Observer Review: I Have Landed By Stephen Jay Gould Essay, Research Paper

A expansive finaleI Have LandedStephen Jay GouldJonathan Cape? 17.99, pp418It is dry that the great evolutionary life scientist Stephen Jay Gould & # 8211 ; who wrote so majestically and instructively about life in all its rich, biological elaborateness & # 8211 ; has produced a valediction work so evocative of death.Apart from the writer & # 8217 ; s ain death last hebdomad, I Have Landed is striking for its unexpected images of loss and grieving, notably those concerned with the devastation of the World Trade Centre. It is a step of Gould & # 8217 ; s zest for life, and his belief in ordinary human decency, that he however manages to contorting a thoroughly carry throughing book from this miasma of misery.Consider the rubric of this, Gould & # 8217 ; s concluding aggregation of essays. I Have Landed was the last of the 300 that he produced for the US journal Natural History and refers to the words that his gramps, Papa Joe, a Magyar immigrant, scribbled on a notebook on the twenty-four hours he arrived at Ellis Island in New York: & # 8216 ; I have landed. September 11, 1901. & # 8217 ; The essay, on the delicate continuity of life, appeared in January 2001. Eight months subsequently, precisely 100 old ages after Papa Joe & # 8217 ; s landing, his adopted metropolis suffered a catastrophe that will guarantee his reaching day of the month is etched in communal memory. It was & # 8216 ; the most eerie happenstance that I have of all time unreasoningly experienced, & # 8217 ; says Gould.Yet Gould is able to observe marks of hope from the events of & # 8216 ; a twenty-four hours of decease that has non been witnessed in America since Gettysburg & # 8217 ; . Remember the Great Asymetry, he says. & # 8216 ; The calamity of human history lies in the tremendous potency for devastation in rare Acts of the Apostless of immorality, non in the high frequence of evil people. & # 8217 ; We should non be blinded by the occasional successes of stray sociopaths, he says. & # 8216 ; Ordinary kindness trumps paroxysmal evil by at least a million events to one. It is a cardinal facet of our being as a species. & # 8217 ; It is typical Gould: high in emotion and rich in historical position, somewhat bathetic, but finally cheerful. His decease, from malignant neoplastic disease, robs us of one of our most gifted and productive scientific discipline authors, an writer who combined eruditeness with a extremely individualized manner and an intense engagement in his topics, from dodos to his darling baseball. & # 8216 ; Although I have often advanced incorrect, or even stupid, statements, at least I have ne’er been lazy, & # 8217 ; he claims, with justification, in the foreword to I Have Landed.Gould began his calling as a author in 1974 when he produced the first of his monthly series of Natural History essays, This Position of Life ( named after Darwin & # 8217 ; s comments in The Origin of Species that & # 8216 ; there is magnificence in this position of life & # 8217 ; . The first aggregation from the series, Ever Since Darwin, was published in 1977 and farther volumes have app

eared at regular intervals. Now his final two dozen essays have been collected to form the core of I Have Landed, with the addition of a few other comment pieces from Time, Science and other disparate sources.In maintaining this stunning output ‘without interruption for cancer, hell, high water, or the World Series’, Gould resurrected the scientific essay from near extinction and restored it to the robust, provocative state in which its grand masters, Thomas Huxley and JBS Haldane, had left it decades earlier. This one indisputable achievement will remain Gould’s prime claim to fame, the popularity of his output also showing, as he says, that ‘contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as “the intelligent layperson” does exist – in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning.’Of course, Gould’s approach has changed greatly over the years. In the the beginning, his prose was crisper and his style more robust, but his subject range narrower. An avowed liberal (some Americans would say Marxist), he was much concerned to do battle with creationists who were trying to suppress scientific explanations of our origins and attacking those who believed human behaviour is innate and genetically hard-wired.However, as I Have Landed makes clear, his intellectual stance softened and his opposition to religion and sociobiology moderated. His writing has also become rather orotund and over-complex (his passion for words such as contingent, canonical, and, above all, maximal, is particularly maddening). On the other hand, his range has broadened magnificently as he has perfected his increasingly personalised approach to his essays. Hence the story of Papa Joe and the fragility of life, as well as his encounters at Ground Zero.What is also remarkable is the lack of whiggish hindsight with which he approaches his subject. There is no sneering at those who have bumbled through scientific life, getting ideas and concepts in a hopeless muddle. Gould’s grasp of historical perspective is too strong to allow that. Hence his defence in The Geometer of Race of the German naturalist JF Blumenbach who dreamt up the notion of the perfect Caucasian white person who is supposed to stand at the apex of all the races. In fact, Blumenbach’s ideas were misunderstood and traduced by others, says Gould.Thus I Have Landed provides us with our last chance to appreciate a Western publishing phenomenon, a writer whose relish of the intricacies of biology and evolution pioneered an explosion in the popularisation of science but who has never been bettered in the process. For years, I have anticipated the publication of each of Gould’s new collection of essays and have never once felt let down by them. I shall miss his books profoundly.