At long last I have finished reading Bertrand Russell's monumental work, A History of Western Philosophy (1945). It was a gratifying experience and I gained a superlative overview of the history of European-influenced ideas. I retained, however, not much, or at least not much detail. In fact, when I first embarked on this over a year ago, I was amazed to find my own marginal comments up to about midway through the book, revealing that I had been this way once before without any memory of it. Let me say right away that my lack of retention is not the fault of the author for I doubt there could be a much more lucid presentation of the information without losing most of the careful summation and meticulous critique. The fault is that, like Peter Wimsey in his interview with the Warden of Harriet Vane's college in Gaudy Night: "I have not the philosophic mind." I would like to learn but whatever I learn that doesn't reenforce what I already think dissolves and returns to sand. I do make paths through the sand, however. In what follows I will not attempt to summarize the philosophical issues for obvious reasons, then, but will instead concentrate on describing Russell's methods and his inimitable style to some extent.
The sober and complex philosophical and historical proceedings are occasionally leavened with candid and often ironic comments. For instance, summarizing "what we are to think" of Socrates as portrayed by Plato, Russell remarks that despite apparent merits such as indifference to worldly success, fearlessness, and a calm humor, Socrates has "some very grave defects." Among the defects, Russell finds that Socrates "uses intellect to prove conclusions that are to him agreeable, rather than in a disinterested search for knowledge." The final verdict? "As a man, we may believe him admitted to the communion of saints; but as a philosopher he needs a long residence in a scientific purgatory."
Dealing with Plato's "cosmogony" in the Timaeus, Russell remarks drily that "this had more influence than anything else in Plato, which is curious, as it certainly contains more that is simply silly than is to be found in his other writings." Among these "silly-gisms" (the "silly" pun is mine) is the theory that every soul has a star (or vice versa) and if a soul overcomes its "sensations, love, fear, and anger," it lives righteously and goes to its star to live happily ever after, but if not, "he will, in the next life, be a woman." Russell's occasional lapses from reverence never, however, cause him to stint on careful and respectful summaries of philosophers and philosophical issues, nor to be cavalier in his critical analyses and responses. His dry quips and clever turns serve only as salt and savor to the reading.
The structure of the work is helpful; it is logically, and chronologically, straightforward. The segments lead into each other, with comments that relate each stage of development, and the Index is unusually complete. There are three "Books": Ancient Philosophy, Catholic Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. Each Book is set out in several sections, generally historical; for example, the subsidiary parts of Modern Philosophy are "From the Renaissance to Hume" and "From Rousseau to the Present Day." Moreover Russell is concerned throughout to provide a geopolitical history of each era, providing a context for the philosophies, without subscribing to any specific theories of cause and effect, but certainly providing the material that a reader may use to good purpose in understanding how ideas evolve with sociopolitical and technological changes. It is also salutary to have reference occasionally to "the rest" of the world, as Russell is careful to remind the reader sometimes that this history is of "Western Philosophy" only.
Our use of the phrase the 'Dark Ages" to cover the period from 600 to
1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe. In China this
period includes the time of the Tang dynasty, the greatest age of Chinese
poetry, and in many other ways a most remarkable epoch. From India
to Spain, the brilliant civiliation of Islam flourished. What was lost to
Christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the
contrary.
(p 399, Clarion PB, 1945)
To this remark which is remarkably enlightened for a European writing in 1945, he adds: "To us, it seems that West-European civilization is civilization, but this is a narrow view."
Book One on Ancient Philosophy is tripartite: a kind of before, during, and after. Pre-Socratics, then Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and finally the ancients After Aristotle. Russell spends ten chapters and 81 pages dealing with all the Pre-Socratics, including the historical and geographical material underlying the culture of Greece. Then he spends fourteen chapters and 137 pages on just the three Big Names. His method is the same throughout: first prefatory material, then detailed summation, and then critique. Russell clearly lays out the Platonic belief that it is not our perceptions that lead us to knowledge, but our concepts, for instance, and that a "true" concept has an existence that is purely non-material. That is to say, if we know what a table is, it is because an ideal table, or a pure table idea, exists. Thus I was at last enabled to grasp philosophical Idealism. Only after careful explication does Russell then offer his objections or approval.
Russell is more respectful toward Aristotle than to Socrates and Plato, and he characterizes Aristotelian philosophy as "Plato diluted by common sense." Despite Aristotle's merits with regard to his predecessors, Russell suggests that his successors made his heritage of equal demerit. It was nearly two thousand years before the west produced a philosopher of such stature as Aristotle, but, on the other hand, excessive posthumous fame became a serious obstacle to progress, and "since the beginning of the seventeenth century, almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine." Stephen Jay Gould often draws the same conclusion; in fact, his book The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox traces the antagonism between the sciences and humanities back to the polemics of the scientific method proponents starting with, for example, Frances Bacon who deplored the fact that knowledge seemed enshrined in "the classics."
The long evolution by which Platonic and Aristotelian ideas were transmitted, transmuted, and translated during the Roman period, medieval Neoplatonism incorporated in Catholic theory, and then the reintroduction of Aristotle by the Scholastics (Abelard, Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas) until the European Renaissance rediscovered the Greek and Roman sources is an intricate story of the dispersion of Alexander's "Greek" influence after the conqueror's death, the interest in Greek philosophy shown by Arab scholars and translators and a few early Christian thinkers, but especially by the Islamic philosopher Averroes.
Book Two: Catholic Philosophy, although it occupies less than 200 pages (of 836), demanded the most time and effort for me because I had not thought about the period between "the Greeks" and the Renaissance since I took a one-semester World History class in college long ago. In Chapter I, The Religious Development of the Jews, Russell sharply emphasizes the then-unique evolution at about the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel of a harsh insistence on One and Only One, Jealous, God-THE-Father, a concept that will make religion in the intervening years as active a participant in wars and persecution as any merely worldly doctrine or human ambition. It is clear from Russell's historical tracing that a primary target of the strictures about "other gods" was the multiple cluster of female divinities, Astarte, for instance. Russell quotes Jeremiah's fulminations that women "knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven [Ishtar]." Jeremiah tells the Jewish refugees in Egypt that "Yahweh will destroy them all because their wives have burnt incense to other gods." Ezekiel expresses horror at a vision of "women at the north gates of the temple weeping for Tammuz (a Babylonian deity)."
In this way, the post-Jacob story becomes more clearly a strengthening of patriarchy and the forerunner of the work of Paul, who did so much to introduce patriarchal aspects into the Christ message. Some time in the last year I read The Red Tent and the new insight Russell provided into the Jeremiads' emphasis made me reflect that I had not sufficiently appreciated the author's historicity in this respect. Although I was entertained by the imagining of Biblical women's lives from their own viewpoint I was not sufficiently aware that the conversion of Jacob to fanatic patriarchy and monotheism represented in fact such historical significance.
