Stephen Jay Gould turns a musty discipline into a joy
Why should the layman be interested in so esoteric a subject as evolutionary biology? It is a question that Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has heard before. But as he sits in his cluttered office, amid the assorted books, charts and fossil remains that are the very sinew of his profession, he smiles tolerantly. "Why?" he asks. "Because it tells us where we came from, how we got here, and perhaps where we are going. Quite simply, it is science's version of Roots, except it is the story of all of us."
No one has done better at telling that story in recent years than Gould. At 41, in lectures and writings, on television and even in the courtroom, this gifted Harvard scholar has managed to turn a musty, bone-littered, backbiting discipline into the most exciting of sciences. Like his friend Carl Sagan, he has become a superstar of science. "Only Carl," Gould insists, "cuts a better figure on the tube."
Few writers, in or out of science, shape a better written line. In three popular books, to say nothing of several scientific ones, he has shown that he can bat out complex ideas with all the grace of his childhood hero, Joe DiMaggio. His writings have won a cluster of honors, including a 1981 American Book Award for his collection of essays, The Panda's Thumb, and a 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Mismeasure of Man. His latest chrestomathy reaffirms Gould's position alongside Physician-Essayist Lewis Thomas as an indispensable bridge between the "two cultures."
Like its predecessors, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (Norton; $15.50) is a banquet of anecdotes, insights and revelations on natural history. The 30 essays range from a humorous discourse on the shrinking size of the Hershey bar to the woeful tale of male anglerfish that attach themselves for life to a female of the species and become little more than "a penis with a heart." He tackles such perennial barroom brain twisters as whether the zebra's stripes are white on black or black on white (his answer: the latter). He provides refreshing new studies of some of the founding fathers of geology and paleontology, including Nicolaus Steno, James Hutton and Louis Agassiz. He even takes time out to discourse on an evolutionary oddity called atavism: the inexplicable reappearance of long-lost characteristics in a species, like extra toes in horses and teeth in chicken.
If Gould has an eye for the unusual, indeed the bizarre, it is because, as he notes, "small items with big implications are my bread and butter." A confessed iconoclast, he likes nothing better than to take aim at major targets. Gould links that saintly man of the cloth and science, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to the infamous Piltdown hoax (the faked fossil, says Gould, was apparently a youthful prank by Teilhard), and displays irreverence for even his great hero Charles Darwin. Says Gould: "If I have one special ability, it is as a tangential thinker. I can make unusual connections."