Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

455 Pages·1992·4 MB·English

by  Stephen Jay Gould

Bully for Brontosaurus
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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
Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors (with R. W. Purcell)
Bully for Brontosaurus
Reflections in Natural History
Stephen Jay Gould
W.W.NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
Cover design by Mike McIver Cover painting by C.R. Knight, Brontosaurus
Courtesy Department of Library Services, American Museum of Natural History.
Neg. trans. no. 2417 (3) Copyright © 1991 by Stephen Jay Gould All rights
reserved.
First published as a Norton 1992
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gould, Stephen Jay.
Bully for brontosaurus : reflections in natural history / Stephen Jay Gould.
p. cm.
1. Natural history—Popular works. 2. Evolution—Popular works. I. Title.
QH45.5.G68 1991
508—dc20 91-6916
ISBN: 978-0-39330857-0
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London WIT 3QT
9 0
Pleni sunt coeli
et terra
gloria eius.
Hosanna in excelsis.
Contents
Prologue
1 | HISTORY IN EVOLUTION
1 George Canning’s Left Buttock and the Origin of Species
2 Grimm’s Greatest Tale
3 The Creation Myths of Cooperstown
4 The Panda’s Thumb of Technology
2 | DINOMANIA
5 Bully for Brontosaurus
6 The Dinosaur Rip-off
3 | ADAPTATION
7 Of Kiwi Eggs and the Liberty Bell
8 Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples
9 Not Necessarily a Wing
4 | FADS AND FALLACIES
10 The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone
11 Life’s Little Joke
12 The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs
5 | ART AND SCIENCE
13 Madame Jeanette
14 Red Wings in the Sunset
15 Petrus Camper’s Angle
16 Literary Bias on the Slippery Slope
6 | DOWN UNDER
17 Glow, Big Glowworm
18 To Be a Platypus
19 Bligh’s Bounty
20 Here Goes Nothing
7 | INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY
Biologists
21 In a Jumbled Drawer
22 Kropotkin Was No Crackpot
23 Fleeming Jenkin Revisited
Physical Scientists
24 The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier
25 The Godfather of Disaster
8 | EVOLUTION AND CREATION
The World of T. H. Huxley
26 Knight Takes Bishop?
27 Genesis and Geology
Scopes to Scalia
28 William Jennings Bryan’s Last Campaign
29 An Essay on a Pig Roast
30 Justice Scalia’s Misunderstanding
9 | NUMBERS AND PROBABILITY
31 The Streak of Streaks
32 The Median Isn’t the Message
33 The Ant and the Plant
10 | PLANETS AS PERSONS
34 The Face of Miranda
35 The Horn of Triton
Bibliography
Prologue
IN FRANCE, they call this genre vulgarisation—but the
implications are entirely positive. In America, we call it “popular (or pop)
writing” and its practitioners are dubbed “science writers” even if, like me, they
are working scientists who love to share the power and beauty of their field with
people in other professions.
In France (and throughout Europe), vulgarisation ranks within the highest
traditions of humanism, and also enjoys an ancient pedigree—from St. Francis
communing with animals to Galileo choosing to write his two great works in
Italian, as dialogues between professor and students, and not in the formal Latin
of churches and universities. In America, for reasons that I do not understand
(and that are truly perverse), such writing for nonscientists lies immured in
deprecations—“adulteration,” “simplification,” “distortion for effect,”
“grandstanding,” “whiz-bang.” I do not deny that many American works deserve
these designations—but poor and self-serving items, even in vast majority, do
not invalidate a genre. “Romance” fiction has not banished love as a subject for
great novelists.
I deeply deplore the equation of popular writing with pap and distortion for
two main reasons. First, such a designation imposes a crushing professional
burden on scientists (particularly young scientists without tenure) who might like
to try their hand at this expansive style. Second, it denigrates the intelligence of
millions of Americans eager for intellectual stimulation without patronization. If
we writers assume a crushing mean of mediocrity and incomprehension, then not
only do we have contempt for our neighbors, but we also extinguish the light of
excellence. The “perceptive and intelligent” layperson is no myth. They exist in
millions—a low percentage of Americans perhaps, but a high absolute number
with influence beyond their proportion in the population. I know this in the most
direct possible way—by thousands of letters received from nonprofessionals
during my twenty years of writing these essays, and particularly from the large
number written by people in their eighties and nineties, and still striving, as