Russell's survey of the development of Christianity in ensuing chapters examines a number of "The Fathers of the Church" in close textual detail: Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Benedict, and Gregory the Great. I was taken back by the deep and cynical misogyny, amounting to a kind of cultural psychosis about women, sexual congress, and even children, childbirth and menstruation. Jerome, for instance, "St. Jerome" as we are to call him in the Catholic Church, was almost obscenely obsessive about female chastity, and Augustine's long polemic about the disgusting sinfulness, greed and lewdness of infants made me for a moment wonder if this were a parody, it seemed so ridiculous. Augustine, of course, dallied excessively with women, threw off one mistress with whom he had children because the relationship was so sinful, and yet immediately took up with another woman. Such hypocrisy of a man blaming his own appetite on that which he lusted for, sadly, was not an isolated phenomenon. I think of the very recent NYPD bulletin that women were to blame for rape because they often "dressed provocatively," a type of blaming the victim mentality that feminist organizing and influence had pushed back for so long in the seventies, eighties, and nineties.
The whole parade of venery and intolerance in the birth of Christianity provoked me to serious reflection on the long pedigree of ideas that still plague us with intolerance and persecution. Thus the reading—although not the writing—was strongly emotional, and I could usually take in only a few pages each week, with copious notes and reflections. I wish all Christians would make this tour of the origins of the faith. Russell of course includes Islam in a similar historical examination of both the ideologies and the geopolitical history.
Most of the second half of A History of Western Philosophy (pp 491-836) entails Book Three: Modern Philosophy. This history was mostly of periods and developments more familiar to me, although Russell taught me a great deal about Philosophical Liberalism, especially the influence of John Locke. I also had to readjust my ideas about Jean-Jacques Rousseau who early in life I identified as one of my philosophical heroes, but for reasons which are now thrown into doubt. In fact the whole Romantic Movement was placed in a new, and more scathing, light.
What I knew of Romanticism was its reaction against industrialism, and its English poetry contingent: Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron. Thus I linked it to Mary Wollstonecraft and A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and to the French revolution's rebellion against monarchy and oppression, and the revolutionary motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. The reign of terror was scanted in my study of history, and I clearly did not fathom the linkage between Romantic philosophy and directions taken in German Idealism which lead to, and culminate in, the philosophy of Nietzsche--if indeed, we should call the pitiful neurotic conjurations of a pusillanimous invalid a "philosophy."
My argument against Nietzsche existed prior to this reading, but certainly Russell's insights, and his deconstructions, strengthened my dislike. Not only is Nietzsche's nihilism and machismo cynical and destructive, but the Nietzschean emphasis on Will, as in willfulness perhaps,by which word he designates a refusal of social bonds much more radical than Macchiavelli's realpolitik, and its feverish idolatry of a "Superman" directly fostered the climate in which Fascism and Hitler could root themselves. Not coincidentally, Triumph of the Will is the title of an insinuatingly celebratory Leni Riefenstahl film glorifying the Fuehrer and the Reich. Viewing this film is profoundly enlightening, and depressing.
Russell misrepresents Darwin to some extent, I think (from my reading of Stephen Jay Gould), gives serious consideration to Marx's political philosophy, but curiously omits any reference at all to Freud whose hypotheses about human psychology has perhaps been more culturally significant than even Hegel's theory of historical progress toward the Ideal.
Hegel is nominated as probably the most influential of modern philsophers but I admit, sadly, to being completely unable to grasp Hegelian theory. I was sorry to see Russell rush to conclusion without what I think would have been an adequate look at "Modernism" as a category in philosophy, although he treats of Bergson, William James, John Dewey and his own loose school of "Logical Analysis" perhaps best represented by his glance at Rudolf Carnap. His own book Principia Mathematica, which Russell wrote with Alfred North Whitehead, might be the best reference for these latter ideas.
Russell was writing A History in 1943, however, before the conclusion of World War II and the success of Gandhi and India's resistance to Britain, both of which dates may be taken as markers for the gradual ending of Modernism and Colonialism, respectively, and the birth-labors of Post-Modernism/ Post-Colonialism generally. I suggest that Michael Ondaatje's brilliant novel The English Patient can be read as an illuminative emblem for this period of world flux. The violent ideological crisis for the character Kip, as a Commonwealth soldier from India trying to grasp how the nuclear holocaust could have been visited on the Japanese, is a brilliant image of that collision of realities throughout the Colonial and Imperial world. Russell at the moment of writing his history was inevitably unable to summarize the coincidence of Modernism and Colonialism as succinctly as he traces the interrelationship of Philosophical Liberalism and Capitalism, or Romanticism as a reaction against Capitalism in its Industrialist Stages, for the reactions of and toward his own era had not yet matured.
Bertrand Russell first entered my awareness back when I was reading Aldous Huxley in the late sixties and learning a little about the activist history that preceded my own generation of anti-war activists. Russell had long opposed imperialism, nuclear weapons, war, Hitler's German dogmas, and was in fact opposed to U.S. aggression in Vietnam before I was properly aware of it. Of course it might be claimed that his book and his philosophy is colored by his opposition to war and exploitation, and his insights into the dangers of idealism, but I would claim, to the contrary, that it is his philosophical insights and piercing intelligence that colored his lifelong pacifism and opposition to superstition, dogma, and fanaticism.
Morton White in The Age of Analysis (1955) pays Russell a handsome tribute: "he has been one of the most prolific and distinguished writers of English prose in this century. . . he has used his immense talent in the cause of rational and humane liberalism for over a half century. . . .His unconventional life and his hatred of political and social tyranny is reminiscent of Mill; so is his honesty and his desire to get to the (preferably clear) bottom of things. . . . No philosopher has had a more salutary influence on the intellectual life of the twentieth century."
I recommend this book highly for Russell's acute insights into the interconnections of material, economic, and technological changes with political, religious, and philosophical developments. Perhaps you will only find it useful as a kind of inside-track encyclopedia. But if you decide to read it through, be prepared to spend adequate time. There are 836 pages in the Clarion paperback I have, which is now housed in an envelope like a few of my other thoroughly-read treasures like John Howard Lawson's Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Marge Piercy's To Be of Use, because--to respectfully trivialize the title of Chinua Achebe's important book--Things Fall Apart.
Russell concludes the book with remarks on the tentative nature of "truth" in the scientific method, which he believes essential to philosophy: using it, he suggests, "we can make successive approximations to the truth, in which each new stage results from an improvement, not a rejection, of what has gone before:"
In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is
scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs
upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested
of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings. . .
The habit of careful veracity acquired in the practice of this philosophy,
can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing
wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism with an increasing capacity
of sympathy and mutual understanding. In abandoning a part of its
dogmatic pretensions,philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire
a way of life. (Russell, p 836.)
