The Lying Stones of Marrakech Read online

  Stephen Jay Gould

  THE LYING STONES

  OF MARRAKECH

  Penultimate Reflections

  in Natural History

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  Published by Vintage 2001

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  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

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

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 2000

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by Stephen Jay Gould

  Preface

  I EPISODES IN THE BIRTH OF PALEONTOLOGY

  The Nature of Fossils and the History of the Earth

  1 The Lying Stones of Marrakech

  2 The Sharp-Eyed Lynx, Outfoxed by Nature

  3 How the Vulva Stone Became a Brachiopod

  II PRESENT AT THE CREATION

  How France’s Three Finest Scientists Established Natural History in an Age of Revolution

  4 Inventing Natural History in Style

  5 The Proof of Lavoisier’s Plates

  6. A Tree Grows in Paris: Lamarck’s Division of Worms and Revision of Nature

  III DARWIN’S CENTURY—AND OURS

  Lessons from Britain’s Four Greatest Victorian Naturalists

  7. Lyell’s Pillars of Wisdom

  8. A Sly Dullard Named Darwin: Recognizing the Multiple Facets of Genius

  9. An Awful Terrible Dinosaurian Irony

  10. Second-Guessing the Future

  IV SIX LITTLE PIECES ON THE MEANING AND LOCATION OF EXCELLENCE

  Substrate and Accomplishment

  11. Drink Deep, or Taste Not the Pierian Spring

  12. Requiem Eternal

  13. More Power to Him

  De Mortuis When Truly Bonum

  14. Bright Star Among Billions

  15. The Glory of His Time and Ours

  16. This Was a Man

  V SCIENCE IN SOCIETY

  17. A Tale of Two Work Sites

  18. The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W

  19. Dolly’s Fashion and Louis’s Passion

  20. Above All, Do No Harm

  VI EVOLUTION AT ALL SCALES

  21. Of Embryos and Ancestors

  22. The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant

  23. Room of One’s Own

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  For Jack Sepkoski (1948–1999),

  who brought me one of the greatest possible joys

  a teacher can ever earn or experience:

  to be surpassed by his students.

  Offspring should not predecease their parents,

  and students should outlive their teachers.

  The times may be out of joint,

  but Jack was born to set the order of life’s history right—

  and he did!

  ALSO BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD

  Ontogeny and Phylogeny

  Ever Since Darwin

  The Panda’s Thumb

  The Mismeasure of Man

  Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes

  The Flamingo Smile

  An Urchin in the Storm

  Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle

  Illuminations

  (with R W Purcell)

  Finders, Keepers

  (with R W Purcell)

  Eight Little Piggies

  Dinosaur in a Haystack

  Life’s Grandeur

  Questioning the Millennium

  Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

  Wonderful Life

  Bully for Brontosaurus

  THE LYING STONES

  OF MARRAKECH

  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, Eight Little Piggies, Life’s Grandeur, Questioning the Millennium, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, Bully for Brontosaurus and Wonderful Life. Wonderful Life won the Science Book Prize for 1991.

  PREFACE

  In the fall of 1973, I received a call from Alan Ternes, editor of Natural History magazine. He asked me if I would like to write columns on a monthly basis, and he told me that folks actually get paid for such activities. (Until that day, I had published only in technical journals.) The idea intrigued me, and I said that I’d try three or four. Now, 290 monthly essays later (with never a deadline missed), I look only a little way forward to the last item of this extended series—to be written, as number 300 exactly, for the millennial issue of January 2001. One really should follow the honorable principle of quitting while still ahead, a rare form of dignity chosen by such admirable men as Michael Jordan and Joe DiMaggio, my personal hero and mentor from childhood. (Joe died, as I put this book together, full of years and in maximal style and grace, after setting one last record—for number of times in receiving last rites and then rallying.) Our millennial transition may represent an arbitrary imposition of human decisions upon nature’s true cycles, but what grander symbol for calling a halt and moving on could possibly cross the path of a man’s lifetime? This ninth volume of essays will therefore be the penultimate book in a series that shall close by honoring the same decimal preference lying behind our millennial transition.

  If this series has finally found a distinctive voice, I have learned this mode of speech in the most gradual, accumulating, and largely unconscious manner— against my deepest personal beliefs in punctuational change and the uniquely directive power (despite an entirely accidental origin) of human reason in evolution. I suppose I had read a bit of Montaigne in English 101, and I surely could spell the word, but I had no inkling about the definitions and traditions of the essay as
a literary genre when Alan Ternes called me cold on that fine autumn day.

