Stephen Jay Gould: I have landed

By JOHN GARDNER*

The death of Stephen Jay Gould in May this year saddened millions of readers of his popular science writing but may have come as a relief to some scientists enraged by the stranglehold his controversial and unorthodox spin on Darwinism had on his public, particularly in America.

Typically, he bowed out having unburdened himself of a mammoth,1500-page doorstopper in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory which has not been charitably received by his scientific peers and having published his last volume of essays I Have Landed which will undoubtedly be a world bestseller.

Like its predecessors since the mid-1970s the latest collection draws on an eclectic range of interests, from his beloved baseball to Gilbert and Sullivan, from the nationalism which led various European nations to describe syphilis as the disease of their enemies to the vagaries of airline scheduling boards.

It also shows Gould at his worst. The prose is often flabby with his omnivorous bibliophile reading infecting his syntax and vocabulary to produce sentences of inordinate length and gothic construction. The preface seems interminable and some of the pieces are so repetitively didactic that this reader was close to shrieking: "Enough already. I've got it. I've got it."

He could have done with a good editor but it appears that he resisted any tampering with his writing which fits with the other unappealing Gould attribute which this book highlights.

Not even his best friends could call Gould modest and his self-congratulation about his unbroken run of 300 essays in Natural History magazine and his constant reminders of the linguistic endeavours which enable him to refer to primary sources become tiresome.

For those who have not previously read Gould I would, in the words of the old joke, recommend that you don't start from here. Begin, perhaps, from The Flamingo's Smile or The Panda's Thumb. But do begin, for even here, behind the irritations, are the qualities which make Gould an addiction.

These essays celebrate science in its diversity, in its intellectual excitement and sense of wonder at the immensity of nature and in its revelation of the glory of reasoning humanity. For all his self-congratulation Gould is deferential to his scientific forebears and pays tribute to their attempts, no matter how wrong, to achieve understanding in the framework of their time. He is, therefore, equally conscious of the incomplete nature of contemporary science.

He describes a medieval medical practice in which cures of injuries could be best effected if the weapon which inflicted the wound also received a suitable procedure.

But he explains how this bizarre behaviour was part of a considered and coherent view.

"How can we blame our forebears for not knowing what later generations would discover?" he asks. "We might as well despise ourselves because our grandchildren will, no doubt, understand the world in a different way."

Nevertheless Gould remains one of the most trenchant polemicists for the primacy of rationality.

"We properly embrace modern science as both a more accurate account and a more effective approach to such practical issues as healing the human body from weakening and disease."

At his best Gould produces a sense of awe and even here at his worst there are nuggets of amusement, enlightenment and stimulus to thought.

Gould died of cancer at the age of 60 some 20 years after being first diagnosed and told he had only months to live, an event he engaged in an extraordinary essay which combined a lesson in the proper interpretation of statistics with a stirring message of human resilience. Whether science finally judges him the victor in the battles over punctuated equilibrium or the status of socio-biology he will leave many an ordinary reader bereft that this is the last Gould collection.

Jonathan Cape

$59.95

* John Gardner is a Herald journalist.