Friday, June 15, 2012
Friday, December 2, 2011
Meditation -- simple but deep
The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat HanhMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an almost indispensable guide toward establishing an understood meditation practice. Why, how and what: that is, why meditation, how to meditate, and what is meditation, actually. No nonsense, no hoo-ha, no mystification: this is a book my son uses In PRISON to help prisoners discover how they can avoid despair, rage, bitterness, and actually find compassion for themselves and others.
An affectionate title many of his students use to refer to Thich Nhat Hanh (pronounced "thick not hawn") is "Thay," a Vietnamese term for teacher or respected teacher. Like calling someone "Maestro" or "Rabbi" or "Pastor." Some people will say that "Thay" caters too much to Western middle-class desires for self-help and self-actualization and self-ish personal happiness, but I say, okay, start there if that's where people are. And not only the middle-class craves help and personal development. It's just that the middle class generally has the time and the means to articulate it for themselves and "buy in" to retreats and books and DVDs and CDs. But youth at risk and people on the edge need it just as much if not more.
Many of Thay's books are at least accessible and straightforward. I myself have taken transmission of the Five Mindfulness Trainings and have formally "Taken Refuge" in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.
And I started with this, and with his book called simply Anger. Almost nine years later and I continue to aspire to the path of Buddhism. A great spiritual teacher, Bo Lozoff, wrote a touching book on practice called Deep and Simple, and in truth that is the spiritual path, just that deep and just that simple: stay aware and open your heart. Breathe: you are alive.
This book is a great introduction and can pay off in almost instant if gradual changes.
View all my reviews
Nebraska and Transcanada's XL Pipeline Plans
A follow-up to my report of hearings before the Natural Resources Committee of the Nebraska legislature, with good news and bad news.
Good News!:
On November 7, the committee began hearings on several bills that would in the future regulate large pipelines. Past efforts have been defeated and is it fair to say that Transcanada's serious lobbying and palsy-walsy glad-to-meetcha efforts might have been instrumental in that? Perchance? At any rate, the special session of the legislature had been called only days or weeks before--again, due to pressure but this pressure on the governor came from the people of Nebraska. Go, Big Red! Because the issue had been raised in the past, there were several bills ready to consider. Senator Annette DuBas (pronounced "doo-BOSS") submitted LB1, which had been carefully vetted for constitutional/legal issues, and stood a good chance of being effective, but a poor chance of getting out of committee, since five of the eight members are generally disinclined toward the long view, and usually vote for the quick bucks. Natural Resources Committee, yes. Another was ideal but had about a wiener dog's chance in an altercation with a dobermann. (Senator Haar's bill, which deal with the whole issue forthrightly and truthfully and thoroughly.) Another bill was a hastily written retaliation on the governor for having called the special session: it assigned the governor and a special panel to regulate pipelines in the future. Giving the guv the old hotfoot, it seems.
Despite everything, the committee agreed to pass LB1 on to the legislature for debate, four of the opposition gang agreeing and one (Senator Smith) just flat out refusing to go along with the idea.
Meanwhile, Obama announced his decision to send the federal permit application back for examination of conflict of interest. His stance said he would make the final decision personally, and that Transcanada should "consider an alternate route." The President acknowledged that he understood the concerns of Nebraskans when he said job creation should never be at the expense of the health and future of tomorrow's families.
So BOLD Nebraskans (our anti-pipeline loose alliance) took up the charge of appearing and lobbying for the legislative debate the following Monday, November 14. Imagine everyone's surprise when the speaker of the house announced that he had made contact with Transcanada, and THEY AGREED TO REROUTE THE PIPELINE 'OUT OF' THE SANDHILLS!! Elation and jubilation. Whoops: well, they "agreed" to move it from the Ogallala Formation in the sandhills which is the area in which the most danger would be posed to the High Plains Aquifer. That's not quite "out of the sandhills." AND Speaker Michael Flood announced that part of "the deal" would be an offer by Nebraska to pay TWO MILLION dollars of anticipated costs of a new Environmental Impact Statement.
I personally would have voted against this deal were I a senator. I think they were going to have to move it
anyway because of the feds (and here I assume they've looked at the GOP Candidate Sideshow and decided Obama does have a pretty good reelection chance), and they knew it. What better move than to acquiesce and do the thing they had flat out refused to consider only a month or two earlier in meetings with key state senators!!
And, moreover, Senator Dubas's bill passed. Amended and lashed, no doubt. But the representative from my district, Sen Karpisek, had already expressed the sentiments of most of us--i.e., in favor of regulation. Transcanada is "exempt" from this bill, however. Another little piece of candy for the corporates!
But good work: the point-person for BOLD Nebraska is Jane Kleeb, and she has my total gratitude and admiration. Especially now that I've seen the level of hatred, disrespect and contempt displayed publicly by at least one of the representatives to Nebraska's unique unicameral. I'm thinking of moving to his district so I can campaign against him.
Good News!:
On November 7, the committee began hearings on several bills that would in the future regulate large pipelines. Past efforts have been defeated and is it fair to say that Transcanada's serious lobbying and palsy-walsy glad-to-meetcha efforts might have been instrumental in that? Perchance? At any rate, the special session of the legislature had been called only days or weeks before--again, due to pressure but this pressure on the governor came from the people of Nebraska. Go, Big Red! Because the issue had been raised in the past, there were several bills ready to consider. Senator Annette DuBas (pronounced "doo-BOSS") submitted LB1, which had been carefully vetted for constitutional/legal issues, and stood a good chance of being effective, but a poor chance of getting out of committee, since five of the eight members are generally disinclined toward the long view, and usually vote for the quick bucks. Natural Resources Committee, yes. Another was ideal but had about a wiener dog's chance in an altercation with a dobermann. (Senator Haar's bill, which deal with the whole issue forthrightly and truthfully and thoroughly.) Another bill was a hastily written retaliation on the governor for having called the special session: it assigned the governor and a special panel to regulate pipelines in the future. Giving the guv the old hotfoot, it seems.
Despite everything, the committee agreed to pass LB1 on to the legislature for debate, four of the opposition gang agreeing and one (Senator Smith) just flat out refusing to go along with the idea.
Meanwhile, Obama announced his decision to send the federal permit application back for examination of conflict of interest. His stance said he would make the final decision personally, and that Transcanada should "consider an alternate route." The President acknowledged that he understood the concerns of Nebraskans when he said job creation should never be at the expense of the health and future of tomorrow's families.
So BOLD Nebraskans (our anti-pipeline loose alliance) took up the charge of appearing and lobbying for the legislative debate the following Monday, November 14. Imagine everyone's surprise when the speaker of the house announced that he had made contact with Transcanada, and THEY AGREED TO REROUTE THE PIPELINE 'OUT OF' THE SANDHILLS!! Elation and jubilation. Whoops: well, they "agreed" to move it from the Ogallala Formation in the sandhills which is the area in which the most danger would be posed to the High Plains Aquifer. That's not quite "out of the sandhills." AND Speaker Michael Flood announced that part of "the deal" would be an offer by Nebraska to pay TWO MILLION dollars of anticipated costs of a new Environmental Impact Statement.
