O sorriso do flamingo: reflexões sobre história natural

Reflections in Natural History #4

by Stephen Jay Gould, Carlos Marques da Silva (Translator)

«O Sorriso do Flamingo é um livro sobre história», escreve o autor neste seu quarto livro de ensaios, «um livro sobre o que significa afirmar que a vida é o resultado de um passado contingente, e não o inevitável e previsível produto de simples e eternas leis da natureza.»

Flamingos que se alimentam de cabeça para baixo; flores e minhocas que mudam de macho para fêmea e, por vezes, voltam a transformar-se no que eram antes; sexo, drogas, calamidades e a extinção dos dinossauros; o umbigo de Adão; a Vénus hotentote; mente e supermente. Estes são apenas alguns dos assuntos e dos títulos do conjunto de ensaios reunidos neste volume. Um autêntico festival que deslumbra o nosso espírito com a incrível variedade e o interesse aliciante do tema de Gould - a teoria evolucionista por ele revista e aprofundada.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Biology, Evolution, Natural History, Essays, Nature

479 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Stephen Jay Gould was a prominent American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Most of Gould's empirical research was on land snails. Gould helped develop the theory of punctuated equilibrium, in which evolutionary stability is marked by instances of rapid change. He contributed to evolutionary developmental biology. In evolutionary theory, he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two compatible, complementary fields, or "magisteria," whose authority does not overlap.

Many of Gould's essays were reprinted in collected volumes, such as Ever Since Darwin and The Panda's Thumb, while his popular treatises included books such as The Mismeasure of Man, Wonderful Life and Full House.
-Wikipedia

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is 30 years old and still highly readable. It's about biology, more specifically about Darwinian evolution and the history of science. Quite good and gripping writing explaining what is still pretty much the current state of our knowledge.

Gould has a fondness for rehabilitating scientists who were wrong for interesting reasons. In this volume those figures include: Edward Tyson (who sought to place chimpanzees next to humans as the next link in the great chain of being theory), the Rev. William Buckland (who misinterpreted evidence of past glaciation as proof of The Flood), Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (who straddled the epigenicist/preformationist embryology debate of the 18th century), and the father of taxonomy himself, Carolus Linnaeus (whose work was also skewed by the false great chain of being theory).

Gould is always careful to point out that no science is without its limiting cultural or social preconceptions. Scientific knowledge, moreover, is conditional, never fixed, and changes with our ever modifying understanding of it. He writes:

Good arguments don't provide nearly as much insight into human thought, for we can simply say that we have seen nature aright and have properly pursued the humble task of mapping things accurately and objectively. But bad arguments must be defended in the face of nature's opposition, a task that takes some doing. The analysis of this "doing" often provides us with insight into the ideology or thought processes of an age, if not into the modes of human reasoning itself. (p. 284)

Also see my reviews for Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack, Bully for Brontosaurus, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, and Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.

[Ben Sutter · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a lot more than meets the eye to this esoteric collection of paleontology/biology articles.

Whilst working through some of the strangest topics, for example (i) the special variation among Caribbean sea snails and (ii) why pre-Cambrian worms aren't actually worms, I was surreptitiously being taught the intricacies of the scientific method.

These articles are lessons in critical thinking concepts such as - open-mindedness, acknowledging errors (including your own), recognizing false assumptions and poorly reasoned conclusions, pursuing truth over ego and differentiating between evidence and speculation. Using real world examples this book is a kind of training manual in critical thinking.

[Jeanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Flamingo's Smile – and many of Stephen Jay Gould's other collections of essays when they were first first published in Natural History 35 or so years ago. I was dismayed when he died, as his descriptions of science and the scientific process were so erudite, engaged, and engaging that I couldn't imagine anyone else taking his place. (They haven't, at least for me and in this genre.) Who else would start a discussion of the paradox of siphonophores – are they an organism or a colony? – by discussing Pirates of Penzance and end with a joke? His questions and his analyses keep me reading.

When an inquiry becomes so convoluted, we must suspect that we are proceeding in the wrong way. We must return to go, change gears, and reformulate the problem, not pursue every new iota of information or nuance of argument in the old style, hoping all the time that our elusive solution simply awaits a crucial item, yet undiscovered. (pp. 77-78)

Should I be reading 35-year-old science essays? Probably not, if I want to learn evolutionary science, but if I want to understand scientific thinking better and read good, smart scientific writing, YES!

The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion (p. 102).

