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74 of 82 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love is a many spandreled thing, August 9, 2007
This review is from: The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (Hardcover)
Anyone familiar with Gould will immediately understand and appreciative my little quip of a title. Stephen J Gould remains the quintessential scientist - a thirst for knowledge, an original thinker, king of the scientific essay for the layman, a genius in multiple areas. Yet he was also involved in the details of everyday life - he was a family man who loved singing in great choirs, he quoted Gilbert & Sullivan by heart, lived & breathed baseball and was always grateful he lived in a nation where he could fulfill his dreams. His passing left a huge hole that has yet to be filled.
This book is a large collection of essays - both from his many books of Natural History essays and from his crowning achievement, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Oddly, we begin with the last essay, the incredibly beautiful and poetic, "I Have Landed". The book is arranged as groups of writings demonstrating the wide scope of his thought on so many areas. There are autobiographical essays (including one on his reaction upon learning he had cancer) and biographical ones on people famous and not so famous, on Evolutionary Theory (technical essays in which he outlined his iconoclastic take on Darwinian theory, namely punctuated equilibrium as a method for explaining sudden appearances of species without transitional forms). Other subjects include, form & shapes, sociobiology, racism and finally religion. The last piece, the story of whales and transitional forms, is a tour de force, outstanding by any measure.
Gould tried his best to stave off the anti-religious Crusade started by Dawkins & Company for the same reason Darwin refused to join such an escapade - it is inevitably self-defeating and scientifically irrelevant, distracting attention from science to things science should not be engaged in (proselytizing for a belief system). As an atheist, he knew the pitfalls of associating a belief (or nonbelief) system with "truth" and felt that religion and science, both human enterprises, served different functions. He always said, "You don't read the Bible to learn about natural selection." Gould was active to the bitter end, writing, editing, learning. This great man and his great thoughts bring to mind the poem that cosmologist Beatrice Tinsley wrote on her deathbed:
"Let me be like Bach, creating fugues,
Till suddenly the pen will move no more.
Let all my themes within - of ancient light,
Of origins and change and human worth -
Let all their melodies still intertwine,
Evolve and merge with ever growing unity,
Ever without fading,
Ever without a final chord...
Till suddenly my mind can hear no more."
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An entertaining mix of science and social observation, September 1, 2007
This review is from: The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (Hardcover)
Stephen Jay Gould is a leading scientist of modern times deemed a 'Living Legend' by Congress in 2000, and his THE RICHNESS OF LIFE offers up a collection of the range of his writings, from his most famous essays and selections from his many major books to speeches and articles. It's an entertaining mix of science and social observation and while its appearance is weighty, even general-interest library holdings will find it holds strong appeal, especially to patrons who like scientific reflections tailored for lay audiences.
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23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Overview of Gould, But His Individual Collections Are Better, March 22, 2008
This review is from: The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (Hardcover)
This book isn't necessarily meant to be "The Best" of Stephen Gould. It aims more at giving readers an overview of the main themes of his life's work. So perhaps it suffers a little from having to include the most representative essays rather than the most interesting ones. For sheer liveliness, I think you would be better off to get some of Gould's more limited annual collections, such as "The Panda's Thumb" and "Bully for Brontosaurus." These latter have the indulgence of including quirkier, more exploratory musings.
However this is still a very worthwhile collection - with one exception. When you get about midway through to the essay entitled "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" - skip over it without a backward glance. A typical sentence in this long exercise reads, "The classical and most familiar category of internal channeling (the first, or empirical, citation of constraint as a positive theme) resides in preferred directions for evolutionary change supplied by inherited allometries and their phylogenetic potentiation by heterochrony." Whaaaaa? The editor does warn that this essay was intended for a professional audience. Still, I didn't think Gould was capable of such utterly opaque writing, whoever his target audience, and my opinion of him was accordingly lowered a bit.
Then other tripping points throughout the book are Gould's repeated use of words such as "contingent" and "epitome." He clearly demonstrates his ongoing fondness for "contingency," but usually (although not always) uses that word in its more obscure sense of "accidental." This is contrary to the meaning most of us give the word colloquially, as when we say, "I will marry you contingent on your earning more money." In this more common sense, the word means "dependant upon - following as a logical consequence of" - almost the exact opposite of Gould's frequent meaning of "accidental."
Because of this persistent eccentricity in Gould's vocabulary, I suggest you keep a dictionary handy as you read "Richness." Then you can look up not only the more unusual words he uses so aptly, but also those more common words on which he tends to put his own spin.
This book also makes it evident how rapidly scientific theory is changing and advancing. Gould, who died just a few years ago, says here that Lamarckianism (the idea that we inherit traits our parents acquired) is totally dead. But just recently, the study of "epigenetics" has been demonstrating that what people eat, what chemicals they are exposed to, their levels of stress, etc., can permanently, genetically influence their progeny by affecting what genes get turned on. Lamarck may have been partially right after all.
There is certainly an advantage to having this span of essays assembled here. It shows connections and contradictions more strongly than even Gould himself might have noticed as he wrote these pieces in different decades. For example, in an early autobiographical essay, Gould writes about his youthful renegade support of the Yankees in the middle of a staunch Brooklyn Dodgers neighborhood. His unpopular affiliation earned him a number of savage beatings. He writes these off with an almost "boys-will-be-boys" tone. Violence in this context struck him as being a sign of healthy, energetic team loyalty - an essential rite of passage.
But then in another essay entitled "Of Two Minds," Gould reflects on and deplores humankind's "tendency to parse complex nature into pairings of `us versus them.'" He says this can be harmful, "given another human propensity for judgment - so that `us versus them' easily becomes `good versus bad'" - and we feel morally justified in eradicating the latter.
He doesn't seem to see how the seeds of such dangerous divisiveness were present in those boyhood neighborhood sports partisanships. But in this and so many other ways, "Richness" gives the reader a bird's eye view that was often denied to the author himself.
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