Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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, Wonderful Life, Eight Little Piggies, Life’s Grandeur
and, most recently,
Questioning the Millennium.

ALSO BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD

(with R. W. Purcell)

(with R. W. Purcell)

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Epub ISBN: 9781409000389

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Published by Vintage 1999

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

First published in Great Britain in 1998

by Jonathan Cape Ltd

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T
O
R
AY
S
IEVER

AND TO THE MEMORY OF
B
ERNIE
K
UMMEL
,

two dear colleagues and friends

who nurtured (and protected)

a young pain in the ass

and helped him to become a scientist

CONTENTS

PIECES OF EIGHT:

CONFESSION OF A HUMANISTIC NATURALIST

I
CAN EASILY UNDERSTAND WHY
,
FOR MOST NATURALISTS
,
THE HIGHEST
form of beauty, inspiration, and moral value might be imputed to increasingly rare patches of true wilderness—that is, to parcels of nature devoid of any human presence, either in current person or by previous incursion. When we recognize that all but the last geological
eyeblink of life’s history evolved in competence and fascination (but to whose notice?) before humans intruded upon the scene—and when we acknowledge that most of our substantial incursions cannot be viewed as fortunate either for local organisms or environments—why should we not glory in bits of space that have perpetuated a 4.5-billion-year tradition of noninterference by any self-conscious
agency? (As I do not wish to engage the theological dimensions of the last sentence, I will restrict my meaning to overt “footprints” of undeniable physical presence.)

I do have a confession to make in this context. My odd attitude may arise only from the happenstance of my birth and happy childhood in New York City, when safe subways cost a nickel, museums were free, and the Yankees, led by
Joe DiMaggio, ruled the world. Wordsworth’s wisdom cannot be gainsaid. Childhood’s sense of wonder cannot be sustained in the same manner through life, but the child is father to the man. So childhood’s “splendor in the grass” and “glory in the flower” must set a lifelong prototype for aesthetic wonder. And my early epiphanic moments included the view of Lower Manhattan’s buildings at sunset, seen
from the magnificent walkway in the center of the Brooklyn Bridge; the growing tip of Manhattan as the Staten Island Ferry (also only a nickel) passes the Statue of Liberty and heads for the Battery; the lobbies of the Woolworth and Chrysler buildings (each, in turn and temporarily, the tallest skyscraper in the world); and the building line of the surrounding city, seen in winter from the middle
of Central Park through bare tree branches.

I am not speaking here, by absurd dichotomy, of city versus wilderness, with a personal preference for the former based on accidents of upbringing. Rather, the dichotomy itself has no meaning, if only because “pure” examples of either extreme scarcely exist when plastic flotsam pervades the seas, and twisted jetsam washes up on the beaches of every
isolated and uninhabited Pacific island; and when almost every spot perceived with rapture as “virgin” wilderness (at least here in northeastern America) really represents old farmland reclaimed by new forest. No satanic “purity” marks the other end either, except in science fiction scenarios. We do not build cities without parks, streets without trees, homes without gardens. At a bare minimum, bits
of nature’s diversity still burst through, if only as rats by the garbage piles, cockroaches in the kitchen, mushrooms through the pavement, weeds galore in the lot, and bacteria everywhere—to cite all major kingdoms of life in the big city.

For whatever reasons of childhood’s happenstances and gifts of temperament, I am a humanist at heart, and I love, best of all, the sensitive and intelligent
conjunction of art and nature—not the domination of one by the other. We want, in our wondrously diverse world, a full spectrum of interactions from near wilderness to near artificiality, but I will seek my own aesthetic optimum right in the middle, where human activity has tweaked or shaped a landscape, but with such respect and integration that a first glance may detect no fault line, no obvious
partitioning: the wooded hillslope adjoining Kiyomizudera in Kyoto, where the gorgeous scene looks so perfectly “rustic” and untouched until you realize that every tree has been selected, pruned, and trained; the genius of Olmsted’s big city parks, with their sculpted diversity of “natural” landscapes crisscrossed by a respectful system of constructed pathways, built of local stones artificially
rusticated if necessary; the smooth transition between a Chinese “scholar’s rock” (selected for calming contemplation based on the fortune of naturally formed beauty, but usually sculpted a bit to enhance the appearance), and the wooden stand expressly carved to accommodate every random bump and crevice of the stone above; and the Hopi pueblo towns, built of local rocks as a layer on the tops
of mesas made of horizontal strata, so that the town, from a distance, can hardly be distinguished from the natural layers below, a village marked as a human construction only by vertical ladders protruding from the tops of kivas.

I even believe—though I would not push the point, for the concept can too easily cede to human arrogance and a discounting of natural forms—that intelligent reconstruction
can “improve” upon natural design (though only by the criterion of human aesthetic preference, the most parochial of all possible judgments). I do ally myself with the most famous quatrain of Omar Khayyám’s
Rubáiyát
(in FitzGerald’s Victorian version), a passage usually misinterpreted today because the subjunctive mood has virtually disappeared from modern English:

That is, if you would join me in the wilderness, and we could share good reading, food, drink (and perhaps more), then even the ugly, scary, untamed forest would become a paradise, literally a lovely
enclosed and cultivated garden.
(The old subjunctive of the last line
must be read: “Even wilderness
would be
close enough to paradise” if you and all the accoutrements would join me there.) After all, in many cultures, wilderness (with an etymology of “wild beast”) denotes fear and foreignness, while human cultivation tames a landscape to beauty and peace of soul. (I also love the old legend—maybe it’s even true—that Eugene O’Neill changed Omar’s last line to “Ah,
Wilderness!” so that the title for his marvelous coming-of-age play would appear first in
The New York Times
’s alphabetical list of Broadway shows.)