So here I am on vacation, having a wonderful time - family, great location, things to do - good times all around. The house we rented has a selection of books left by other guests - I rummage among them, thankfully skipping the James Patterson crap, etc, and happen upon some SJGould books. Checking the pub dates, I start with Ever Since Darwin.
Jeez - could it be more fascinating? I devour it in between, well, vacation stuff, and quickly move on to The Panda’s Thumb, which I am in the middle of now. Just as good. I mean - I know this guy was considered good - I knew enough to pick the books out, thinking “oh, he’s s’posed to be good and I haven’t read him - I’ll go with his book over Mary Higgins Clark” - but *please * - this stuff is some of the best science writing I have ever read.
What I find most fascinating - besides the measured, articulate voice Gould uses, so his arguments seem to come from the “voice of the reasonable person” instead of the academic with a stick up his butt - is the format. They are a series of self-contained essays, each a column from Natural History magazine. Thus restricted, each was a 5 - 10 page self-contained piece. He had to state the main theme, provide historical context and frame the opposing views and then share his Reasonable Man perspective, re-stating the main theme and showing why his view wins out. And you can eat them like candy - at one sitting, you can devour 4 - 5 of these without feeling full - instead feeling like you have enjoyed a few bite-sized chunks of scientific goodness.
Who else writes/wrote science like this? There are countless examples of great science writing, but how about in this specific short essay format?
And you are welcome to not like Gould or disagree with his findings - if you have big evidence of him being a fraud or something, I suppose I need to hear about that to dash my emerging worship of him - but if you just think “meh, its okay” then no need to comment here.
I gotta agree with you WordMan , Gould is good. I also like Robert Parks, (especially his weekly blog) but Parks tends to write longer pieces, and he’s more sarcastic.
Gould, no doubt about it. My personal hero—one could make a case for him being my personal savior (if an avowed atheist could have a savior). In the mid 80’s my husband got transferred to Ft. Polk, LA. It was the back of beyond for a girl who grew up near a major city and had spent the previous three years living in beautiful Monterey, CA. I was stuck in a tiny house with a tiny baby, no job, no connections and no internet of course. I stumbled onto Ever Since Darwin and it changed my life. I went onto to read everything he’d published to date. I had no science background so I really struggled with some—okay, most—of the content but it jumpstarted my brain which had begun to turn to mashed potatoes. I began a self-education in science so that I could understand what Gould was talking about and eventually it led me back to school so that I could become a science teacher. I’ve been teaching for 13 years and was recently named one of three state finalists for the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching. I always meant to write to him to thank him for his writing and its influence on me and was deeply saddened by his far too early death from cancer. He died the summer I started a master’s degree in science education. There’s just no one like him now.
Hey! That’s where I am right now on vacation!! Well, Pacific Grove actually - a few blocks from Lover’s Point. Gotta love a small world. And great story, too!
Hmm - I have to look up this David Quammen and order a book or two. Any specific recommendation that is in the same short essay format as Gould used?
Oh I loved Pacific Grove. The last time I went back we stayed at the Lighthouse Inn, I think. And the Magic Carpet, right along the ocean near Lover’s Point was amazing when it bloomed. sigh good times.
The only one of his books of essays I’ve read is The Boilerplate Rhino, which I liked – I’m forcing myself to not read everything of his at once, because I like having more of his books in the queue.
I - like you, WordMan - have always meant to get around to reading SJG. I’ve read a lot about him, and I’ve read a lot of his essays, etc. (and didn’t he have a website that he kept pretty updated?), but I’ve never actually read one of his books.
Right now I’m reading a book that contains a long interview with him by the author and he comes off as a real jerk. The author is very excitable and obviously a huge fan and SJG is repeatedly responding to him in rude and anti-social ways, threatening almost constantly to end the interview for reasons that seem insignificant.
That has soured him to me a little bit, but he also exudes such an air of authority, reason, understanding, and intelligence that I want to read more.
I’m actually going to the library in about an hour; maybe I’ll look for Ever Since Darwin.
There have been plenty of excellent science essay writers. I don’t want to put down Goulds, who was excellent essayist, but he wasn’t the only or the first, by a long shot.
