Status Updates From Dinosaur in a Haystack

The most recently read essay deals with punctuated equilibrium, evolution, and to a degree the beginning of a separate homo sapiens and our very small group of direct ancestors. Best evidence is we’re all directly descended from a clade of fewer individuals than now live in your home town. How frightening, marvelous, and wild our world was then.

Gould could be an Englishman in his mastery of the language and literature.

This current essay is an interesting review of the lengthy poem Im Memoriam by Tennyson. The author had an excellent education.

“I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur in succumbing to progress. Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium. Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near 1 million years old, and has limited prospects, entirely self-imposed, for geological longevity.”

Excellent. I also heartily recommend essay collections by the same author including The Panda’s Thumb and Eight Little Piggies. One essay I recall from “…Thumb.” Those who consider evolution false cite nature’s perfect constructions. Gould cites the panda’s thumb as supporting evolution as it is a modified wrist bone.

An example of his gift for general knowledge was his observation with hominid paleontologists at Olduvai gorge.

“Trained incapacity” =
Your expertise helps you see certain things and at the same time can blind you to other features.

* The paleoanthropologists: focused on hominid teeth
* Gould (trained as a paleontologist of invertebrates): notices mollusk fossils

* Observation depends heavily on training.

Stephen Jay Gould knew evolution and mollusks. He was also a generalist with an excellent memory who saw connections everywhere. If you are a natural scientist, or not, I think k you will love his essays. Most of his books, like this one, are a collection of short monthly essays written over several decades for Natural History magazine. Great knowledge and concepts in small packages.

absolutely enthralled with gould. just a fantastic selection of essays

one essay in and i am immediately a gould fan

My heart leaps up then I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!

Let the world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.

King Lear's tragic error, which shall lead to blinding, madness, and death, lies in not recognizing that silence - overt nothing - can embody the deepest and most important meaning of all.

Nothing will come of nothing.