I kept the boy from noticing the title of my most recent book, Dinosaur in a Haystack, by Stephen Jay Gould. Just as well…I didn’t really want to read these out loud. The boy is reading, but Gould revels in employing each bon mot just so, and he stretches my vocabulary and cultural acumen often enough. For the under-six reader (even the “I want to be a paleontologist” under-six reader), such strutting leads to frustration and confusion. The last thing I want to do right now is disrupt the voracious interest in everything he sees. Or maybe the challenge would only fire him up…
But back to the book…this is a collection of essays from Gould’s lengthy, impressive run of such in Natural History. In fact, we’re told in the prologue, this is the seventh collection of such essays. Reading them once a month, as they arrived, must have been a treat. In the aggregate, I was a bit done earlier than the end, although I did plow on to complete even the final essay about Erasmus Darwin’s literary antecedents to his grandson’s Charles’ revolutionary work.
Gould was a professorial star, in part because of these essays and other prolific writing which brought him beyond the academy, in part because of his science. “Punctuated equilibrium” is a term you cannot miss…at least if you’re reading Gould himself. (He was not shy about his accomplishments.) His CV gives a sense of the recognition he earned. Wikipedia has more, of course. He died of mesothelioma, one of those cancers which has become such a valuable pay-per-click keyword. From his wide-ranging interests, I’m sure he would have commented on this phenomenon, although in what context I cannot imagine.
I took one course from Gould, one of those “everyman science” courses which fills a large theater…when everyone attends. I can’t remember the course title, but it was broadly about evolution, and I was not in regular attendance (not proud of that, just a fact). I did finally read The Origin of Species a few years ago, going through my one real legacy of that class.
These essays make science approachable, but he does not dumb anything down — they are wonderful in that regard. I just wouldn’t read more than a half-dozen at once, and then come back for intellectual sustenance later.