Status Updates From Dinosaur in a Haystack

The last three essays included an ancient and enormous Michigan mycorrhizal fungus, Caribbean snails and Creole languages, and the evolution of whales. Each excellent.

Do you share a birthday with someone famous or infamous? Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born February 12,1809. Try for a moment to imagine the alternative history if either man was never born.

Several essays on eugenics. Brings to mind that almond trees were domesticated for consumption because their bitterness is controlled by a single gene, making it easier to breed non-bitter varieties. Conversely, oak trees have many genes controlling acorn bitterness, complicating selective breeding. Additionally, oaks grow slowly and spread primarily through squirrels who are fine with bitter acorns.

Wide ranging, scholarly and accessible. Entirely to my taste.

The last two essays were about Jurassic Park (and an evolutionist’s kudos and complaints), and museums historical and modern. The biases, theories, and ultimate presentations. Both superb.

If you hold a seashell 🐚 point up as in the emoji, it’s right handed if the opening is right if the axis (as in the emoji), but left handed if on the other side. The great majority of seashells are right handed, though many species come in both types. Most parrots are left handed.

Edgar Allan Poe had one book printed in a second edition in his lifetime. The Conchologist's First Book, for students of Malacology (the study of mollusks). Poe made significant changes to Wyatt's original text. Poe translated the French text by Cuvier into English, worked on accounts of the animals, and constructed a new classification scheme. Poe drew on his association with Dr. Ravenel, an "eminent conchologist"

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.