Cancer selection Book

Writing a review of an anthology like Stephen Jay Gould's Bully For Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History seems a thankless task because one could craft a review for each of Gould's individual essays & attempting to synthesize an entire book of them seems almost impossible. I have read the essays in this volume over many months, some of them more than once. The anthology is nearly 30 years old but remains an interesting cornucopia of rather analytical stances on scientific questions & the people who were a party to them, but also many others, including Tolstoy, Captain Bligh, Kropotkin & the Brothers Grimm, folks who are quite beyond the normal framework of the world of science. It is Gould's wondrous power to form analogies that lifts this book far beyond the ordinary.

For starters, I realize every time I read one of the essays that the late Prof. Gould had a considerable gift for expression, for rendering fairly abstract & scientific topics so that they are within the realm of someone without a background in science. That said, Gould had a extreme fascination with words, some quite scientific, as befits a Harvard professor but also others, many of which are far from common usage. Thus, some (many) of us will need to keep a dictionary at the ready. Among the rarely heard words is epigone, describing a "2nd rate imitator, or a follower, as of a philosopher", a word I have committed to memory & plan to use at some point in a G/R review, but not this one! The use of arcane words is a distraction, at least until one comes to grips with the author's heightened pleasure with the expansiveness of the English language & his often playful use of words.



Gould spends time debunking commonly held notions, such as in the essay "Knight Takes Bishop" with regard to the confrontation between Prof. Thomas Henry Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog") & a prominent cleric of the time just after Darwin's findings appeared in print, Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford. It turns out that there was no "debate", merely some opposing statements by the two after a much longer & now forgotten oration by a visiting American professor on the "Intellectual History of Europe." Gould does a kind of postmortem to convey what actually occurred on that long-ago day in 1860 & tells us that there were no written accounts & that the event was embellished over time via the fog of memory & by some who were not even present when the 2 figures faced off against one another in an impromptu manner. Beyond that, it seems that the bishop was felt to have gotten the better of Prof. Huxley in the brief interchange between the two.

Here is where it becomes even more compelling, for in this & an ensuing essay, "Genesis & Geology", Gould explains:But no battle exists between science & religion--the two most separate spheres of human need. A titanic struggle occurs, always has, always will, between questioning & authority, free inquiry & frozen dogma--but the institutions representing these poles are not science & religion. These struggles occur within each field, not primarily across disciplines. The general ethic of science leads to greater openness, but we have our fossils, often in positions of great power. Organized religion, as an arm of state power so frequently in history has tended to rigidity--but theologies have also spearheaded social revolution. Official religion has not opposed evolution as a monolith & many prominent evolutionists have been devout, while many churchmen have placed evolution at the center of their personal theologies.Gould then concludes the essay by suggesting that "the struggle for free inquiry against authority is so central, so pervasive that we need all the help we can get from either side and inquiring scientists must join hands with questioning theologians." The 2nd of the two linked essays, one involving political differences between Disraeli & Gladstone, begins with some humorous lines from Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe and attempts to respond to the question: In what helpful ways may science & religion coexist? Gould finds that the lack of correlation in Genesis among the development of animal species is unimportant & "does not compromise the power & purpose of religion, or its relationship to the sciences, for Genesis is not a treatise on natural history." I for one find Prof. Gould's dialectic approach to almost everything rather formidable and even uplifting.

One of my favorite essays is "The Godfather of Disaster", which begins with a reference to Gulliver & Jonathan Swift's use of satire. There is a consideration of a man named William Whiston, someone who saw the world in purely theological vs. scientific terms & who succeeded Sir Isaac Newton at Cambridge, recommended in fact by Newton but whose 17th century lens was appropriate to a time when science as a separate subject did not really exist, when the world was viewed in terms of divine inspiration alone. Yet, Gould is sympathetic to Whiston's quirky deductive scheme, which was Newtonian in format but not in outcome. While demonstrating how Prof. Whiston's findings were limited by his worldview, so that even while the man's methodology was not unlike Newton's, their conclusions differed greatly. This essay is just one example of how Prof. Gould looks compassionately on historical figures, while reexamining past circumstances, almost akin to performing an experiment in front of a class. The essays are always probing while employing different angles of investigation.

"Literary Bias on a Slippery Slope" examines how we craft stories to make scientific reality more palpable, finding that a distinguished scientist's statement detailing his own discoveries do not match his own journals, something Prof. Gould uncovered while examining the journals at the Smithsonian of Prof. Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927), the world's leading expert on Cambrian rocks & fossils & once the most powerful scientific administrator in America. During his time at the Smithsonian examining the Walcott archives, Gould concludes that all the key points of the story of Walcott's main discovery are false. He indicates that "memory is a fascinating trickster, that words & images have enormous power that can easily displace actual experience over the years."

For, "so much of science proceeds by telling stories--and we are especially vulnerable to constraints of this medium because we rarely recognize what we are doing, with even the most distant & abstract subjects, like the formation of the universe or the principles of evolution, falling within the bounds of necessary & unreliable narrative."

Throughout Bully For Brontosaurus Gould displays a keen interest in history & a sardonic wit. Who else would title one essay, "To Be a Platypus", while another, "Male Nipples & Clitoral Ripples" & yet another, "George Canning's Left Buttock & the Origin of Species"? Always, in the midst of articulate statements of scientific purpose, Gould seems to insist that we must not devalue past notions simply because they are not in synch with current ideologies. In essence, Gould's approach might be viewed a guide to living in a world full of dissension & conflict, a self-help book for humanity. The author encourages us to "rage against the dying of the light--and although Dylan Thomas spoke of bodily death in his famous line, we must also apply his words to the extinction of wonder in the mind, by pressures to conformity in an anti-intellectual culture."

In an essay entitled "The Dinosaur Rip-Off", Prof. Gould is impressed that in a New York Times article on science education in Korea, a 9 year old girl being interviewed states that Stephen Hawking is her personal hero, not some sports star or Hollywood figure & apparently in Korea science whizzes are class heroes. Gould comments that we live...in a profoundly non-intellectual culture in America, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth & its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest entertainment in short & loud doses of easy listening. Can we not invoke dinosaur power to alleviate unspoken tragedies? Can't dinosaurs be the great levelers & integrators--the joint passion of the class rowdy & the class intellectual? I will know that we are on our way when the kid who names Chasmosaurus as his personal hero also earns the epithet of "Mr. Cool"Dinosaurs are to be seen as metaphors, as iconic images that can inspire & even provoke us. Moving on from that thought is Gould's belief that linguistic evolution must be taken seriously as well and he uses analogies to make his point, suggesting that the power these analogies convey is important & that we must search within language for clues to evolutionary development, well beyond analyzing DNA & fossils. Thus, for Gould the tales of the Brothers Grimm are not mere fables but involve a linkage between genetics & language and "we must never doubt the power of names as Rumpelstiltskin learned to his horror." This may seem a leap but in reading the essays by Stephen Jay Gould, I see a resemblance to fables, or at least an assembling of stories with a scientific bent that holds a fabalistic touch.

By way of a caution, Bully for Brontosaurus has considerable density & is not a book to be read from cover to cover; rather, it is like a box of fine chocolates, to be savored individually over time. And, rereading the essays can yield greater clarity, an additional reward.