I personally would have voted against this deal were I a senator. I think they were going to have to move it
anyway because of the feds (and here I assume they've looked at the GOP Candidate Sideshow and decided Obama does have a pretty good reelection chance), and they knew it. What better move than to acquiesce and do the thing they had flat out refused to consider only a month or two earlier in meetings with key state senators!!
And, moreover, Senator Dubas's bill passed. Amended and lashed, no doubt. But the representative from my district, Sen Karpisek, had already expressed the sentiments of most of us--i.e., in favor of regulation. Transcanada is "exempt" from this bill, however. Another little piece of candy for the corporates!
But good work: the point-person for BOLD Nebraska is Jane Kleeb, and she has my total gratitude and admiration. Especially now that I've seen the level of hatred, disrespect and contempt displayed publicly by at least one of the representatives to Nebraska's unique unicameral. I'm thinking of moving to his district so I can campaign against him.
Nebraska and Transcanada Keystone XL Pipeline plans
November 9, 2011
Amazing what a little group of people can do.
Here in Nebraska we (and not some "special interests" environmental group, as the conservatives like to call us), we ordinary citizens have put up a valiant struggle to prevent Transcanada Corporation from ploughing right through our state without more than the resistance of a few extraordinarily heroic individual farmers and ranchers who have refused to be bullied into signing away easements with this dirty oil-carrying giant in the face of harassment and threats.
Put yourself in this position: you are a rancher, for instance, and one day you get notice that Transcanada needs to come onto your ranch to survey for a pipeline that's "coming through." You try to get more information; it's a maze. You contact your state representative--what's going on? Many of them don't answer. There's no state permit, no official state regulations, no laws even about whether or not a foreign corporation has the right to force you to lie down and roll over.
So you tentatively say no. And over the next 3 years you are continually phoned, contacted, mailed, by different "land agents" purporting to represent Transcanada. Some of them say the pipeline has passed the only requirement--an Environmental Impact Statement! You actually get a letter giving you 30 days to sign an easement agreement or they will begin Easement Condemnation processes against you. Your legislator says, "See an attorney." Attorneys cost money. All this costs time and energy. Ranching and farming in Nebraska is sometimes a time-draining and expensive proposition.
Finally you find out where this "pipeline" is coming from, and see that a 36" diameter pipe is to come through 8 miles of your sandhills pastures, pastures of native prairie because that's what holds these sand-dune soils in place. You picture what such construction will mean, and what it will do to even the roads with their own tentative purchase. One rancher testified that the pipeline would mean taking 8 miles of pasture out of production--for maybe 20 years!! Otherwise, cattle herds grazing on the disturbed soil would aggravate erosion, and the line was supposed to go on a NW-SE diagonal: just what the prevailing winter winds do.
Bad plan. But who's going to ask a mere rancher? Who's going to listen? Who's going to answer such a rancher?
I heard one rancher give this solid testimony on Monday, Nov. 7, at a hearing of Nebraska's Natural Resources Committee. With four of the most sneering and hostile state legislators I can imagine in my wildests dreams presiding.
A State Senator Carlson afterwards dragged the rancher through a catechism of questions: Are you an environmentalist? Are you against fossil fuels? Do you believe in Global Warming? In other words, Sen. Carlson implied, the rancher was just pretending to worry about his ranch, his business, his relationship with a huge and hostile foreign company, and the soil and prairie: he was probably masking his true sinister identity as a rabble-rousing special-interest damned Environmentalist. The attitude made it clear that unless you answer all those questions right, you're not a patriot, damn you!
I was shocked at this insolent treatment of a Nebraskan who had taken time off from his work, gone to the trouble and expense of coming for the whole day to Lincoln, had braved the bristling halls and offices of "important people" and dared to report his position, his analysis, his story. I knew there were members of the committee that usually oppose anything like conservation and environmental concerns. Now I think I saw enough to convince me that for at least three of them "natural resources" means "things to be converted into cold cash for you and me and our friends," although I never thought I'd see such open contempt and disrespect in a public setting.
Amazing what a little group of people can do.
Here in Nebraska we (and not some "special interests" environmental group, as the conservatives like to call us), we ordinary citizens have put up a valiant struggle to prevent Transcanada Corporation from ploughing right through our state without more than the resistance of a few extraordinarily heroic individual farmers and ranchers who have refused to be bullied into signing away easements with this dirty oil-carrying giant in the face of harassment and threats.
Put yourself in this position: you are a rancher, for instance, and one day you get notice that Transcanada needs to come onto your ranch to survey for a pipeline that's "coming through." You try to get more information; it's a maze. You contact your state representative--what's going on? Many of them don't answer. There's no state permit, no official state regulations, no laws even about whether or not a foreign corporation has the right to force you to lie down and roll over.
So you tentatively say no. And over the next 3 years you are continually phoned, contacted, mailed, by different "land agents" purporting to represent Transcanada. Some of them say the pipeline has passed the only requirement--an Environmental Impact Statement! You actually get a letter giving you 30 days to sign an easement agreement or they will begin Easement Condemnation processes against you. Your legislator says, "See an attorney." Attorneys cost money. All this costs time and energy. Ranching and farming in Nebraska is sometimes a time-draining and expensive proposition.
Finally you find out where this "pipeline" is coming from, and see that a 36" diameter pipe is to come through 8 miles of your sandhills pastures, pastures of native prairie because that's what holds these sand-dune soils in place. You picture what such construction will mean, and what it will do to even the roads with their own tentative purchase. One rancher testified that the pipeline would mean taking 8 miles of pasture out of production--for maybe 20 years!! Otherwise, cattle herds grazing on the disturbed soil would aggravate erosion, and the line was supposed to go on a NW-SE diagonal: just what the prevailing winter winds do.
Bad plan. But who's going to ask a mere rancher? Who's going to listen? Who's going to answer such a rancher?
I heard one rancher give this solid testimony on Monday, Nov. 7, at a hearing of Nebraska's Natural Resources Committee. With four of the most sneering and hostile state legislators I can imagine in my wildests dreams presiding.
A State Senator Carlson afterwards dragged the rancher through a catechism of questions: Are you an environmentalist? Are you against fossil fuels? Do you believe in Global Warming? In other words, Sen. Carlson implied, the rancher was just pretending to worry about his ranch, his business, his relationship with a huge and hostile foreign company, and the soil and prairie: he was probably masking his true sinister identity as a rabble-rousing special-interest damned Environmentalist. The attitude made it clear that unless you answer all those questions right, you're not a patriot, damn you!
