Stephen Jay Gould on Writing

"Our discombobulated lives need to sink some anchors in numerical stability."

"This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity."

"The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum."

"Natural historians tend to avoid tendentious preaching in this philosophical mode . Our favored style of doubting is empirical: if I wish to question your proposed generality, I will search for a counterexample in flesh and blood. Such counterexamples exist in abundance, for they form a staple in a standard genre of writing in natural history — the “wonderment of oddity” or “strange ways of the beaver” tradition."

"The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources. The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor."

"I... praise the newly opened halls of fossil mammals at the. ...teaching us about evolutionary trees by organizing the entire hall as a central trunk and set of branches... placing our brains in our feet and letting us learn by walking. ...the chosen geometry of evolutionary organization... violates the traditional picture of life's history, thus illustrating... an important principle in the history of science: the central role of pictures, graphs, and other forms of visual representation in channeling and constraining our thought. ...Words are an evolutionary afterthought. ...My colleagues have actually done it. ...They have ordered all the fossils into an unconventional iconographic tree that fractures the bias of progress. ...so that we can preambulate along the tree of life and absorb the new scheme viscerally by walking... They have taken Colbert's radical idea and arranged all the fossils by their branching order, not their later "success" or "advancement." Groups that branch early appear early in the hall... Sea cows and elephants are at the end of the hall, horses in the middle, and primates near the beginning."

"Very few people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources—certainly not in necessary depth and comtemplation, and often not at all. When writers close themselves off to the documents of scholarship, and then rely only on seeing or asking, they become conduits and sieves rather than thinkers. When, on the other hand, you study the great works of predecessors engaged in the same struggle, you enter a dialogue with human history and the rich variety of our own intellectual traditions. You insert yourself, and your own organizing powers, into this history—and you become an acive agent, not merely a “reporter."

"Included in this “almost nothing,” as a kind of geological afterthought of the last few million years, is the first development of self-conscious intelligence on this planet—an odd and unpredictable invention of a little twig on the mammalian evolutionary bush. Any definition of this uniqueness, embedded as it is in our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If our propensity to grasp nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge, for we receive in trade both the joys of literature and the core of our being."

"I first met Stephen Jay Gould in the sixth grade in Queens, New York, when we were the only two geeks in the school interested in natural history and particularly in dinosaurs—decades before the advent of worldwide dinomania. In junior high school, our schoolmates nicknamed me "Dino" and Gould "Fossilface." We spent many afternoons at the American Museum of Natural History, where such curators as Edwin Colbert and Norman Newell fanned the flames of our hobby. We lost touch for twenty-five years, and I was delighted one day to discover Steve's columns in Natural History. At the time, both my life and my career had wandered far away from natural history, and I was working as an editor of what used to be called pulp magazines. I wrote to him, "You have inherited Thomas Huxley's mantle in explaining evolution to a new generation," and I asked if he remembered me. He wrote back, "Blood may be thicker than water, but junior high school friendships are thicker than anything." Steve encouraged me to return to the fold and take up my boyhood interests once again. But where to begin, with no credentials and no umbrella institution? He urged me to pursue the history of science as an independent scholar, to make a pilgrimage to Darwin's home in England, and to buy antiquarian natural history books in the shops around the British Museum. He gave me letters of introduction to top scholars. Eventually he encouraged me to write my Encyclopedia of Evolution, to which he generously contributed a foreword. Soon after it was published, in 1990, I was hired by Natural History, and among my duties is seeing "This View of Life" through to press each month . My reconnection with the man, and with the passions and ideas that we both enjoy, has transformed my life immeasurably for the better. Thanks, Fossilface!"

"Many similarities of basic design among animal phyla, once so confidently attributed to convergence, and viewed as testimony to the power of natural selection to craft exquisite adaptation, demand the opposite interpretation that Mayr labeled as inconceivable: the similar features are homologies, or products of the same genes, inherited from a common ancestor and never altered enough by subsequent evolution to erase their comparable structure and function. The similarities record the constraining power of conserved history, not the architectural skills of natural selection independently pursuing an optimal design in separate lineages. Vertebrates are, in a certain sense, true brothers - not mere analogs - of worms and insects."