[Adrian Colesberry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest modern voice for the neo-Darwinian synthesis. He and a colleague, whose name I forget, re-purposed Kipling's term "just-so stories" to describe evolutionarily plausible but unprovable explanations for things. An amazing critical thinker, Gould realized that if you didn't establish some way of critiquing evolutionary explanations, they would become the equivalent of folk explanations, overpredicting to the point that they could never be disproven. Once evolutionary explanations became non-disprovable, it stops being a science and starts being a belief, like believing in god. So he spent a lifetime not just doing his own research but in popularizing disciplined neo-Darwinian critical thinking in this series of essays in Natural History magazine or Nature magazine, I forget. Most of my understanding of the neo-Darwinian synthesis comes from reading Gould.

[Pam Baddeley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is volume 4 of the collected essays by the late Stephen Jay Gould. As before, it is the usual mixture of some rather esoteric ones that go a bit over my head and subjects I find more interesting. I had to skip the article on baseball however, being from the UK and unable to drum up any interest. The discussion of mass extinctions was interesting, given that these essays were written during the period when the theory that the dinosaurs (and many marine invertebrates) had been wiped out by an asteroid strike was beginning to gather sufficient evidence to be accepted. Some of the articles have no doubt been superseded by more recent scientific developments which is problematic when a reader such as myself doesn't know which have been affected. So all in all, I rate this at 3 stars.

[Pratik Rath · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is quite old for a pop science read, but certainly not outdated. Stephen Jay Gould has been a great recent find for me, and I'm now quite a fan of his writing.

This collection of essays in particular is pretty diverse ranging over various themes such as peculiarities of natural history illustrating the quirks of evolution, the scientific method illustrated by testable ideas that turned out to be manifestly false, the punctuated equilibrium of speciation and mass extinctions, and also some interesting biographical stories tied in with the progress in our understanding of nature and our place in it. With the benefit of hindsight, I think this book should be read as a collection of short stories, skipping from one to another and reading casually in spurts. Unfortunately I went through it in one go and that essentially meant I strongly appreciated the earlier essays with my attention span decaying towards the second half of the book. This is perhaps also correlated with the quality of essays mildly wavering towards the end.

But undoubtedly the author provides an ideal for pop science writers to achieve, covering vastly different topics with great guile and not at all shying away from difficult concepts while doing a great job of carrying the reader along. I wish there was something of this kind in other sciences, although I imagine it's easier to do so with natural history and biology.

Discussions of nature are also nicely peppered with discussions of pop culture, baseball and human society making it an interesting read even outside the context of the primary focus. What particularly impressed me were the author's deeply thought out ideas about sociology and the interplay with nature, thoughts that have aged surprisingly well for the greatest part.

[Stacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may be my favorite collection of his essays because of the note at the beginning about his personal bout with mortality that occurred at this time and because the essays reflect his initial skepticism of and gradual acceptance of the Alvarez theory for the cometary extinction of dinosaurs and its implications for understanding our evolutionary history more broadly. This volume also documents his concern about the possible impact of nuclear war and his public efforts, together with other scientists and religious figures from around the world, to prevent it.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like his writing style and the essays were all great. Some of them didn't appeal to my interests but that's not the fault of the essay. I'll definitely read more works by SJG in the future but maybe smaller chunks. This book is pretty hefty and though it's comprised of easy length essays it was kind of a lot to read in 1 month as a book club book (sorry about that friends!). Some of what he touched on related to previous books we've read so that was cool. All in all I enjoyed it and I'm glad I read it!

[Mythlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hit or miss for me with some of the essays, but the ones I liked were very good! He writes well and makes a good pitch for science.

Some standouts:

* "For Want of a Metaphor" at 150-151:

We would say today that Maupertuis's basic insight was correct: complexity cannot arise from formless potential; something must exist in the egg and sperm. But we now how a radically different concept of this "something." Where Maupertuis could not think beyond actual parts, we have discovered programmed instructions. [...] Programmed instructions were not part of the intellectual equipment of eighteenth-century thinkers. Music boxes pointed in the right direction, but the first revolutionary invention based on programmed instructions, the Jacquard loom, was not introduced until the early 1800s. [...] How could Maupertuis imagine the correct solution to his dilemma [...] in a century that had no player pianos, not to mention computer programs?


We often think, naïvely, that missing data are the primary impediments to intellectual progress—just find the right facts and all problems will dissipate. But barriers are often deeper and more abstract in thought. We must have access to the right metaphor, not only to the requisite information. Revolutionary thinkers are not, primarily, gatherers of facts, but weavers of new intellectual structures.