I was shocked at this insolent treatment of a Nebraskan who had taken time off from his work, gone to the trouble and expense of coming for the whole day to Lincoln, had braved the bristling halls and offices of "important people" and dared to report his position, his analysis, his story. I knew there were members of the committee that usually oppose anything like conservation and environmental concerns. Now I think I saw enough to convince me that for at least three of them "natural resources" means "things to be converted into cold cash for you and me and our friends," although I never thought I'd see such open contempt and disrespect in a public setting.
Leonard's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, by Stephen Jan Gould, a review.
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History by Stephen Jay GouldMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
When Stephen Jay Gould, eminent evolutionary scientist and prolific writer, died in May of 2002, some of his previous forecasts--about "the end" or "the penultimate reflections," or "before the millennium calls a halt"--seemed to be eerie foreshadowings of the virulent cancer which killed him. He had, however, long planned to end his columns for Natural History magazine, and the books that collected them, with the January 1 issue of 2001, the date he would celebrate as the first day of the new century. I think it rounded out to an even 300 successive issues for which he delivered, on time and on the dime, some very polished and often profound pieces of sophisticated science writing for the public.
In Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms(1998), Gould presents twenty-one essays which span his unique mix of interests in science, society, art and literature and history. Gould is first and foremost an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist, but he is also a science historian. The history of science, studied in its cultural contexts, is a sobering study of how much we are all—scientists included--shaped by mostly unconscious cultural expectations. We "think" that what we "think" is the result of "thought and observation," whereas the extent to which our beliefs are shaped by unthinking prejudices should humble us all.
I am reading all of Gould's books this year (or as long as it takes), having read fifteen thus far of some twenty-six, and I am reading them in roughly chronological order. One of the problems with such a diachronic, or longitudinal, study is not knowing the changes in context, in social politics, and philosophy, over the twenty-one years from 1977 to 1998. Nor do I know how much has changed since then, as I write now in late 2011. Moreover, I am not a scientist, only one of his interested general public. I may not fully grasp the innuendos of a given essay, what the topical debate was at the time he wrote it, if he changed his mind later, or how widely accepted his beliefs were or are. To claim to represent Gould's views on any subject, then, is rather like the common fallacy of claiming that Shakespeare believed, because he wrote it, that "there's nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Because I do know Shakespeare, and the background and context, I know that, far from believing that, he saw it as a moral equivocation leading to human chaos. He gave those lines to someone he considered to have very wrong values: Iago, in Othello, to be precise Therefore, I think to be safe I'll just sketch a few of Gould's essays here, hoping to entice readers to pick up a few books by this deep, graceful, humorous and above all ethical philosopher of science.
One of the biographical sketches that caught my attention was a story of Leonardo DaVinci's notebooks on natural history. Yes, the Mona Lisa, and The Last Supper, yes, his war machines, his irrigation ideas, but also his novel observations of such preconditions to establishment of contemporary geology as the temporal and historical nature of horizontal earth strata, the differentiation in size of riverine deposits from source to mouth, the presence of fossils and emphatic argument that they are remains of organisms, and their deposition at different times---and many more "first" analyses. Now look at the Mona Lisa again in its entirety and notice even her figure and hair as extended figuration of the processes of "living nature" in the background.
On the other hand, Gould argues, DaVinci is not the original "Yankee at Camelot," nor is he a Space Alien. His observations, in fact, reveal the timeliness of certain early debates. DaVinci died in 1519, a time of great interest and curiosity. The Renaissance did not subscribe to a "flat earth" mythology; that it did was first suggested in the 1800's, perhaps as a way to claim that modernity had advanced!
There are many curious and provocative gems in this book: The origin of Aquariums and how they changed the graphic representation of marine environments. The controversy over Linnaeus's terms and illustrations for the clam, which presented it as basically a living female genital (which seems to reveal deep mental disturbances in the consciousness of the all-male science fraternity in the "Enlightenment").
The theory of evolution proposed as one of "increasing cephalization"—i.e., having more and more "head-room" (by which theory a child is more evolved than an adult) and, most impressively, the gyrations the theorist went through to try to classify data so that it would seem to support the theory.
Then there is a fascinating Art History essay on paleolithic cave art and various theories about its chronology and function. French structuralist theory, as alluring as it once looked, makes what now seem artificial and baseless suggestions of "function and meaning" here. Structuralism looks for opposing values, and decides to make male-female the axis for differentiation, and then decides cow-like animals are female and horse-like animals are male. Am I too much the sarcastic feminist if I say, "Well, of course!"?
The more interesting aspect of the theories, however, relates to ideas about chronology. I am a scholar of art history as it pertains to performance and literary art, and I am well aware of the "Whiggish" and Positivist interpretation of all art history according to modernist superstitions about progress in civilizations. Such interpretations—i.e., that the later is better, or vice versa--underlie methods for estimating chronology by determining, on no particular concrete scale, what is "better." Whatever features the better art has are supposed superior, advanced, progressed, developed; i.e., later in time. (With the exception, of course, of periods of "decadence," which complicate the issue.) But would the new be better if you didn't already know it was new?
Gould cleverly traces this double-bind in dating cave art as theorists looked for "an internal criterion that could order this earliest art into a chronological sequence." They settled, predictably on "the venerable technique of art historians of later times—the analysis of styles." Gould argues that if we had only Michaelangelo's The Last Judgment and Picasso's Guernica, and did not already know that Picasso was several centuries later than Michaelangelo, and knew nothing of the rest of art history in Europe from the 1500s to the 1900s, the two pieces of art could not be ordered in time. The so-called "analysis of styles" would be reduced to mere statements of differences. Neither painting could objectively be called better or worse, earlier or later.
In 1986, cave-art theory summed up: "From the earliest images onward one has the impression of being in the presence of a system refined by time" representing "15,000 years of apprenticeship followed by 8,000 years of academicism"(Ruspoli). Gould raises his familiar complaint about social positivism, by reminding us that even Darwinian evolution "is not a theory of progress." In fact, any "progressivist paradigm for the history of art" is based on the fact that "it just 'feels right' to us that the very earliest art should be primitive. Older in time should mean more rudimentary in mental accomplishment." The corollary, of course, is that closer to our time, in fact in our time precisely, should mean more (one of the magic words) "advanced."
Imagine the chagrin when carbon-dating and other newer techniques of science were able to determine that, in fact, the paintings denoted "earlier" in this theory were no older, or newer, than others. Both "kinds" of paintings supposedly discerned by the art historians (remember, "apprenticeship" and then "academicism") were equally distributed throughout time. There was no such development or progress or progressive change.
We are in our times accustomed to see everything, it seems, change at near-light-speed rates. We live immersed in a bath of public relations (both blatant commercials and more subtle spin doctors for psychology, medicine, philosophy, health, etc.) which continuously chime, "The Newest! The Latest! The Best!" It is therefore deeply engrained in us that progress is inevitable and normal, and that we, each younger generation even, is better, is the "coming thing," is "the beginning of the new." Maybe we would be wiser to realize what Buddha observed 600 years before Common Era time: All is impermanent. Not necessarily better or worse; always changing. I'm sure there is an Old Testament prophet who says something similar. Maybe "there is nothing new under the sun."