  I began the series with quite conventional notions about writing science for general consumption. I believed, as almost all scientists do (by passively imbibing a professional ethos, not by active thought or decision), that nature speaks directly to unprejudiced observers, and that accessible writing for nonscientists therefore required clarity, suppression of professional jargon, and an ability to convey the excitement of fascinating facts and interesting theories. If I supposed that I might bring something distinctive to previous efforts in this vein, I managed to formulate only two vague personal precepts: first, I would try to portray all subjects at the same conceptual depth that I would utilize in professional articles (that is, no dumbing down of ideas to accompany necessary clarification of language); second, I would use my humanistic and historical interests as a “user friendly” bridge to bring readers into the accessible world of science.

  Over the years, however, this mere device (the humanistic “bridge”) became an explicit centrality, a feature that I permitted myself to accept (and regard as a source of comfort and pride rather than an idiosyncrasy to downplay or even to hide) only when I finally realized that I had been writing essays, not mere columns, all along—and that nearly five hundred years of tradition had established and validated (indeed, had explicitly defined) the essay as a genre dedicated to personal musing and experience, used as a gracious entrée, or at least an intriguing hook, for discussion of general and universal issues. (Scientists are subtly trained to define the personal as a maximally dangerous snare of subjectivity and therefore to eschew the first person singular in favor of the passive voice in all technical writing. Some scientific editors will automatically blue-pencil the dreaded I at every raising of its ugly head. Therefore, “popular science writing” and “the literary essay” rank as an ultimately disparate, if not hostile, pairing of immiscible oil and water in our usual view—a convention that I now dream about fracturing as a preeminent goal for my literary and scientific life.)

  I have tried, as these essays developed over the years, to expand my humanistic “take” upon science from a simple practical device (my original intention, insofar as I had any initial plan at all) into a genuine emulsifier that might fuse the literary essay and the popular scientific article into something distinctive, something that might transcend our parochial disciplinary divisions for the benefit of both domains (science, because honorable personal expression by competent writers can’t ever hurt; and composition, because the thrill of nature’s factuality should not be excluded from the realm of our literary efforts). At the very least, such an undertaking can augment the dimensionality of popular scientific articles—for we lose nothing of science’s factual beauty and meaning, while we add the complexity of how we come to know (or fail to learn) to conventional accounts of what we think we know.

  As this series developed, I experimented with many styles for adding this humanistic component about how we learned (or erred) to standard tales about what, in our best judgment, exists “out there” in the natural world—often only to demonstrate the indivisibility of these two accounts, and the necessary embeddedness of “objective” knowledge within worldviews shaped by social norms and psychological hopes. But so often, as both Dorothy and T.S. Eliot recognized in their different ways, traditional paths may work best and lead home (because they have truly withstood the test of time and have therefore been honed to our deep needs and best modes of learning, not because we fall under their sway for reasons of laziness or suppression).

  Despite conscious efforts at avoidance, I find myself constantly drawn to biography—for absolutely nothing can match the richness and fascination of a person’s life, in its wondrous mixture of pure gossip, miniaturized and personalized social history, psychological dynamics, and the development of central ideas that motivate careers and eventually move mountains. And try as I may to ground biography in various central themes, nothing can really substitute for the sweep and storytelling power of chronology. (I regard the Picasso Museum in Paris and the Turner Wing of the Tate Gallery in London as my two favorite art museums because each displays the work of a great creator in the strict chronological order of his life. I can then devise whatever alternative arrangement strikes my own fancy and sense of utility—but the arrow of time cannot be replaced or set aside; even our claims for invariance must seek constant features of style or subject through time’s passage.)

  So I have struggled, harder and more explicitly than for anything else in my life as a writer, to develop a distinctive and personal form of essay to treat great scientific issues in the context of biography—and to do so not by the factual chronology of a life’s sorrows and accomplishments (a noble task requiring the amplitude of a full book), but rather by the intellectual synergy between a person and the controlling idea of his life. In this manner, when the conceit works, I can capture the essence of a scientist’s greatest labor, including the major impediments and insights met and gathered along the way, while also laying bare (in the spare epitome demanded by strictures of the essay as a literary form of limited length) the heart of a key intellectual concept in the most interesting microcosm of a person’s formulation and defense.

