I Have Landed
Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
The End of a Beginning
in Natural History
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
JONATHAN CAPE
LONDON
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409000136
Published by Jonathan Cape 2002
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Copyright © 2002 by Turbo, Inc.
Stephen Jay Gould has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
The essays in this book were previously published in magazines and newspapers.
First published in the United States of America in 2002 by Harmony Books
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by
Jonathan Cape
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II. Disciplinary Connections: Scientific Slouching Across a Misconceived Divide
2. No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts: The Lepidoptery of Vladimir Nabokov
3. Jim Bowie's Letter and Bill Buckner's Legs
4. The True Embodiment of Everything That's Excellent
III. Darwinian Prequels and Fallout
6. The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral: Resolving Evolution's Oddest Coupling
7. The Pre-Adamite in a Nutshell
8. Freud's Evolutionary Fantasy
IV. Essays in the Paleontology of Ideas
11. Syphilis and the Shepherd of Atlantis
V. Casting the Die: Six Evolutionary Epitomes
12. Darwin and the Munchkins of Kansas
13. Darwin's More Stately Mansion
17. The Without and Within of Smart Mice
VI. The Meaning and Drawing of Evolution
18. What Does the Dreaded “E” Word Mean Anyway?
19. The First Day of the Rest of Our Life
20. The Narthex of San Marco and the Pangenetic Paradigm
24. An Evolutionary Perspective on the Concept of Native Plants
25. Age-Old Fallacies of Thinking and Stinking
27. The Great Physiologist of Heidelberg
VIII. Triumph and Tragedy on the Exact Centennial of
I Have Landed
, September 11, 2001
28. The Good People of Halifax
TO MY READERS
Fellow members of the ancient and universal
(and vibrantly continuing) Republic of Letters
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Ontogeny and Phylogeny
Ever Since Darwin
The Panda's Thumb
The Mismeasure of Man
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes
The Flamingo's Smile
An Urchin in the Storm
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle
Illuminations
(with R. W. Purcell)
Wonderful Life
Bully for Brontosaurus
Finders Keepers
(with R. W. Purcell)
Eight Little Piggies
Dinosaur in a Haystack
Full House
Questioning the Millennium
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
Rocks of Ages
The Lying Stones of Marrakech
Crossing Over
(with R. W. Purcell)
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
Described by the
Sunday Times
as âthe greatest living scientist', Stephen Jay Gould's writing remains the modern standard by which popular science writing is judged. Ever since the mid-1970s, his monthly essay in
Natural History â
âwritten without a single interruption for cancer, hell, high water, or the World Series' â and his full-length books have bridged the yawning gap between science and wider culture.
Throughout his work Gould has developed a distinctive and personal form of essay to treat great scientific issues in the context of biography. In this fascinating collection, his tenth and last volume of essays from
Natural History
, Gould has once again applied biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts and their history, ranging from the discovery of the new scourge of syphilis by Fracastero in the sixteenth century and Isabelle Duncan's nineteenth-century attempt at reconciling scripture and palaeontology to Freud's weird speculations about human phylogeny and recent creationist attacks on the study of evolution. As always the essays brilliantly illuminate and elucidate the puzzles and paradoxes great and small that have fuelled the enterprise of science and opened our eyes to a world of unexpected wonders.
A Suffix to Begin a Preface
T
HE
HEADING
for this opening paragraph sounds contradictory, but stands as a true description of sad necessity and proper placement. The material is suffixial, both in actual chronology and in obviously unintended, but eerily seamless, fit as an unavoidable ending, knitting this book together by recursion to the beginning essay and title piece. I wrote the following preface in the summer of 2001, beginning with some musings about numerical coincidences of my own career, including the completion of this series of essays at an even 300, fortuitously falling in the millennial month of January 2001, also the centennial of the year that my family began its American journey with my grandfather's arrival at Ellis Islandâas he wrote in the English grammar book that he purchased, at age thirteen and just off the boat: “I have landed. September 11, 1901.” I need say no more for now, as no one, living and sentient on the day, will ever forget the pain and transformation of September 11, 2001. I have addedâprimarily because duty compelled in the most general and moral sense, but also because the particular joy and hope of Papa Joe's words in 1901 must not be extinguished by the opposite event of spectacular evil on the exact day of his centennial in 2001âa closing section of four short pieces tracing my own emotional odyssey, and the message of tragic hope that an evolutionary biologist might legitimately locate amidst the rubble and tears of our present moment.
In 1977, and quite by accident, my first volume of essays in
Natural History
for general readers
(Ever Since Darwin)
appeared at the same time as my first technical
book for professional colleagues in evolutionary theory
(Ontogeny and Phylogeny)
. The
New York Times
, viewing this conjunction as highly unusual, if not downright anomalous, featured me in their
Book Review
section as a “freak” of literary nature on this accountâand I cannot deny that this article helped to propel a career then mired in infancy. I suppose that I also viewed this conjunction as both strange and fortuitous. (The technical book, for reasons beyond my control, had been delayed by more than a year, causing me only frustration, untempered by any inkling of potential advantage in simultaneity along these different pathways.)
Now, exactly twenty-five years later, and again with frustration rather than intention (this time entirely of my own making, for I failed to finish the technical book in time for an intended and truly millennial appearance in 2000 or 2001, and had to settle instead for the merely palindromic 2002
1
), this tenth and last volume of essays for general readers from my completed series in
Natural History
magazine also appears at the same time as the technical “life work” of my mature years, twenty years in the making and 1,500 pages in the printing (
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
, Harvard University Press). But I have undergone a significant change in attitude during this quarter-century (as well, I trust, as an equally significant improvement in writing and thinking). I no longer view this conjunction of technical and “popular” as anomalous, or even as interesting or unusual (at least in principle if not in frequency of realization among my colleagues). For, beyond some obvious requirements of stylistic tuning to expected audiencesâavoidance of technical jargon in popular essays as the most obvious exampleâI have come to believe, as the primary definition of these “popular” essays, that the conceptual depth of technical and general writing should not differ, lest we disrespect the interest and intelligence of millions of potential readers who lack advanced technical training in science, but who remain just as fascinated as any professional, and just as well aware of the importance of science to our human and earthly existence.