At least we have the writings of Stephen Jay Gould who reminds us again and again that we are not the apex of creation, neither as a civilization nor as homo sapiens, and nudges us toward being content with the beauty of differentiation and diversity, always with vivid examples and always, or almost always, with patience and wit.
View all my reviews
Angle of Repose by Wallace StegnerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
A story that starts with a love between two intellectual young American women in the 1850s has me halfway won already. Susan and Augusts are artistic young women in the East and then Thomas comes along to make it an artistic and literary threesome until Thomas proposes to Augusta. Somewhat suddenly Susan resolves to marry Oliver Ward, someone she doesn't know very well, an engineer "in the west." How a genteel Quaker and professional illustrator (of Longfellow & other poets at first) adapts to the crudeness and heartache following her husband from mining sites in such frontier areas as Leadville (CO), Michoacan and Idaho to finally reach an "angle of repose" in Grass Valley (CA) for the last 50 years of her life is the question that is asked by her invalid grandson, who himself is forced into an angle—whether of repose or not is part of the question—an angle of reclined existence at least, strapped in a wheelchair because of a serious bone disease and fighting with his adult son to avoid being placed "in a home."
Stegner writes of the conquest of the west in all its brutality (except for the genocide of the native American nations), its protocapitalist exploitation of the land and the people alike. Susan's husband Oliver fails, or is fired for principle, or is pushed aside in place after place. Three children are born as they trek from place to place, and as her career grows through publication of stories from the west published in major magazines in the east. (She is based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote.)
The story is fragmented, fractured and refracted through various materials and from different perspectives as contemporary research finds letters, newspaper clippings and obituaries, reads her stories and studies drawings and portraits. It is said that Stegner first became successful as a novelist when he developed the device of telling a story about the American west through a contemporary man with his own eccentricities and personality. The narrator in this story, however, Lyman Ward, retired professor, serves that role, but I found him simply self-important and selfishly judgmental---my reaction representing perhaps a postmodern and feminist insight into the very fifties-like stand-in for the author, similar to the way the "narrators" of Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and John Updike became to many women of the late twentieth-century included in what David Foster Wallace called the "Great Male Narcissists." A little overmuch of that flavor here.
Stegner is known as one of the greatest American writers about "the west," and was notably an environmentalist before that word came into vogue, and an expert biographer of John Wesley Powell, the first explorer and government scientist to begin agitation for the conservation of water in the west. Stegner wrote all of his books in a remarkable "personal literary partnership" with Mary Stuart Page, his wife of 59 years (per Arthur Schlesinger Jr. tribute). He worked on passage of the Wilderness Act, served on the board of the Sierra Club, and helped prevent dams at Dinosaur National Monument in CO. Angle of Repose was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1972.
Although I think it's merely pretty good as literature, as a window into the true story of "how the west was won," and an intellectual woman's struggle to find a place in that conquest, I recommend it. It's an easy read except for the personality of the narrator perhaps.
View all my reviews
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Dinosaur in a Haystack, by Stephen Jay Gould, a review.
How better to summarize this 1995 book by paleontologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould than simply to say, " 34 Natural History Essays, 460 pages, with a valuable Index and Bibliography ranging from William Blake and both Bacons (Sir Francis of Elizabethan science and Roger the contemporary painter), Humphrey Bogart, P.T. Barnum, Lewis Carroll, Anton Chekhov and Noam Chomsky, to Lord Bertrand Russell, Oliver Sacks, Mary Shelley, Voltaire, and E.O. Wilson. Not to mention the scientists!
Gould, professor at Harvard and NYU, curator and important theorist himself in evolutionary science, was all his life engaged in an effort to eradicate the chasm between science and social understanding, or between academic and intellectual discourse and the rest of "us." His concern is always to eradicate faulty or downright false ideas about science in general and evolution most particularly. He constructs graceful, often humorous, but meticulous arguments about important ideas, starting from a detail, e.g., a historical event, a curious happenstance in the life of some artist, politician, or scientist, or even sports star, and leading with precision to general conclusions and theories.
Take, for example, one essay which is going to be deadly serious and worrisomely abstract about the debate between Gradualism (or Uniformitarianism) and Catastrophism (or Punctuated Equilibrium, as one of Gould's major scientific theories has it). But Gould doesn't start talking in the abstract or scientific jargon: he starts with some innocuous and amusing remarks on "Tongue Worms, Velvet Worms, and Water Bears." Illustrations of these eerie tiny creatures add greatly to the interest; one species is aptly called Hallucigenia. Gould leads the reader gently around to the fact that some scientists have cited these creatures as arguments against the Cambrian Explosion. And here we are embarking on geology and paleontology and the history of life, but carried along by little living fantasias to provoke the curiosity and by transparent prose. What is the Cambrian Explosion? A geologically brief time (a mere 5 million years!) nearly 550 million years ago. What exploded? Life! Most major groups of today's creatures first appear in discernible fossils during that "explosion" of life forms.
Gradualists find it unlikely that this all happened so (relatively) fast. It goes against the grain of almost unconscious expectation of uniform and gradual changes. Gould, the original 20th-century "catastrophist" in a way (and I oversimplify) is delighted therefore to share new data that uses Tongue Worms et al. to affirm the Cambrian Explosion.The argument against it cited the Tongue Worm phylla as representative of most early life in that it was soft-bodied so we couldn 't know much about origins because of course there aren't fossils before the Cambrian Explosion because soft bodies wouldn't leave fossils. So maybe the phylla of Tongue Worms evolved well after the supposed burst. But a new method for identifying the presence of "shell-less bone-less chicken-less eggs" found that these weird tiny creatures did, in fact, first occur during that 5-million-year episode of "Let there be (multi-celled) life!" Can you imagine the intellectual satisfaction of actually following this elucidation?
Dinosaur in a Haystack takes its name from a curious phenomenon, that of not finding Dinosaur fossils where they were not really expected to be. A common theme of Gould's penetrating essays on the interaction of social gestalts and scientific theories is that finding anything requires, first, the capacity to imagine that the thing exists somewhere, and, second, the ability to predict where to look. Plus, the third, a conviction that one must look painstakingly. The proverbial needle in the haystack is impossible to find in a casual search, especially if the searcher is not really sure there is one. Once the search is motivated by expectation of value and an image of what is being sought, then it makes sense to take apart the haystack straw by straw, with the inevitable result that if it's there it will be found.