Read the essays of Isaac Asimov, or L. Sprague de Camp, or Willy Ley. They ranged over an incredibly broad range of topics, and did a great job of popularizing the subjects. George Gamow wrote excellent works that explained quatum theory and its history. Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke wrote essays covering quite a range, as well.
Unfortunately, their stuff has gotton harder to find as the years go by, which is too bad (and Asimov wrote some 800 bookS!) But try to find collections of his science essays these days – you have to go to used book sites. But read Ley’s “The Dodo, the Dragon, and the Lungfish” or “Willy Ley’s Exotic Zoology”, then reflect that this is the guy who popularized manned spaceflight in the early 1950s.
I like Asimov - the left hand of the electron may be slightly dated from the POV of the currency of its physics, but still, good writing, v. similar to SJG.
If you like SSJG, do get hold of Wonderful Life. It’s not an essay collection, but is the best layman’s intro to the Burgess Shale.
While he can be a little … cantankerous, Dawkins is pretty good at laying things out.
I credit SJG with getting me interested in biology and evolution. Before reading his essays, I considered everything along those lines to be too dry or over my head to attempt.
I also enjoyed John Allen Paulos’ books “Innumeracy” and “A Mathemetician Reads the Newspaper.” They’re about mathmatical concepts rather than biology, but they have the same essay type format and Paulos is also a skilled writer.
The first Gould book of essays was, I think, The Panda’s Thumb. Absolutely wonderful. A great voice and a new slant at looking at science in terms of the history of an idea.
But compare it to one of his last books of essays. They are twice the size, yet both contain exactly seventeen essays - a number he picked, BTW, because Asimov’s collections of his F&SF science essays had seventeen in each, IIRC. That means that each individual essay had grown to twice the length.
And I think that extra length was almost all padding, self-appreciation, and didactic exposition. The amount of information stayed a constant. My extremely high appreciation of Gould faded with the years. By the end I may have stopped reading him entirely.
CalMeacham has a good list of authors. Asimov wrote 399 columns for F&SF. They’re probably the all-time standard of science essay writing. Many of them hold up surprisingly well because he was doing something that virtually nobody does today: instead of concentrating on the cutting edge he wrote about the basics of physics, math, chemistry and astronomy. The sort of stuff you need to know to make sense of the cutting edge and obviously the stuff that people aren’t reading today - at least if the ignorance shown by most GQ posters on the cutting edge is any indication. Asimov was far less good on the social sciences, but I say that as a social scientist. He had no training and no appreciation of theory. He could spit out every date in history and connect that to an event but he never saw any bigger picture.
I also like Willy Ley but he’s dated and unfindable. Sagan and Clarke are good, but with Clarke the early stuff is better so I’m not sure how well he holds up.
I just pulled a few names off my shelf of science essays that people might want to look for. William H. Calvin, Leonard Kristalka, Magnus Pyke (yep, the “She Blinded Me with Science” scientist), monocled Patrick Moore, and Harold J. Morowitz.
Willey Ley is great, but a tad dated. There is also Gerald Durrell.
Although Gould has some great essays, he beats one drum note into the ground too damn much “humans are all =” Ok, Ok, we get it. They also get a bit tedious later, as **Exapno Mapcase ** pointed out.
Well, Willy Ley is dated because he wrote quite a while back, and he’s dead, and scientific progress goes on, but …
…some things don’t change. His essays about dodos and solitaries in Dutch history and art talks about things that haven’t changed. Or his essay on the “man eating tree” or the “poison tree”, or about mistaken numerology in the Great Pyramid, or whole hosts of other stuff. The only real problem is finding his essays.
As for Stephen Jay Gould, his constant note is really “here’s how evolution works”, and how we can frequently be in error about its mechanisms or implicaions. That runs as a constant and intentional thread behind all his essays. even when it doesn’t explicitly seem to be there, it’s generally lurking in th background.
I have read all of SJG, and enjoyed it all. I will agree with others who have mentioned a trend toward verbosity which diminished his quality toward the end. What I found most enjoyable about his essays was his ability to bring together incredibly disparate subjects in one essay, using knowledge from unscientific areas to illustrate his scientific point.