* "Losing the Edge" - in which Gould notices that we have lost not just the .400 hitter in baseball, but also the lower extremes in performance as well. He posits that the explanation is not that we've lost our greats, but instead the "increasing precision, regularity, and standardization of play" (p. 225). As baseball has become a serious profession, "managers and players have discovered [ways] to remove the edge that truly excellent players once enjoyed." Id.

* "Opus 100" in explaining how his work on Cerion provides "daily joy" -- it is in "Little predictions affirmed or small guesses proved wrong and exchanged for more interesting ideas" (p. 183). [Note this is very much the spirit animating the fieldwork in Bernd Heinrich's "Ravens in Winter".] Gould notes that "any good field project" will provide "unending stimulation, so long as little puzzles remain as intensely absorbing, fascinating and frustrating as big questions. Fieldwork is not like the one-hundred-thousandth essay on Shakespeare's sonnets; it always presents something truly new, not a gloss on previous commentaries." Id.

* Also interesting in Opus 100 is Gould's speculation/insight that because his Cerion fieldwork shows that "a complex set of independent traits can evolve in virtually the same way more than once," there's probably a genetic releaser of some kind that can coordinate the joint appearance of these traits. p. 182. {Note this is as if it the genetic code were formed as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story; depending on local conditions, you'll head down one developmental pathway rather than another.}

* "Reducing Riddles" - this bit reminds me a teensy bit of Indiana Jones:

Contrary to the romantic image of science and exploration, many important discoveries are made in museum drawers, not under adverse conditions in the parched Gobi or the freezing Antarctic. And so it must be, for the nineteenth century was the great age of collecting -- and leading practitioners shoveled up material by the ton, dumped it in museum drawers, and never looked at it again. (p. 249)

[Lydia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the use of stories about scientific discoveries (and some on other topics like the statistics of baseball) to highlight the different ways in which we can easily fall into the trap of logical fallacies in how we think, and the ways in which preconceptions and paradigms of the day can constrain our imagination. Fun book of essays in a bit of a (sometimes overly) verbose style, but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the reading.

[JM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gould is that rare public figure who somehow manages to marry a great intelligence, a deep curiosity, an able writership and a empathetic humanism. He is a delight to read. Spanning diverse subjects of evolution he always makes both the specific and the general a fascinating insight into the histories of life. The greatest take away from all these essays is the diversity and robustness of being. There are so many ways things could have (and still could) turn out, and all this wonder around us has been the reverence of contingency. We are incredibly lucky that we are here at all. It is against all odds that it were to be so. And yet it is.

And even with this how much we seem to have screwed up along the way.

Social lessons abound in these essays, sometimes as more observational curiosities, sometimes as staunch condemnations. Always with an eye for understanding and bettering. Gould isn't trying to lay out a theoretical groundwork here so much as he is attempting to excavate and understand the histories of what is. To clear up misunderstandings and impart the knowledge that will hopefully be used for future wisdom. A really refreshing point that he had made, which I haven't seen before in my (admittedly sparse) readings into scientific fields was the idea that old models of thought-though now laughable- still were, in their own way, brilliant consolidations and rationalizations of what was then known. And while this doesn't mean that you have to commend all old ideas, it should be used as a way to try and understand (again to uncover) WHY they came about. Because knowing is power. Even if power to make clearer and more informed changes. To avoid the failings of the past. To strengthen our adaptability and avoid dying out from under our own hand.

Even when confronting religion, Gould avoids the generalist combative atheistic approach (ala Dawkins) and instead leans into a more nuanced appreciation of what likely religion came about for, and a very learned understanding about how even science doesn't have all the answers for all the questions out there. Again, the humanistic approach makes him such a warm and admirable figure to read.

I'll leave off with one of my favorite passages in the book:
"The excitement of new theories lies in their power to change contexts, to render irrelevant what once seemed sensible. If we laugh at the past because we judge it anachronistically in the light of present theories, how can we understand these changes of context? And how can we retain proper humility toward our own favored theories and the probability of their own future lapse into insignificance? Honest intellectual passions always merit respect."

I know, right?

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of Stephen Jay Gould’s books are collections of his essays he wrote for years (until his untimely and unfortunate death in 2002) that appeared in “Natural History” magazine. “The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History” is the fourth such collection.

Gould was a prominent paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and astute historian of science, who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard. His essays are a mix of science and history.

