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In his ninth collection of essays, best-selling
scientist Stephen Jay Gould once again offers his unmistakable
perspective on natural history and the people who have tried
to make sense of it. In tandem with the closing of the millennium,
Gould is planning to bring down the curtain on his nearly
thirty-year stint as a monthly essayist for Natural History
magazine. This, then, is the next-to-last essay collection
from one of the most acclaimed and widely read scientists
of our time. In twenty-three essays, Gould presents the
richness and fascination of the various lives that have
fueled the enterprise of science and opened our eyes to
a world of unexpected wonders.
Part I treats the most absorbing period
in Gould's own subject, paleontology -- the premodern struggle
(from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century) to
understand the origin of fossils which nascent science grappled
with the deepest of all questions about the nature of both
causality and reality. Are fossils the remains of ancient
organisms on an old earth, or manifestations of a stable
and universal order, symbolically expressed by correspondences
among nature's three kingdoms -- animal, mineral, and vegetable.
Part II discusses the greatest conjunction
of a time, a subject, and an assemblage of amazing people
in the history of natural history: the late-eighteenth to
the early-nineteenth century in France, when a group that
included some of the most exceptional intellects of the
millennium -- Georges Buffon, Antoine Lavoisier, and Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck -- invented the scientific study of natural history
in an age of revolution.
Part III illustrates the greatest British
challenge to this continental preeminence: the remarkable,
and wonderfully literate, leading lights of Victorian science
in Darwin's age of turmoil and reassessment: Lyell's uniformitarianism,
Darwin's own intellectual development, Richard Owen's invention
of dinosaurs, and Alfred Russel Wallace on Victorian certainties
and subsequent unpredictabilities.
The last three parts of the book do not
invoke biography so explicitly, but they use the same device
of embodying an abstraction within a particular that can
be addressed in sufficient detail and immediate focus to
fit within an essay. The interlude of Part IV presents some
experiments in the different literary form of short takes.
Part V, on scientific subjects with more obvious and explicit
social consequences (and often unacknowledged social origins
as well) also uses biography, but in a different way, to
link past stories with present realities -- to convey the
lesson that claims for objectivity based on pure discovery
often replay episodes buried in history, and prove that
our modern certainties flounder within the same complexities
of social context and mental blockage. Finally, Part VI
abandons biography for another device of essayists: major
themes (about evolution's different expression across scales
of size and time) cast into the epitome of odd and intriguing
particulars.
Stephen Jay Gould is the Alexander Agassiz
Professor of zoology and professor of geology at Harvard
and the curator for invertebrate paleontology in the university's
Museum of Comparative Zoology. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and New York City.
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