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Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
The Lying Stones of Marrakech
Stephen Jay Gould
HE
L
YING
S
TONES
OF
M
ARRAKECH
Penultimate Reflections
in Natural History
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409000341
Published by Vintage 2001
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Copyright © Turbo, Inc. 2000
Stephen Jay Gould has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
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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ONTENTS
I E
PISODES IN THE
B
IRTH OF
P
ALEONTOLOGY
The Nature of Fossils and the History of the Earth
1 The Lying Stones of Marrakech
2 The Sharp-Eyed Lynx, Outfoxed by Nature
3 How the Vulva Stone Became a Brachiopod
4 Inventing Natural History in Style
5 The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates
6. A Tree Grows in Paris: Lamarck's Division of Worms and Revision of Nature
III D
ARWIN'S
C
ENTURYâAND
O
URS
Lessons from Britain's Four Greatest Victorian Naturalists
8. A Sly Dullard Named Darwin: Recognizing the Multiple Facets of Genius
9. An Awful Terrible Dinosaurian Irony
10. Second-Guessing the Future
IV S
IX
L
ITTLE
P
IECES ON THE
M
EANING AND
L
OCATION OF
E
XCELLENCE
11. Drink Deep, or Taste Not the Pierian Spring
Â
14. Bright Star Among Billions
15. The Glory of His Time and Ours
18. The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W
19. Dolly's Fashion and Louis's Passion
22. The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant
For Jack Sepkoski (1948â1999),
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 life's history rightâ
and he did!
Â
Â
Â
ALSO BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD
Â
Ontogeny and Phylogeny
Ever Since Darwin
The Panda's Thumb
The Mismeasure of Man
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes
The Flamingo Smile
An Urchin in the Storm
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle
Illuminations
(with R W Purcell)
Finders, Keepers
(with R W Purcell)
Eight Little Piggies
Dinosaur in a Haystack
Life's Grandeur
Questioning the Millennium
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
Wonderful Life
Bully for Brontosaurus
HE
L
YING
S
TONES
OF
M
ARRAKECH
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, Life's Grandeur, Questioning the Millennium, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, Bully for Brontosaurus
and
Wonderful Life. Wonderful Life
won the Science Book Prize for 1991.
REFACE
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 I'd 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 seriesâto 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 recordâfor number of times in receiving last rites and then rallying.) Our millennial transition may represent an arbitrary imposition of human decisions upon nature's true cycles, but what grander symbol for calling a halt and moving on could possibly cross the path of a man's 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 mannerâ 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 alongâand 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 entrée, 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
I
at every raising of its ugly head. Therefore, “popular science writing” and “the literary essay” rank as an ultimately disparate, if not hostile, pairing of immiscible oil and water in our usual viewâa convention that I now dream about fracturing as a preeminent goal for my literary
and
scientific life.)
I have tried, as these essays developed over the years, to expand my humanistic “take” upon science from a simple practical device (my original intention, insofar as I had any initial plan at all) into a genuine emulsifier that might fuse the literary essay and the popular scientific article into something distinctive, something that might transcend our parochial disciplinary divisions for the benefit of both domains (science, because honorable personal expression by competent writers can't ever hurt; and composition, because the thrill of nature's factuality should not be excluded from the realm of our literary efforts). At the very least, such an undertaking can augment the dimensionality of popular scientific articlesâfor we lose nothing of science's factual beauty and meaning, while we add the complexity of how we come to know (or fail to learn) to conventional accounts of what we think we know.
As this series developed, I experimented with many styles for adding this humanistic component about how we learned (or erred) to standard tales about what, in our best judgment, exists “out there” in the natural worldâoften only
to demonstrate the indivisibility of these two accounts, and the necessary embeddedness of “objective” knowledge within worldviews shaped by social norms and psychological hopes. But so often, as both Dorothy and T.S. Eliot recognized in their different ways, traditional paths may work best and lead home (because they have truly withstood the test of time and have therefore been honed to our deep needs and best modes of learning, not because we fall under their sway for reasons of laziness or suppression).