I'll take my lead from Dr. Gould. This book’s curious title comes from the very first essay to appear. A flamingo's smile is almost as enigmatic as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa's. Why? In this essay, Gould explores the theme of form follows function and the question of just why do pink flamingos have upside-down smiles?

Gould writes: “In most birds (and mammals including us), the upper jaw fuses to the skull; chewing, biting, and shouting move the mobile lower jaw against this stable brace. If reversed feeding has converted the flamingo’s upper jaw into a working lower jaw in size and shape, then we must predict that, contrary to all anatomical custom, this upper beak moves up and down against a rigid lower jaw. The flamingo, in short, should feed by raising and lowering its upper jaw.”

Which, by the way, it does. Flamingos are filter feeders that feed with their heads upside down, submerged in water. So, for a practical purpose, in nature, the jaw that is actually on the bottom during feeding is the movable one. Most curious. Most curious, indeed.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reflection in Natural History as the subtitle says. Gould had a natural gift in explaining or in just talking about science. Not very unlike Asimov even if he was much more restricted in his subjects. But impressing enough. The Darwin worship is a little annoying but there are excellent pieces, like the one False premise, Good Science about Kelvin’s refutation of the “Doctrine of Uniformity”. And even better: “For Want of a Metaphor”. Here Gould gives a good example how progress in science is dependant on metaphors. It is the story of preformationists vs. epigeneticists. Gould rejects the usual good guy vs. bad that is so natural in the history of science.
How asks the protagonist Maupertuis (*1698), can Albinos or polydactyly be possible if they existed as homunculi from the beginning of time? He felt there must be something from father and mother that comes together. What he missed was the metaphor of programs, that makes it so easy for us to understand what is going on.
“Carrie Buck’s daughter” is remarkable because of the extraordinary coincidence that I read it just after watching “Judgment of Nuremberg”.
“Losing the Edge” explains why baseball players in the past were better. Would be interesting to see if that is also true for football.

[Taylar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very different read for me. I don't typically read a lot about geology or paleontology. I found Gould's writing approachable and understandable. Sure, there were things I had to read a couple of times but overall I think I understood his arguments and I learned some new things - and now have a lot to think about/ was challenged. I looked forward to reading Gould's perspective. Would love to see some of these updated with current research!

[Lghamilton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gould covers a lot of ground in these essays - evolution (both in the biological sense and in the pattern of thought as it relates to our natural world), dinosaurs, ETs, extinction and even baseball with references to Casey Stengel and an entire essay on the disappearance of the .400 hitter. A little bit of a slog though; while Gould has a somewhat breezy manner, the topics he covers are very sciency and he breaks up the narrative with asides on Latin word origins, or even asides in Latin.

[Janet Eshenroder · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are few scientific authors who can write so well, presenting science tidbits as well as sweeping overviews to keep the audience entertained and enlightened. Writers who specialize in science may be as engaging in their style but they lack the scientific background to also present a new hypothesis or critique science from the inside out.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book and admire the author.

[David Rubenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not an easy book to read--Gould's language and style are aimed at educated, but non-professional readers. Each essay is a gem in its own way, on a wide diversity of subjects. Gould sheds much light on how science is done, and the importance of the process rather than the conclusions. Highly recommended!

[Debbie "DJ" · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love all of Gould's books. There is nothing more fascinating than the world we live in with all it's peculiarities. Gould is THE expert in paleontology. His books are very scientific, so not an easy read, but for anyone who is really interested in paleontology he's the best.

[Italo Aleixo De Faria · Rating 4 out of 5]

A divulgação científica é uma arte por si só! Durante minha graduação em Biologia, não foram poucas as vezes que eu ouvi de meus professores, que muito do sucesso estrondoso da Teoria da Evolução se deu graças a Thomas Huxley, o "buldogue de Darwin"! Já que Darwin deveria ser uma pessoa pacata e reclusa, coube a Huxley o papel de difundir e debater a nova teoria, em palestras e debates com autoridades religiosas da época. Uma vez que a produção científica precisa ser debatida pelos pares, não é de se estranhar que sua linguagem seja voltada à eles, isolando esse conhecimento em bolhas intelectuais apartadas da sociedade. Espalhar esse conhecimento ao "publico leigo" é essencial para o avanço científico e alguns dos grandes nomes da ciência entraram para história, não tanto pelas descobertas que eles próprios fizeram, mas pela capacidade que tinham de comunicar e de produzir conhecimento a partir do conhecimento pré-existente. Assim foram imortalizados Thomas Huxley, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins e claro Stephen Jay Gould!

