Where He Subverts Expectations

Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I haven't read Stephen Jay Gould in many years. It was nice to pick up a collection I hadn't read and discover, even though it's almost 30 years old, that it's still interesting, informative, and entertaining.

The book collects a number of his essays on natural history, most of which relate stories of scientists trying to make sense of the partial data of paleontology and getting it somewhat right and somewhat wrong. These are personal stories, told in his own voice, and often include events from his own life, including those that don't reflect terribly well on him. There's a lot of zigging and zagging here. You think he's making a case for science, as in "Yay, science, the answer to everything!" and then he writes about the failings and limitations of science. Just as you're getting used to his suggestion that our approach to science is unfailingly pointless and unable to lead to capital T Truth, he hits you with how grand it is after all.

I think he just likes subverting expectations. One of the last essays concludes with this paragraph, including the embedded Newton quote:

Isaac Newton mused on the interaction of fact and theory in his most famous passage:

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

We would love to fathom that distant ocean, but it is no shabby thing to fondle those pretty pebbles on the shore.

Many of the essays entertainingly demonstrate how scientists reached wrong conclusions or a variety of contradictory conclusions from the same data, and one of the most effective of this type is the last, which shows the effects of missing data on theories. A clam long thought extinct is discovered in the wild, leading to many conjectures about the gap, and it is not until many years later that any fossil examples from the intervening years are discovered, proving some right and some wrong. He compares this missing evidence to Sherlock's dog that didn't bark in the nighttime as well as his own search for a left-spiraling variety of a certain snail--periwinkles--that can only be found spiraling to the right. he concludes the final essay with this line: "I must have looked at a thousand periwinkles this morning. Still no lefties. Maybe someday." It's a nice ending, but he has another tacked on after; in a postscript, he reveals that a leftie had been found, and it forces him to rethink the whole thing.

That unexpected find encapsulates his whole message in a snail shell, and it is something like work hard, pay attention, and don't get too stuck on one idea. Probably good advice in a lot of realms.

Recommended for those interested in the topic.

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