I was hooked. Got his collected essays, "The richness of life - the essential Stephen Jay Gould". There are quite a few essay collections and books, and this seems like a good starting point.This collection selects from a wide range and has apparently some of the best essays. A curated view. Good to get started.
Stephen Jay Gould was a scientific essayist. A paleontologist. A naturalist. A scientist. He, along with Niles Eldredge, talked about 'punctuated equilibrium', and along with Elisabeth Vrba, about 'exaptation'. The writing is selected from his different essays written for Natural history magazine (he published 300 essays in a continuous streak over 25 years!), and from his books. Some of the essays are autobiographical, and a pleasure to read. Some are biographies of people he reads and revers. Others then get to Evolutionary Theory (the most difficult part oft he book for me). And then delightful readings on size, form and shape (including an intriguing account of Zebra stripes). And some really wonderful writing on whales, insects, wings, snails. Then the collection covers sociology, religion, racism - his essays linking everything to evolution and the misguided understanding of nineteenth and twentieth century evolution and survival of fittest.
One of those books that you end up being proud of yourself for reading. It took a long time. Almost two months. Over 600 pages, hardcover. And I read it along with other long reads which are still half way done. Not much other reading over the last two months I realize. But this one is a joyful read. Joyful in the sense it is science, it is thought, it is statistics, it is a way of looking at things which is not ordinary and humdrum, and you come out so much richer in thoughts on the other side.
Sample this from his writing on logical errors, and here, he is similar to Kahneman, Taleb.
"Our minds are not build to work by the rules of probability, though these rules clearly govern our universe. We do something else that usually serves us well, but fails in crucial instances. We "match to type". We abstract what we consider the 'essence' of an entity and then arrange our judgments by their degree of similarity to this assumed type. ...This propensity may help us to understand an entire range of human preferences, from Plato's theory of form to modern stereotyping of race and gender. We might also understand the world better, and free ourselves from unseemly prejudice, if we properly grasped the workings of probability and its inexorable hold, through laws of logic, upon much of nature's pattern. 'Matching to type' is one common error; failure to understand random patterning in streaks and slumps is another."
Some of the writing was quick to read, and easy to follow. But some was dense, difficult, full of terms I didn't know. But I am not complaining. I enjoyed it. Except one essay - "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: Revising Three Central Features of Darwinian Logic" (an extract from his book of similar name), which I struggled with thrice but could not fathom. There were so many words/ scientific terms that I didn't understand. I have finally given up on that one. Sample a few words: Hoxology, ontogeny (I understand that now), insect metameres, rhombomeric segments, dorso-ventral inversion, parallelism, coherent clades. I can figure them out, and I sort of understand them in the context, individually, but I just can't follow the argument completely. More patience needed on my side.
But I did read rest of it, and I loved it. Another place where I came across 'stasis' a lot. And in its original scientific sense. The other bit, about insects and how their world is driven more by surface tensions than gravity - if one loves science fiction and imagining what alternate life looks like, this is so much fun fodder. Add "Other minds" by Peter Godfrey-Smith to your reading list for a sense of invertebrate intelligence. Another book which I have read only halfway.
What appealed most to me in SJ Gould's essays was his way of looking at things. The joy of science shines through. And a humility, sense of respect, and clearheaded dissent with stuff he does not agree with (Dawkins views for instance). The book is full of quotable quotes, and my reading journal is full of words to look up and understand better and paragraphs copied for future. Books like these, like his, like Carlo Rovelli's, like Nassim Nicholas Taleb's - they either lend a new way to look at the same things or they just open up a new world to think about. And for that, I am grateful to these authors.
Sharing some of the copied quotes from Stephen Gould's essays below. From my notebook, may not be exact.
Sharing some of the copied quotes from Stephen Gould's essays below. From my notebook, may not be exact.
"The brain, like the eye cannot focus on all depths simultaneously. One can lose important aspects of the general pattern by concentrating too strictly upon intricate details"
"Darwinism is a two part theory of randomness for raw materials and conventional causality for change - Chance and Necessity"
Hadn't thought about this - "the world's oceans form a single system and transport of heat from tropical areas guarantee that no major part of open ocean can freeze"
"Scientists have a terrible tendency to present their work as a logical package as if they thought everything out in careful and rigorous planning beforehand and merely proceeded according to their good designs. It never works that way, if only because anyone who can think and see makes unanticipated discoveries and must alter any preconceived strategy. ...Projects grow like organisms, with serendipity and supple adjustment not like the foreordained steps of high school proof of plane geometry."
"We are prisoners of the perceptions of our size and rarely recognize how different the world must appear to smaller animals."
"A system that seems to us stable, perhaps even immutable, is maintained by constant turmoil. We who lack an appreciation of history and have so little feel for the aggregated importance of small but continuous change scarcely realize that the very ground is being swept from beneath our feet; it is alive and constantly churning."
"Darwinian evolution cannot be read as a theory of progress, but only as a mechanism for building better adaptation to changing local environment."
"History is a series of irreversible changes yielding a series of unique states."
"The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak, All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources.The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor. The best of us will try to live by a few simple rules: Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with thy God and never draw to an inside straight."
"Our world workson different levels but we are conceptually chained to our own surroundings, however parochial the view"
"The comfortably familiar becomes a prison of thought"