  The first three parts of this book apply this strategy to three different times, places, subjects, and worldviews—an extended test of my claim for a distinctive voice based on applying biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts and their history (following the basic strategy, in each essay, of linking a person’s central operating idea, the focus of a professional life in development, to an important concept in human understanding of the natural world—in other words, to summarize the range and power of a principle by exemplifying its role in the intellectual development of a particularly interesting scientist). Thus I have tried to encapsulate, in the unforgiving form of an essay, the essence of both a person (as expressed in the controlling idea of his scientific life) and a concept (through the quintessentially human device of displaying its development in an individual life).

  Part I treats the most fascinating period in my own subject of paleontology, the premodern struggle (sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries) to understand the origin of fossils while nascent science struggled with the deepest of all questions about the nature of both causality and reality themselves. Are fossils the remains of ancient organisms on an old earth, or manifestations of a stable and universal order, symbolically expressed by correspondences among nature’s three kingdoms of animal, vegetable, and mineral, with fossils arising entirely within the mineral kingdom as analogs of living forms in the other two realms? No subject could be more crucial, and no alternative view more eerily unfamiliar, than this particular battleground for the nature of reality. I present three variations upon this theme, each biographically expressed: the early-eighteenth-century tale of paleontology’s most famous hoax, combined with a weirdly similar story from modern Morocco; the linkage of the unknown Stelluti to the preeminent Galileo through their friendship, and through a common error that unites the master’s original view of Saturn with Stelluti’s erroneous belief that petrified wood arose in the mineral kingdom; and finally, a “reversed” biography expressed in terms of an organism under study (the brachiopod fossils that were once called “vulva stones” for their resemblance to female genitalia) rather than a person pursuing the investigation.

  Part II then discusses the greatest conjunction of a time, a subject, and a group of amazing people in the history of natural history: late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century France, when a group including some of the most remarkable intellects of the millennium invented the scientific study of natural history in an age of revolution. Georges Buffon establishes a discipline, by the grandest route of virtually defining a new and historically based way of knowing, in the forty-four volumes of his eminently literary Histoire naturelle, and then loses public recognition, for interesting and understandable reasons, in the midst of his ub
iquity. Antoine Lavoisier, the most stunningly incisive intellect I have ever encountered, literally adds a new dimension to our understanding of nature in the geometry of geological mapping, his one foray (amidst intentions cut short by the guillotine) into my profession. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck belies his own unfairly imposed reputation for error and inflexibility with a heartrending reassessment of the foundations of his own deepest belief—in an odyssey that begins with a handwritten comment and drawing, inked by Lamarck into his own copy of his first evolutionary treatise, and here discovered and presented for the first time.

  Part III then illustrates the greatest British challenge to this continental preeminence: the remarkable, and wonderfully literate, leading lights of Victorian science in Darwin’s age of turmoil and reassessment: the heart of Lyell’s uniformitarianism as seen (literally) by visiting the site of his most famous visual image, the pillars of Pozzuoli, used as a frontispiece to all editions of his Principles of Geology; Darwin’s own intellectual development from such an unpromising temperament and early training to an ultimately understandable role as the most gentle, yet thorough revolutionary in the history of science; Richard Owen’s invention of dinosaurs as an explicit device to subvert the evolutionary views of a generation before Darwin; and Alfred Russel Wallace on Victorian certainties and subsequent unpredictabilities.

  The last three parts of this book do not invoke biography so explicitly, but they also use the same device of embodying an abstraction within a particular that can be addressed in sufficient detail and immediate focus to fit within an essay. The interlude of part IV presents some experiments in the different literary form of short takes (op-ed pieces, obituary notices, and even, in one case, an introductory statement for Penguin CD’s series of famous classical compositions). Here I include six attempts (the literal meaning of essay) to capture the most elusive and important subject of all: the nature and meaning of excellence, expressed as a general statement about substrates (chapter 11) followed by five iterations on the greatness of individuals and their central passions across a full range of human activity—for excellence must be construed as a goal for all varieties of deeds and seasons, not only for mental categories—from bodily grace and dignity within domains debased by the confusion of celebrity with stature; to distinctive individuality within corporate blandness; to the intellectual innovations more commonly cited by scholars to exemplify this most precious (and uncommon) of human attributes.