Além de dezenas de publicações sobre paleontologia revisadas pelos pares, Stephen Jay Gould também produziu centenas de pequenos ensaios de divulgação científica. No próprio Prólogo de O Sorriso do Flamingo, Gould enaltece a comunicação científica como uma atividade executada à tempos por grandes intelectuais da ciência e deixa claro que é influenciado por esse estilo clássico, em contraste às simplistas abordagens contemporâneas. Fugindo do conceito básico de apenas explicar por explicar, Gould usa esse conhecimento para fazer ponderações intelectuais a respeito de literatura, tendências científicas e sociais, tecer críticas e claro, para mostrar como ocorre o desenvolvimento científico, normalmente narrado com muita pompa, mas na maioria das vezes um avanço atarracado e não linear.

O Sorriso do Flamingo é uma coletânea de 30 ensaios onde o autor discute com muita sagacidade os mais variados assuntos. No ensaio que nomeia o livro, Gould usa o bico do flamingo como seu foco de argumentação, para creditar à Lamarck o princípio funcionalista — atribuído quase que exclusivamente à seleção natural: os organismos devem primeiro adotar um comportamento para só depois a terem sua forma alterada — os estruturalistas acreditavam que a forma do organismo deveria mudar primeiro, para só depois se adaptar à uma nova função. Ele também discute como as metáforas são essenciais para os modelos científicos, em Na falta de uma metáfora, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis rebatia a ideia do pré-formacionismo — que propunha que todos os organismos vivos já estavam formados dentro dos seus progenitores — ao entender que a prole herda características mistas dos pais, mas não conseguia determinar os mecanismos pelos quais isso ocorria. E em Falsa Premissa, Boa Ciência vemos como Lord Kelvin estimou a idade da Terra em apenas algumas dezenas de milhares de anos usando premissas simples da termodinâmica e calculando a quantidade de tempo que levaria para um corpo, do tamanho de nosso planeta, se resfriar. Acontece que nos tempos de Maupertuis ou Kelvin, modos de pensar que resolviam essas questões sequer existiam, Maupertuis jamais viu alguma máquina que funcionasse com informação programadas, que só viriam a surgir a partir do século XIX e Kelvin não tinha conhecimento de elementos capazes de criar calor por conta própria, já que os elementos radioativos só seriam descobertos no século XX. Esses e outros ensaios mostram que o conhecimento científico depende não só dos dados levantados, mas também das formas de pensar específicas para interpretar esses dados. Gould também discute como a vida é, na sua essência, um gradiente contínuo: de vespas e WASPs, discute a problemática de tentar categorizar o comportamento sexual humano, e Convivendo com ligações e Um paradoxo muito engenhoso, discutem respectivamente, onde termina e começa um indivíduo, tanto em gêmeos siameses como em animais coloniais, como os cnidários. Num dos ensaios mais interessantes dessa coletânea, Perdendo a forma, Gould dá uma aula estatística usando com leveza a história do beisebol, onde joga por terra o saudosismos dos torcedores, ao mostrar que o aumento ou a queda das médias, pode se dar na verdade pela simples alteração na variação dos dados, dessa forma os rebatedores lendários do passado, teriam deixado de existir, graças à uma simples nivelação do nível dos jogadores.

Gould mistura em seu texto, curiosidades sobre os seres vivos com conceitos e teorias ecológicas e dessa sopa resgata nomes e eventos que ficaram obscurecidos nas prateleiras do conhecimento. Gould ainda dá um passo além e elabora a partir desses ensaios, divagações e debates, hora criticando modos de pensar retrógrados e apontando onde eles erravam, hora produzindo pensamento completamente novo. O que nós encontramos na escrita de Stephen Jay Gould é mais puro prazer pelo conhecimento, o amor de alguém que escreve pelo simples prazer de desnovelar o saber, como afirma o próprio autor:

"Escrevo esses ensaios sobretudo para auxiliar meu propósito de aprender e compreender o mais possível sobre a natureza no pouco tempo que me cabe."