The particular example here of missing dinosaurs is part of a six-essay centerpiece under the general title "Origin, Stability, and Extinction." All six deal with the problem of expectations, the difficulty of theoretical changes, and how changing expectations or models then begin to yield new results. The dinosaur example figures in a discussion of the once ridiculous suggestion that a large meteor or part of a comet "struck the earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, sixty-five million years ago, triggering one of the five great mass extinctions of life's history," the one which killed all, yes, all dinosaurs. Gould notes that when Nobel-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and colleagues including his son Walter, Helen Michel and Frank Asaro, "first proposed their radical hypothesis of catastrophic extinction," it was met with rejection, containing both "ridicule and vehemence."
Beyond the general difficulty of accepting such a new and unheard-of proposition, the hypothesis entailed a larger and more general historical debate in evolutionary science: the above-mentioned Gradualism vs. Catastrophism. The Alvarez hypothesis was announced in 1979, coincidentally only a few years after Gould himself and colleague Niles Eldredge had staked their young careers on publication of an anti-gradualist thesis in "Punctuated Equilibria" (1972). Most paleontologists, however, argued that although the dinosaurs became extinct over a period of time toward the end of the Cretaceous era, there was literally no evidence that they had all died in such a short period as would be caused by a single event. And what kind of event could possibly affect the whole globe so quickly?
Part of the hold of Gradualism is that it allows for the myth that all of life has been evolving naturally toward the creation of the ideal creature, the highest and most complex creature, our humble selves. If catastrophes actually figure significantly in evolution, then the role of chance, of contingency and specific histories, would argue against steady advancement toward improvement. Nevertheless evidence began to accrue to support the Collision thesis: some of it geographical—a crater off the Mexican Yucatan; some of it mineralogical—involving unusually high concentrations of a mineral rare in indigenous earth, and "shock crystals" or "shocked quartz." So scoffing paleontologists were challenged—either to find or definitively not-find-- fossil evidence.
The argument that dinosaurs died off gradually, over a long period of geological time, was based on the way fossils seemed harder and harder to find in strata over a long era. There were no dinosaurs right up to the very edge of the supposed "cataclysm," so they were already all gone by then, supposedly. A determined search, straw by straw, as it were, was made in order to prove that the dinosaur fossils disappeared before the sudden "end" of the era which would coincide with a cataclysmic event. When the later strata of formations were gone through, "straw by straw," the various scientists issued graceful acknowledgment of defeat: "there is no significant change (in occurrence) between the lower, middle, and upper thirds of the formation. . . .These findings are consistent with an abrupt extinction scenario." The "missing" dinosaur remains were found, after all.
Finally, in 1994 there was visual confirmation of what an asteroid might do to a planet when the Shoemaker-Levy comet fragments bombarded Jupiter. One fragment produced "a fireball that exceeded the brightness" of the entire planet, and a gas plume some 1300 miles in height. Fragment G, the largest, was only about 2.0 to 2.5 miles in diameter. The Cretaceous-ending object was 6.0 miles across. Doubters became believers as the physics of planetary impact were vividly demonstrated.
Cultural paradigms die slowly, often agonizingly, for societies and for individuals. To change the very framework through which we view the world is wrenching and disorienting. Imagine today how many fundamentalists—with no science training and relying only on popular, often distorted impressions of evolutionary theory—simply cannot bear to contemplate what seems to them only a wild and unsupported theory which would (again, in the popular distortions of evolution) honor only the bestial in human beings, deny divine agency, contradict their religious foundations and endorse cruel competition, chaotic mayhem. Even if one is not a Christian fundamentalist, I think one needs a strong science background to resist the image that Social Darwinism seems still to project as justification for the worst excesses of dog-eat-dog corporate capitalism. (See new book by Robert H. Frank, The Darwin Economy ! Ox-pucky!)
There are also essays here on re-visioning what is right in front of us, partly because of new technology, but also because of slowly shifting paradigms. For instance, scientists can now conceive of asking whether a thirty-acre fungus is to be granted status as an individual? And since female aphids—dare we call them mothers?—can generate up to a billion little aphids parthenogenetically (i.e., without sexual fertilization), are these offspring individuals, or clones, or can clones be individuals? At last, it seems scientists are coming around to my way of thinking (I say this only partially in jest, as a Buddhist in philosophy and practice with its vision of being/not-beging "one with everything") and beginning to loosen rigid culturally biassed definitions of individuality. Nineteenth-century science, confined and defined as it was in Europe, was not likely to notice or consider any alternative definition of individuals as long as the model or ideal "progressive" society was one in which the individualist end of the continuum was obviously either God's idea or the idea that had replaced God.
Perhaps even thirty or twenty years ago a question of the individuality of a vast fungus would have been considered out of bounds. For one thing, what could be the "test" or "evidence" of individuality? Thus the organic complexity of a fungus was left in limbo, but believed to be completely different from the social sense of individuality. In fact, the "Humongous Fungus Among Us" (Gould) was a bit scary ideologically, simply too much like Star Trek's Borg, a cancerous envelopment of individuals who thereby lost their separate beings and were subservient to the oppressive "commune." In the sauve qui peut mindset of nineteenth and early twentieth century, "separation" and "individuation" literally defined the progressive and fully matured individual. From this perspective scientists and philosophers (and psychologists) argued that social insects are not individuals; they have no individual freedom. (See my review of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter mystery, Whose Body? and reference to "a few backward individuals.")
Genetic science has been a major factor in shifting science's purview. And now (perhaps) the fungus is an individual, by genetic analysis. The aphid clone is—a clone of perhaps a billion. All right, billion individuals. Bees and ants are individuals even without individual competition to leave the most (personal) progeny. It seems whenever males are not the kings of a portion of creation, and I am talking of the negligibility of the males in ants, bees and aphids, the Buddhist principle of interbeing is given more room to reverberate. Fish who change gender to suit the needs of the school!! Medusas, or other kinds of jellies, which are individuals without a single brain and without benefit of sexual reproduction, being made up of a big cohort of sisters, or a consort of sorority? I'm straying from Gould here, but no wonder.
I tell you, this evolution/paleontology/biology/science stuff is a gas. And Gould, -- well, he's a mine, from which we derive pure energy. Elegant, thorough, coherent, articulate, and (usually) clear and graceful. This 1995 book is a little on the self-indulgent side of his work, it seems to me, but still: these collections of his Natural History columns are readable, literate, often humorous, and always food for serious thought. Even for non-scientists. Like me. By the way, the anti-gradualist essay was reprinted in book form in 2007 as
Punctuated Equilibrium. Readable. Even for non-scientists. Yes, like me.
Gould, professor at Harvard and NYU, curator and important theorist himself in evolutionary science, was all his life engaged in an effort to eradicate the chasm between science and social understanding, or between academic and intellectual discourse and the rest of "us." His concern is always to eradicate faulty or downright false ideas about science in general and evolution most particularly. He constructs graceful, often humorous, but meticulous arguments about important ideas, starting from a detail, e.g., a historical event, a curious happenstance in the life of some artist, politician, or scientist, or even sports star, and leading with precision to general conclusions and theories.
