FitzGerald’s Victorian version), a passage usually misinterpreted today because the subjunctive mood has virtually disappeared from modern English:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
That is, if you would join me in the wilderness, and we could share good reading, food, drink (and perhaps more), then even the ugly, scary, untamed forest would become a paradise, literally a lovely enclosed and cultivated garden. (The old subjunctive of the last line must be read: “Even wilderness would be close enough to paradise” if you and all the accoutrements would join me there.) After all, in many cultures, wilderness (with an etymology of “wild beast”) denotes fear and foreignness, while human cultivation tames a landscape to beauty and peace of soul. (I also love the old legend—maybe it’s even true—that Eugene O’Neill changed Omar’s last line to “Ah, Wilderness!” so that the title for his marvelous coming-of-age play would appear first in The New York Times’s alphabetical list of Broadway shows.)
I make this humanistic confession (or profession, really) because I have tried, in the prefaces to each of my essay volumes (this is the eighth in a series that will reach ten before the millennium calls a halt), to figure out how the present effort differs from (and, I hope, builds upon) the varying themes of preceding books. I began with emphasis on evolutionary basics, proceeded to evolutionary implications, social and philosophical usages, the interaction of predictive rules with contingent history to form the unique and surprising patterns of life’s history, and the interaction of human history with natural environments.
This eighth volume, as usual, includes all these themes, but differs in emphasis primarily in my own increasing comfort with my unconventional approach to “natural history” writing, as outlined above. If any overarching theme pervades this body of writing (now standing at 270 successive monthly essays), I suppose that a groping effort toward the formulation of a humanistic natural history must unite the disparity. I think that I have been reluctant to recognize, address, or even admit this feature, either to myself or to my readers, because such an approach does contravene a deep (and usually unstated) convention in writing about nature. We are supposed to love nature for itself, and we are, therefore, presumably charged with the task of characterizing and interpreting nature (as she is) so that interested people with less expertise can learn new information and draw appropriate messages, both factual and ethical. Well, I do love nature—as fiercely as anyone who has ever taken up a pen in her service. But I am even more fascinated by the complex level of analysis just above and beyond (and I do mean “abstracted from,” not “better than”)—that is, the history of how humans have learned to study and understand nature. I am primarily a “humanistic naturalist” in this crucial sense.
Of course I yearn for answers to all the puzzles, great and small, that build the order (and wondrous disorder) of nature “out there”—an order that our intellectual ancestors could only read (understandably) as a proof of God’s existence and benevolent intent. And I am convinced that such answers exist, if only to be seen “through a glass darkly,” given the necessary interposition of human history, sociology, and psychology between the “real” world, and any abstractions of disembodied logic that might manipulate and order our observations. (In this sense, no practicing scientist can be a pure “relativist,” although I trust the more sophisticated and self-analytical among us know that “pure” observation, “unsullied” by human foibles and preferences, can only rank as idealized legend.)
But I prefer to emphasize the interaction of this outside world with something unique in the history of life on Earth—the struggle of a conscious and questioning agent to understand the whys and wherefores, and to integrate this knowledge with the meaning of its own existence. That is, I am enthused by nature’s constitution, but even more fascinated by trying to grasp how an odd and excessively fragile instrument—the human mind—comes to know this world outside, and how the contingent history of the human body, personality, and society impacts the pathways to this knowledge.
A map of the roadblocks—imposed by the evolutionary limitations of an instrument clearly not designed for this style of inquiry, and then joined with the improbable and unrepeatable contingencies that built our modern technological society—holds just as much interest as an accurate map of nature’s geography. Moreover, a humanistic focus on how we know about nature—rather than an “objective” account, unattainable in any case, of how nature “is”—gives an essayist a “whole ‘nother” level of juicy material, for we lose nothing of the primary topic, the world as we find it, and gain all the foibles and fascination of how we find it so.
As another benefit of this humanistic focus, we acquire a surprising source of rich and apparently limitless novelty from the primary documents of great thinkers throughout our history. But why should any nuggets, or even flakes, be left for intellectual miners in such terrain? Hasn’t the Origin of Species been read untold millions of times? Hasn’t every paragraph been subjected to overt scholarly scrutiny and exegesis?
Let me share a secret rooted in general human foibles, and in the faint tinge of anti-intellectualism that has always pervaded American culture. Very few people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources—certainly not in necessary depth and completion, and often not at all. Nothing new here, but this shortcutting propensity of the ages has been abetted in our “journalistic” era by a lamentable te
ndency to call experts, rather than to read and ponder—yet another guarantee of authorial passivity before secondary sources, rather than active dialogue, or communion by study, with the great thinkers of our past.
I stress this point primarily for a practical, even an ethical, reason, and not merely to vent my spleen. When writers close themselves off to the documents of scholarship, and rely only on seeing or asking, they become conduits and sieves rather than thinkers. When, on the other hand, you study the great works of predecessors engaged in the same struggle, you enter a dialogue with human history and the rich variety of our intellectual traditions. You insert yourself, and your own organizing powers, into this history—and you become an active agent, not merely a “reporter.” Then, and only then, can you become an original contributor, even a discoverer, and not only a mouthpiece.
What could be more democratic than the principle that nuggets of real discovery abound in primary sources, located in such accessible places as major university and city libraries, for those willing to do the work and develop the skills. (And there’s the rub. I do, of course, acknowledge the impediment for most Americans that many of these works, representing the ecumenical range of international scholarship, have never been translated into English—a fact that should be a spur to study, and not a barrier.) Good anatomists have told me that novel and important observations can still be made by dissecting a common frog, despite millions of prior efforts spanning several centuries. I can attest that all major documents of science remain chock-full of distinctive and illuminating novelty, if only people will study them—in full and in the original editions. Why would anyone not yearn to read these works; not hunger for the opportunity? What a thrill, whatever the outcome in personal enlightenment, to thus engage the greatest thinkers and doers of our past, to thumb the pages of their own printings, to speculate about past readers who pondered the same copies with the differing presuppositions of other centuries, as the candle of nighttime illuminated their silent labor.