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author knows the value of using vivid particulars to communicate abstract scientific ideas. When he writes about such biological oddities as the inverted jellyfish Cassiopea, the praying mantis's mating habits, the giant panda's extra ''thumb'' or the flamingo's inverted jaw, he does so with a double purpose - to entertain us with fascinating details while teaching us a few general concepts. Every oddity he describes stands on its own as a discrete fact of nature, an individual mystery, as well as yielding an example of some broader principle. This lively approach - ''letting generality cascade out of particulars,'' in his own words - is displayed again in his latest collection of essays, "The Flamingo's Smile." -- New York Times

Very erudite essays, even though written for the layperson (i.e. jargon free). I suppose any layperson reading this book must be terrifically interest in biology, or science in general. Some of the essays were easier to read the others, but I particularly liked the first essay (The Flamingo's Smile) and the last (The Cosmic Dance of Shiva.)

In the essay Continuity, Gould says:
"We now have evidence, in fossils of simple cells that life on Earth arose at least 3.5 billion years ago. It has, since then, extended upward in time, in unbroken continuity to the present. We can all, from moss to hippopotamus, trace our ancestry all the way back to these beginnings. The tree is an accurate metaphor for life's history; the tip of each current twig (we humans are one) flows back through branches ever wider and sturdier to the common trunk of original cells nearly 4 billion yeas ago. Ours is a small twig indeed. If we extirpate this twig directly by nuclear winter then we have canceled forever the most peculiar and different, unplanned experiment ever generated among the billions pf branches -- the origin, via consciousness, of a twig that could discover its own history and appreciate its continuity.

. . . consciousness is a quirky evolutionary accident, a product of one particular lineage that developed most components of intelligence for other evolutionary purposes; if we lose its twig by human extinction, consciousness may not evolve again in any other lineage during the 5 billion years or so left to our planet before the sun explodes. I cannot imagine anything more vulgar, more hateful, than the prospect that a tiny twig with one peculiar power might decimate a majestic and ancient tree, whose continuity stretches back to the dawn of Earth's time and whose trunk and branches house so many thousand prerequisite3s to the twig's existence."

[Michael Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am continuing my way through rereading Gould's essay collections.

It is exciting to follow a sharp knowledgeable person trying to solve problems. He always throws in a few essays that are not about science. The last book had one on Mickey Mouse.

This one has an essay on the question of why there are no more 400 hitters in the major leagues. Most people focus on things that have made it harder to get that many hits like night games, more travel, better equipment, more data. Gould points out that many of those factors effect the defense as much as the offense.

Gould notices that really bad hitters have also declined over the years. He theorizes that we are seeing a regression toward the mean. In many systems over time the extremes decrease and more and more actors tend towards the middle. It is a function of a system maturing. This is an interesting and unusual way to look at a problem. The value in these essays is seeing the examples of new ways to approach old problems.

Gould's big scientific idea is that evolution is not the smooth slow process that Darwin proposed. It has long periods of stability and relatively short periods of change. Global catastrophes have strong effects on evolution. The survival of any particular species through a global catastrophe is mostly luck since the evolved survival strategies don't necessarily help in a dramatically altered environment. We are accidents.

He packs these essays with fun stuff. For example, Alfred Kinsey, of "The Kinsey Report" was a world renowned expert on wasps before he got into sex. Gould argues that his wasp work influenced his sex work.

He is a brilliant popular science writer. He guides us through extremely sophisticated scientific ideas with out condescending or talking down. Sometimes he does get a pretty dense. "Of all groups with a large number of sequential hermaphrodites', only vertebrates have evolved protogyny as a more common pattern than protandry." He defines all those words as we go along but it gets hard to follow. I am comfortable skipping a sentence when necessary.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly compelling collection of essays by Gould. Gould here has done a good job organizing the essays, originally for a popular science periodical, into a fairly coherent book. As usual, Gould's writing is excellent, and he presents the scientific stories of his time in a readable but detailed way. Gould's love for his field shines through the book, as always.

Particularly interesting were two aspects of the book. First, Gould's repeated return to scientists of the past who were wrong about much of the natural world. Gould repeatedly explains how the world that they lived in determined the ways that they were wrong, and that they should not be treated as irredeemable fools, but instead as smart, thinking individuals who simply did not have access to all of the information that we do today (well, in 1985). For instance, Lord Kelvin's estimates for the age of the Earth, bounded at 100 million years at the top end, were not the result of him refusing to acknowledge geological reality, but instead an attempt to match observable geological facts with a universe in which the Earth was not generating any heat, because radiation was as yet unknown.

