Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History

This is the first collection of Stephen Jay Gould's essays on evolutionary science from Natural History Magazine, featuring pieces originally published in the 1970s.

They are, naturally, very dated, and I wasn't certain for a while whether they would still be worth reading for that reason. (Indeed, in one essay on human evolution, Gould suggests that the field was moving so fast the essay might be out of date by the time it was published, never mind five decades later.) Honestly, though, there's something in their very datedness that itself helped to give me an interesting and worthwhile shift in perspective. It was, for instance, something of a jolt to see Gould talking about this new idea of plate tectonics and how it so quickly come show more to be accepted over the previous decade. I grew up with that idea being taught to me as if it were ancient scientific wisdom, but I'd already been born when Gould was writing this. Between that and also realizing that he was writing only 120 years after On the Origin of Species and only a few decades into the firm and widespread acceptance in science of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, it really brought home to me just how short a timespan and how few links in the chain of human discovery lie between me, sitting here in 2025, and the days when people were arguing over whether or not Adam and Eve had contained within them the tiny homunculi of every subsequent human generation. (Which, yes, was a real theory that was taken seriously, and which Gould talks about in one of these essays.)

So, that was interesting. And so were the essays, overall, just as I've found all the others of his I've read.

There are certain repeating themes here. One is that it's wrong to regard evolution as a process of life climbing an inevitable ladder of progress, or even the idea of "progress" as a thing in evolution at all. Which is point worth hammering home, as misconceptions on this score are still rampant among the public and cause a lot of serious misunderstanding. Another is that science itself is not all climbing ladders of inevitable progress, either, as scientists are always working within their own cultural contexts and hampered by their own biases. He describes, for example a number of people trying very hard to reach for rational explanations, but whose conclusions were distorted by operating within a world of Biblical literalism. Gould has a lot of sympathy and often real respect for these folks, but he is relentless in his criticism of those using bad scientific reasoning to justify racism or to paint current social structures as inevitable and right (something that always seems to end up with the guy doing the justifying sitting at the top of the hierarchy). And in those criticisms, both in terms of scientific reasoning and simple humanity, he seems not dated at all, but, indeed, if anything a bit ahead of his time. show less

Note: I wrote this review sometime before Gould's death.

How does one write about a book of essays? Ever Since Darwin is a collection of essays drawn from Natural History magazine for which Gould wrote a monthly column entitled "This View of Life." While not especially easy reading, all the essays provide an intellectual delight that make them well worth the effort. A common thread running through all is the wonder and amazement Gould has for the extraordinary variation and adaptability of nature. One can see in these essays the development of ideas more fully defined in [b:Wonderful Life The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History|36475|Wonderful Life The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History|Stephen Jay show more Gould|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1228161229s/36475.jpg|55914]

His examples are most absorbing and occasionally bizarre. He explains how the tiny gall midge reproduces in two ways: either normally from eggs as sexually reproducing flies; or without the aid of a father, i.e., via parthenogenesis, otherwise known as virgin birth. When food is abundant (midges feed primarily on mushrooms) the young grow in the mother's body feeding on her flesh. After she has been consumed they emerge and within two days their own children begin to feed off the parent. This matricide which at first glance might appear somewhat foolish is not just a disgusting freak of nature. As Gould points out, in light of evolutionary theory, the behavior is truly efficient and adaptive. As long as food is plentiful reproduction remains parthenogenetic. As food inevitably becomes scarcer the flies reproduce normally (hate to use the word normal in this context) at which point they can fly and scout out new food sources. "The flightless parthenogenic female stays on the mushroom and feeds. When it exhausts its resources it produces winged descendants to find new mushrooms." This still does not answer the question of why matricide? Gould explains better than I (read the essay entitled "Why should a fly eat its mother?;" but, basically it has to do with adaptability to environments which impose irregular catastrophic mortality (fairly common in nature,) or where food sources are hard to find but abundant when located. The best adaptability is to "reproduce like hell while you have the ephemeral resource, for it will not last long and some of your progeny must survive to find the next one." Whether this lesson should be applied to Man I will not hazard a guess.

Gould recognizes the social and cultural influences of the scientific imagination. Theories, at their best, should free us from our prejudices, at their worst they support the biases of their creators (witness Wolcott and his misinterpretation of the Burgess Shale), illustrated also in the attempts to find parallels between individual development and evolutionary history. (Gould has another book Ontoqeny and Phyloqeny dealing with just this issue which I have not yet read, but will soon?) Gould is very skeptical of biological determinism. (At a recent conference I witnessed E.O. Wilson, author of [b:Sociobiology The New Synthesis, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition|183819|Sociobiology The New Synthesis, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition|Edward O. Wilson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172521072s/183819.jpg|177649] , a proponent of biological determinism, and Gould argue these points, much to the fascination of the audience.
Gould argues for biological potentiality.) Biological determinism has become popular in Gould's mind because it allows us to escape responsibility, e.g. the homeless are inevitably thus because they inherited the wrong genes; we can fob off responsibility for war to man's inherent aggressiveness rather than to blame the political structures we have created. Several essays deal with just such issues. Obviously I have not come close to doing justice to this richly diverse and fascinating collection of essays. Read the book, I guarantee you will be fascinated. show less

Gould is best known as an advocate for atheism, but those leanings are not readily apparent here. The book is a series of short essays on various aspects of evolutionary theory as seen from a 1977 perspective and as such is of historical interest. Additionally, most of what Gould says is still mainstream opinion and hasn't changed in nearly 40 years. His approach to evolution is best summed up by the last sentence in the book: "I will rejoice in the multifariousness of nature and leave the chimera of certainty to politicians and preachers."

This collection, Gould's first, has gotten a bit dated over the years, but his style comes through even here. While I don't agree with all of his conclusions, his essays are just about always worth the read, and some of them (as on Darwin's role aboard the Beagle and about the Irish elk) are simply delightful.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1446321.html

Another collection of Gould's essays from Natural History Magazine, this time dating from the mid-1970s; as ever, nicely constructed and argued pieces, though it is something of a shock to realise that, say, continental drift had only recently become orthodox, or indeed (when considering his comments on the Permian / Triassic extinction) that the Alvarez proposal that the Cretaceous ended in a massive impact event was still several years in the future. He is also terrifically good, and humane, in warning against the casual adoption of Darwin's ideas to support racist theories, including past examples of where even liberal scholars got it badly wrong. It has dated a bit more than The Panda's show more Thumb, but I think is slightly better. show less

Simply divided, this book makes out of a broad and complex topic (evolutionary science) an entertaining and accessible subject.

Some articles are more interesting than others, an unavoidable imbalance for such a collection but, all in all it's clever, very well written, witty at times and, always relevant.

As this was my first Stephen Jay Gould, I would particularly recommend it to whose not knowing where to start with such a prolific writer.

I read this before and will certainly read it again. Excellent essays that make evolution clear and plausible. A fun aspect of Gould's essays are his commentaries on historical figures in science and how some of the oddities, not to say absurdities, of the history of science fit into its progress. Chapters on midges who grow by consuming the mother, the Irish Elk's antlers (formed by sexual selection), criticism of the genetic basis of IQ, how Engels argued correctly that human upright posture preceded our large brain (sharing with John Dewey a criticism of the dominant prejudice against work that favors thinking over work). Gould is for the most part congruent with the Kuhn's _Structures of Scientific Revolutions_, however, there are show more times when his exposition of science could use some correction of Richard Rorty's concept of cultural politics. show less