The Lying Stones of Marrakech

Stephen Jay Gould

Penultimate Reflections
in Natural History

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All of the essays contained in this work were previously published by
Natural History
magazine

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 2000

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Cover

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Also by Stephen Jay Gould

Preface

I E
PISODES IN THE
B
IRTH OF
P
ALEONTOLOGY
The Nature of Fossils and the History of the Earth

1 The Lying Stones of Marrakech

2 The Sharp-Eyed Lynx, Outfoxed by Nature

3 How the Vulva Stone Became a Brachiopod

II P
RESENT AT THE
C
REATION
How France's Three Finest Scientists Established Natural History in an Age of Revolution

4 Inventing Natural History in Style

5 The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates

6. A Tree Grows in Paris: Lamarck's Division of Worms and Revision of Nature

III D
ARWIN'S
C
ENTURY—AND
O
URS
Lessons from Britain's Four Greatest Victorian Naturalists

7. Lyell's Pillars of Wisdom

8. A Sly Dullard Named Darwin: Recognizing the Multiple Facets of Genius

9. An Awful Terrible Dinosaurian Irony

10. Second-Guessing the Future

IV S
IX
L
ITTLE
P
IECES ON THE
M
EANING AND
L
OCATION OF
E
XCELLENCE

Substrate and Accomplishment

11. Drink Deep, or Taste Not the Pierian Spring

12. Requiem Eternal

13. More Power to Him

 

De Mortuis When Truly Bonum

14. Bright Star Among Billions

15. The Glory of His Time and Ours

16. This Was a Man

V S
CIENCE IN
S
OCIETY

17. A Tale of Two Work Sites

18. The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W

19. Dolly's Fashion and Louis's Passion

20. Above All, Do No Harm

VI E
VOLUTION AT
A
LL
S
CALES

21. Of Embryos and Ancestors

22. The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant

23. Room of One's Own

Illustration Credits

Index

For Jack Sepkoski (1948–1999),
who brought me one of the greatest possible joys
a teacher can ever earn or experience:
to be surpassed by his students.
Offspring should not predecease their parents,
and students should outlive their teachers.
The times may be out of joint,
but Jack was born to set the order of life's history right—
and he did!

 

 

 

ALSO BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD

 

Ontogeny and Phylogeny

Ever Since Darwin

The Panda's Thumb

The Mismeasure of Man

Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

The Flamingo Smile

An Urchin in the Storm

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

Illuminations

(with R W Purcell)

Finders, Keepers

(with R W Purcell)

Eight Little Piggies

Dinosaur in a Haystack

Life's Grandeur

Questioning the Millennium

Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Wonderful Life

Bully for Brontosaurus

Stephen Jay Gould is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology at Harvard University, and the Vincent Astor Visiting Professor of Biology at New York University. His publications include
Ever Since Darwin, Eight Little Piggies, Life's Grandeur, Questioning the Millennium, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, Bully for Brontosaurus
and
Wonderful Life. Wonderful Life
won the Science Book Prize for 1991.

In the fall of 1973, I received a call from Alan Ternes, editor of
Natural History
magazine. He asked me if I would like to write columns on a monthly basis, and he told me that folks actually get paid for such activities. (Until that day, I had published only in technical journals.) The idea intrigued me, and I said that I'd try three or four. Now, 290 monthly essays later (with never a deadline missed), I look only a little way forward to the last item of this extended series—to be written, as number 300 exactly, for the millennial issue of January 2001. One really should follow the honorable principle of quitting while still ahead, a rare form of dignity chosen by such admirable men as Michael Jordan and Joe DiMaggio, my personal hero and mentor from childhood. (Joe died, as I put this book together, full of years and in maximal style and grace, after setting one last record—for number of times in receiving last rites and then rallying.) Our millennial transition may represent an arbitrary imposition of human decisions upon nature's true cycles, but what grander symbol for calling a halt and moving on could possibly cross the path of a man's lifetime? This ninth volume of essays will therefore be the penultimate book in a series that shall close by honoring the same decimal preference lying behind our millennial transition.

If this series has finally found a distinctive voice, I have learned this mode of speech in the most gradual, accumulating, and largely unconscious manner— against my deepest personal beliefs in punctuational change and the uniquely directive power (despite an entirely accidental origin) of human reason in evolution. I suppose I had read a bit of Montaigne in English 101, and I surely could spell the word, but I had no inkling about the definitions and traditions of the essay as a literary genre when Alan Ternes called me cold on that fine autumn day.

I began the series with quite conventional notions about writing science for general consumption. I believed, as almost all scientists do (by passively imbibing a professional ethos, not by active thought or decision), that nature speaks directly to unprejudiced observers, and that accessible writing for nonscientists therefore required clarity, suppression of professional jargon, and an ability to
convey the excitement of fascinating facts and interesting theories. If I supposed that I might bring something distinctive to previous efforts in this vein, I managed to formulate only two vague personal precepts: first, I would try to portray all subjects at the same conceptual depth that I would utilize in professional articles (that is, no dumbing down of ideas to accompany necessary clarification of language); second, I would use my humanistic and historical interests as a “user friendly” bridge to bring readers into the accessible world of science.

Over the years, however, this mere device (the humanistic “bridge”) became an explicit centrality, a feature that I permitted myself to accept (and regard as a source of comfort and pride rather than an idiosyncrasy to downplay or even to hide) only when I finally realized that I had been writing
essays,
not mere columns, all along—and that nearly five hundred years of tradition had established and validated (indeed, had explicitly defined) the essay as a genre dedicated to personal musing and experience, used as a gracious entrée, or at least an intriguing hook, for discussion of general and universal issues. (Scientists are subtly trained to define the personal as a maximally dangerous snare of subjectivity and therefore to eschew the first person singular in favor of the passive voice in all technical writing. Some scientific editors will automatically blue-pencil the dreaded
I
at every raising of its ugly head. Therefore, “popular science writing” and “the literary essay” rank as an ultimately disparate, if not hostile, pairing of immiscible oil and water in our usual view—a convention that I now dream about fracturing as a preeminent goal for my literary
and
scientific life.)

I have tried, as these essays developed over the years, to expand my humanistic “take” upon science from a simple practical device (my original intention, insofar as I had any initial plan at all) into a genuine emulsifier that might fuse the literary essay and the popular scientific article into something distinctive, something that might transcend our parochial disciplinary divisions for the benefit of both domains (science, because honorable personal expression by competent writers can't ever hurt; and composition, because the thrill of nature's factuality should not be excluded from the realm of our literary efforts). At the very least, such an undertaking can augment the dimensionality of popular scientific articles—for we lose nothing of science's factual beauty and meaning, while we add the complexity of how we come to know (or fail to learn) to conventional accounts of what we think we know.

As this series developed, I experimented with many styles for adding this humanistic component about how we learned (or erred) to standard tales about what, in our best judgment, exists “out there” in the natural world—often only
to demonstrate the indivisibility of these two accounts, and the necessary embeddedness of “objective” knowledge within worldviews shaped by social norms and psychological hopes. But so often, as both Dorothy and T.S. Eliot recognized in their different ways, traditional paths may work best and lead home (because they have truly withstood the test of time and have therefore been honed to our deep needs and best modes of learning, not because we fall under their sway for reasons of laziness or suppression).