Second are the areas in which the book itself has been left behind, and these areas show the same pattern as the above. The book was written before the confirmation of the Alvarez hypothesis by the discovery of the Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico, and Gould, a believer in the hypothesis, is almost too enthusiastic. He extends the single impact event to a proposed 26-million year impact cycle, including a companion star of Sol, Nemesis, which does not in truth exist. In fact, as far as we know today, the K-T extinction is the only mass extinction event to have been caused by an impactor. Yet, Gould recognizes the possibility of the Nemesis hypothesis being wrong: the hypothesis was testable and failed, instead of being untestable.

While I do not think that I will love this book as much as I did Wonderful Life, I was very happy to pick it up, and it proved a very good read.

[Hannah]

I am such a fan of Gould’s science writing, that I’ve ignored more contemporary (and no doubt also excellent) books and writers in favor of another installment of Reflections in Natural History. He’s my comfort paleontologist, okay??

Standouts of this collection were chapters 10 and 21 (still painfully relevant 🙃)

In ch 10, Gould details Alfred Kinsey’s lesser known work in wasp taxonomy, and connects the dots between that and his later research on human sexual behavior. A compelling argument against essentialist views of both species classification and human behavior.
“Variation is the raw material of evolutionary change. It represents the fundamental reality of nature, not an accident about a created norm. Variation is primary; essences are illusory. Species must be defined as ranges of irreducible variation.”

In ch 21, Gould describes the concerns around falling birth rates among the educated class—something we’ve seen again recently as Elon Musk and other natalist advocates gain prominence. Gould uncovers the motivation behind this viewpoint as a deep belief in biological determinism—only certain types of people can be, and produce, valid members of society.
“The real issue is biological potentiality versus biological determinism. We are all interactionists; we all acknowledge the powerful influence of biology upon human behavior. Potentialists acknowledge the importance of biology but stress that complexities of interaction and the resultant flexibility of behavior, preclude rigid genetic programming as the basis for human achievement. . .Biological determinism has a longstanding (and continuing) political use as a tool for justifying the inequities of a status quo by blaming the victim.”

[Diane Jeske · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gould presents 30 essays on issues in natural history. All are of very high quality, but some are not of great interest to the lay reader. I was fascinated by two essays on 19th-century creationists who, unlike contemporary creationists, were willing to revise or reject views in light of evidence. (One attempted to explain the fossil record via a cyclical view of history, and one thought there was geological evidence for Noah’s flood) One essay on conjoined twins was interesting but not philosophically adept: Gould fails to make the important distinction found in Locke between person and human being and so finds himself entangled in some pseudo problems about identity. There are some good essays on the errors of eugenics and also on what we can and cannot infer from the fact that intelligent life has evolved on our planet. All in all this is a volume well worth dipping into. Even the rather dry essays usually have some interesting insights to render them worth your while.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) wrote in the Prologue to this 1985 book, "If my volumes work at all, they owe their reputation to coherence supplied by the common theme of evolutionary theory... [This book] has a different kind of trigger---a specific discovery with cascading implications. It now seems, to use the favored jargon of the profession, 'highly probable' that an errant asteroid or shower of comets provoked the great Cretaceous extinction (dinosaur death knell...). Moreover, such quintessentially fortuitous and episodic restructurings of life have occurred several times, perhaps even on a regular cycle of some 25-30 million years..."

He writes (perhaps surprisingly) with some sympathy for English naturalist and science popularizer, Philip Henry Gosse (author of 'Omphalos'll), saying, "its author was such a serious and fascinating man, not a hopeless crank or malcontent.... Gosse (1810-1888) was the David Attenborough of his day, Britain's finest popular narrator of nature's fascination... Gosse was the finest descriptive naturalist of his day." (Pg. 100-101) He adds, "The pig, created by God but an hour ago, this displaying his worn molars and, particularly, the arching canines themselves, a product of long and continued growth. I find this part of Gosse's argument quite satisfactory as a solution, within the boundaries of his assumptions..." (Pg. 106)

He rejects Carleton Coon's suggestion [in 'The Origin of Races'] that there are five separate "races" of humans, of different levels of advancement: "W.E. Le Gros Clark, England's greatest anatomist at the time ... replied [to then-undergraduate Gould's question] that he, at least, could not identify a modern race in the bones of an ancient species... Could five separate subspecies undergo such substantial changes and yet remain so similar at the end that all can still interbreed freely, as modern races so plainly do? ... we must view Coon's thesis more as the last gasp of a dying tradition than a credible synthesis of available evidence... Human variation exists; the formal designation of race is passé." (Pg. 190, 193)

