Stephen Jay Gould

I got nudged towards him through Atul Gawande's essay in New Yorker, which for some reason came up in my feed recently. It was "Letting Go - what should medicine do when it can't save your life?" He refers to Stephen Jay Gould and his essay "The median isn't the message" - when Gould found out that he had cancer and then lived long enough to beat the median. The essay was about statistics, about medians, long tails, and about life, and his struggle to not get bogged down by the median, but to rage mightily against the dying of the light.

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.

"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"

Finding the next read

When you are not trained in literature by experts, you try to find your own teachers. Guides. For me, a way to find new work has been prizes. Nobel prizes for one. And once you start reading of, and around the author, you find their essays, their influences, and writings they enjoyed. And that leads you to more books and more authors. And then there is something to be said about serendipity. You follow enough literary mags, authors, people, and you might stumble upon something that you wish to read next. [1]

In the same vein, books about books have been another of my favorite reading pleasures. Sometimes, I complete them. At other times, I just surround myself with them. Dipping into them, here and there, coming out inspired, and with a new list. You may not agree with whatever they say, still, it is like reading about reading from a fellow, more experienced reader. Always a pleasure.

I recently read Susan Hill's "Jacob's room is full of books". The title got me. (No, not yet read Jacob's room. This one, like The Waves, has been on the reading list for a while.)

Back to Susan Hill's memoir. The book is a journal or diary of a year, around and about books, poems and authors. About writing and prizes. And life. Sort of a year's collection of diaries or in modern world, blog posts. My joy was in the list making. Many of the authors I've read, and many I've not, but keen to read. Reading such books is like getting some sort of context and intro to new authors, and other books. Meta books.

Little else to say about the book except that I have a bigger list to read next. I have not read any other book by Susan Hill. Although I kept noticing "Howard's end is on the landing" in the book shops.

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Susan Hill's was a quick, laid-back read with a piece of paper keeping a running list. At the moment,  I have two slow-reads keeping me company.

One of them is Ursula K. Le Guin's, "Dreams must explain themselves". These are selected non-fictions - essays/ talks on different topics. So many thoughts get fired up. And some of them need context of her books. Still many to go.

The other is also a selection of essays - the Essential Stephen Jay Gould. Lots of essays clubbed across subjects ranging from probability to biographies, to his core, evolution. Reading these is not laid back for me at all, it can actually be a bit of work. But delightful work. So much to highlight, note down, and almost always, to re-read. It is a big collection, and I am just about a third in. But loving it.

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[1] I might have to rethink the title of this post. There is so much in my immediate reading lists, and longer lists, and just a general wish list of books to read, that it is not the question of where to look for the next read. It is a question of priority, of picking one out of the many. It is double-edged feeling - on one hand,  delicious, that you've so much, so much to look forward to reading wise. And on the other, the vita brevis feeling, so much to read, and so little time. How do you fit in everything? And why can't I read and think faster. Wish there were a secret time loop, where you are away for five mins in real world, and in the book-world, you could do five hours worth of reading. Wishes. Anyhow,  the point of the post is that if a book comes with recommendation, or an introduction, it helps at times. At other times, you don't need any recco or intro, the book just pulls you. Sometimes you push and work through a bit and then the book pulls you. But in most cases, the book eventually drives the reading.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Some writers can go on and on about seemingly commonplace things, that have little left to be said about them, and still compel you to read them. As if hypnotized by their language. Or the meditative nature of these writings. Even the fluency of their thoughts can be contagious, showing the path, lighting it up with their coherence.They have this ability to pick up a seemingly random thread and follow it through, and around and before you know it, they have weaved it into a beautiful section of a larger rug.

I remember this rug metaphor, that life is woven like some sort of Persian carpet, of details building up over years. From Somerset Maugham's classic, Of Human Bondage. Read it a very long time ago, early teens may be, on my pen pal's recco. I don't remember it much except an aspiring, yet dismal, dark, unhappy life portrayed in the book. I guess it was too early to read it. But I do remember the carpet metaphor, that how life is like a Persian carpet, different things that happen to us making the colours and patterns. Not sure this meaning is what the author intended, but it is one of those things from a book, some image that stays with you, carving its own space in your head.

I have been reading Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard.  He is the kind of writer I talk about above - the ones who hypnotise you with their meditative prose. Compelling you to read the commonplace. But then it is not commonplace any more in his hands. As to his writing, I get repelled often and still keen to read more from him. Part of the reason I left his "My struggle" after book 2. Some books leave you feeling righteous, virtuous, good - ideally they shouldn't but they do however. And then some which leave you sad, bitter, petty, shallow, spilling over around you. His "My Struggle" was the second category. I know I'll read the next ones sometime, but not yet.

Winter is the second book in Seasons Quartet. (First one was Autumn) - notes to his unborn daughter. In this book, they eventually become Notes to a newborn daughter. A sort of personal mini encylopaedia but essentially departure points of what he wishes to share about himself. And it is not that he has not said so much about himself already. And said it quite vividly. For a while, I couldn't think of new year without thinking of Karl Ove's new year described in such detail in his My Struggle books. Such detail which goes on and on and on for pages. Recreating the reality by pinning down every little detail.

As to this quartet of notes, I like reading such writing. The pieces touch upon many related and unrelated things and people. However, one of the delights is the way he captures the daily joys and struggles of being a parent. Those things that leave you distraught because you wish to let the kid do what they say, and you know it is not right, and part of you wishes to stop them from doing that, and part of you wants the kid to let be, to go on being happy the way they are. Hence, both are sub-optimal choices. The moment that there is a choice, the outcome itself is sub optimal compared to earlier. Ideally those little struggles won't come up. But they do. And I am not sure that you read about them often - the little daily struggles that can tear you apart, and the little daily joys that send you to the top of the world.

However, I liked Autumn better than Winter. In some pieces, it starts feeling like work. And I feel that sometimes, the beauty of art is in making you forget the labour behind it. If you can feel the work, then perhaps it still needs some more pixie dust.