He explains, "I regard the failure to find a clear 'vector of progress' in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record... Niles Eldredge and I ... argue that the pattern of normal times is not a tale of continuous adaptive improvement within lineages. Rather, species form rapidly in geological perspective (thousands of years) and tend to remain highly stable for millions of years thereafter... the fluctuating pattern must be constructed by a complex and fascinating interaction of two distinct tiers of explanation---punctuated equilibrium for normal times, and the different effects produced by separate processes of mass extinction... Organisms cannot track or anticipate the environmental triggers of mass extinction. No matter how well they adapt to environmental ranges of normal times, they must take their chances in catastrophic moments." (Pg. 241-242)

He says, "Homologous structures need not look alike. Indeed, the standard examples invoke organs quite dissimilar in form and function... How then can we recognize homology and thereby reconstruct the pathways of evolution? This most difficult question in evolutionary theory has no definite answer. No single criterion works in every case... We must evaluate proposed homologies... and accept or reject a hypothesis by the joint and independent affirmation of several criteria.... But truly homologous organs may be modified by evolutionary changes in embryos that mask the pathways of descent." (Pg. 366-367)

After describing a theory proposed by botanist Hugh H. Ilitis, he comments, "This theory may therefore serve as a remarkable exemplar of a process long ridiculed by conventional evolutionists but, in my view eminently plausible in certain cases---the 'hopeful monster,' a 'saltational' view for the origin of novel morphological structures and species (evolution by jumps). The great German geneticist Richard Goldschmidt proposed this idea ... in his 1940 book, 'The Material Basis of Evolution'... detractors claim that Goldschmidt's theory represents a surrender to ignorance, a reliance on the quirky and capricious accident... Yet don't we know that virtually all major mutations are harmful?... The hopeful few won their status precisely because they achieved their abruptly altered form within the constraints imposed by an inherited developmental system. Hopeful monsters are ... large-scale modifications along the established pathways of ordinary sexual and embryological development... in Goldschmidt's initial version, the hopeful monster arose as a consequence of small... genetic changes that produce large effects upon form because they alter early stages of development with cascading effects upon subsequent growth." (Pg. 371-372)

He rejects Freeman Dyson's argument from design based on the importance of mind: "Any complex historical outcome---intelligent life on earth, for example---represents a summation of improbabilities and becomes thereby absurdly unlikely... Does this kind of improbability permit us to conclude anything at all about that mystery of mysteries, the ultimate origin of things?... does the existence of intelligent life in our universe demand some preexisting mind just because another cosmos would have yielded a different outcome?." (Pg. 395-396) He also suggests that NASA’s SETI program is “a long shot well worth trying.” (Pg. 404)

Besides being a highly creative evolutionary theorist, Gould was also a brilliant writer and an engaged "public intellectual." His presence is sorely missed on the scientific and literary scene.

[Jason Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Flamingo's Smile" capture a unique moment in science. The excitement of the Alvarez finding of an asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous is palpable throughout the essays. Thirty years later, the theory is a given and it is a joy to see the excitement from a top scientific mind when a great idea first comes to light. The rest of the essays are of the quality to expect from the series. I particularly enjoyed the collaboration with Carl Sagan and the Pope (!?) to describe nuclear winter. Overall four stars.

[Jill Rebryna]

I've never read one of Stephen Jay Gould's books before, only heard of him through other science authors in the discipline. I thought he sounded an interesting man, and so I decided to check one of his books out. The essays are interesting, insightful, and strangely dated, which I don't always find in the scientific disciplines when it comes to books. Still, they were all extremely interesting, and in the dating, proof that things have changed, and that we have learned more.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

These essays are easy to read while still feeling precise and technical-enough. They remind me of Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' in their mix of anecdote, revival of the historically overlooked oddballs of the science community, and real insight into the big ideas behind scientific inquiry.

[Doug Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the fourth collection of Stephen jay Gould essays from his regular monthly column is Natural History. The essays are mostly about topics of natural history, but there are periodic side streets about such topics such as baseball. Gould wrote his monthly column for around 25 years amassing around 300 essays.

[Luísa Andrade · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Flamingo’s Smile” é um compêndio de ensaios sobre biologia evolutiva. Nem todos os textos têm o mesmo impacto, mas os do capítulo sobre política e progresso são especialmente potentes: revelam como o pensamento evolutivo pode ser usado — ou distorcido — para sustentar narrativas de poder. Uma leitura densa, elegante e profundamente esclarecedora.