Take, for example, one essay which is going to be deadly serious and worrisomely abstract about the debate between Gradualism (or Uniformitarianism) and Catastrophism (or Punctuated Equilibrium, as one of Gould's major scientific theories has it). But Gould doesn't start talking in the abstract or scientific jargon: he starts with some innocuous and amusing remarks on "Tongue Worms, Velvet Worms, and Water Bears." Illustrations of these eerie tiny creatures add greatly to the interest; one species is aptly called Hallucigenia. Gould leads the reader gently around to the fact that some scientists have cited these creatures as arguments against the Cambrian Explosion. And here we are embarking on geology and paleontology and the history of life, but carried along by little living fantasias to provoke the curiosity and by transparent prose. What is the Cambrian Explosion? A geologically brief time (a mere 5 million years!) nearly 550 million years ago. What exploded? Life! Most major groups of today's creatures first appear in discernible fossils during that "explosion" of life forms.
Gradualists find it unlikely that this all happened so (relatively) fast. It goes against the grain of almost unconscious expectation of uniform and gradual changes. Gould, the original 20th-century "catastrophist" in a way (and I oversimplify) is delighted therefore to share new data that uses Tongue Worms et al. to affirm the Cambrian Explosion.The argument against it cited the Tongue Worm phylla as representative of most early life in that it was soft-bodied so we couldn 't know much about origins because of course there aren't fossils before the Cambrian Explosion because soft bodies wouldn't leave fossils. So maybe the phylla of Tongue Worms evolved well after the supposed burst. But a new method for identifying the presence of "shell-less bone-less chicken-less eggs" found that these weird tiny creatures did, in fact, first occur during that 5-million-year episode of "Let there be (multi-celled) life!" Can you imagine the intellectual satisfaction of actually following this elucidation?
Dinosaur in a Haystack takes its name from a curious phenomenon, that of not finding Dinosaur fossils where they were not really expected to be. A common theme of Gould's penetrating essays on the interaction of social gestalts and scientific theories is that finding anything requires, first, the capacity to imagine that the thing exists somewhere, and, second, the ability to predict where to look. Plus, the third, a conviction that one must look painstakingly. The proverbial needle in the haystack is impossible to find in a casual search, especially if the searcher is not really sure there is one. Once the search is motivated by expectation of value and an image of what is being sought, then it makes sense to take apart the haystack straw by straw, with the inevitable result that if it's there it will be found.
The particular example here of missing dinosaurs is part of a six-essay centerpiece under the general title "Origin, Stability, and Extinction." All six deal with the problem of expectations, the difficulty of theoretical changes, and how changing expectations or models then begin to yield new results. The dinosaur example figures in a discussion of the once ridiculous suggestion that a large meteor or part of a comet "struck the earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, sixty-five million years ago, triggering one of the five great mass extinctions of life's history," the one which killed all, yes, all dinosaurs. Gould notes that when Nobel-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and colleagues including his son Walter, Helen Michel and Frank Asaro, "first proposed their radical hypothesis of catastrophic extinction," it was met with rejection, containing both "ridicule and vehemence."
Beyond the general difficulty of accepting such a new and unheard-of proposition, the hypothesis entailed a larger and more general historical debate in evolutionary science: the above-mentioned Gradualism vs. Catastrophism. The Alvarez hypothesis was announced in 1979, coincidentally only a few years after Gould himself and colleague Niles Eldredge had staked their young careers on publication of an anti-gradualist thesis in "Punctuated Equilibria" (1972). Most paleontologists, however, argued that although the dinosaurs became extinct over a period of time toward the end of the Cretaceous era, there was literally no evidence that they had all died in such a short period as would be caused by a single event. And what kind of event could possibly affect the whole globe so quickly?
Part of the hold of Gradualism is that it allows for the myth that all of life has been evolving naturally toward the creation of the ideal creature, the highest and most complex creature, our humble selves. If catastrophes actually figure significantly in evolution, then the role of chance, of contingency and specific histories, would argue against steady advancement toward improvement. Nevertheless evidence began to accrue to support the Collision thesis: some of it geographical—a crater off the Mexican Yucatan; some of it mineralogical—involving unusually high concentrations of a mineral rare in indigenous earth, and "shock crystals" or "shocked quartz." So scoffing paleontologists were challenged—either to find or definitively not-find-- fossil evidence.
The argument that dinosaurs died off gradually, over a long period of geological time, was based on the way fossils seemed harder and harder to find in strata over a long era. There were no dinosaurs right up to the very edge of the supposed "cataclysm," so they were already all gone by then, supposedly. A determined search, straw by straw, as it were, was made in order to prove that the dinosaur fossils disappeared before the sudden "end" of the era which would coincide with a cataclysmic event. When the later strata of formations were gone through, "straw by straw," the various scientists issued graceful acknowledgment of defeat: "there is no significant change (in occurrence) between the lower, middle, and upper thirds of the formation. . . .These findings are consistent with an abrupt extinction scenario." The "missing" dinosaur remains were found, after all.
Finally, in 1994 there was visual confirmation of what an asteroid might do to a planet when the Shoemaker-Levy comet fragments bombarded Jupiter. One fragment produced "a fireball that exceeded the brightness" of the entire planet, and a gas plume some 1300 miles in height. Fragment G, the largest, was only about 2.0 to 2.5 miles in diameter. The Cretaceous-ending object was 6.0 miles across. Doubters became believers as the physics of planetary impact were vividly demonstrated.
Cultural paradigms die slowly, often agonizingly, for societies and for individuals. To change the very framework through which we view the world is wrenching and disorienting. Imagine today how many fundamentalists—with no science training and relying only on popular, often distorted impressions of evolutionary theory—simply cannot bear to contemplate what seems to them only a wild and unsupported theory which would (again, in the popular distortions of evolution) honor only the bestial in human beings, deny divine agency, contradict their religious foundations and endorse cruel competition, chaotic mayhem. Even if one is not a Christian fundamentalist, I think one needs a strong science background to resist the image that Social Darwinism seems still to project as justification for the worst excesses of dog-eat-dog corporate capitalism. (See new book by Robert H. Frank, The Darwin Economy ! Ox-pucky!)
There are also essays here on re-visioning what is right in front of us, partly because of new technology, but also because of slowly shifting paradigms. For instance, scientists can now conceive of asking whether a thirty-acre fungus is to be granted status as an individual? And since female aphids—dare we call them mothers?—can generate up to a billion little aphids parthenogenetically (i.e., without sexual fertilization), are these offspring individuals, or clones, or can clones be individuals? At last, it seems scientists are coming around to my way of thinking (I say this only partially in jest, as a Buddhist in philosophy and practice with its vision of being/not-beging "one with everything") and beginning to loosen rigid culturally biassed definitions of individuality. Nineteenth-century science, confined and defined as it was in Europe, was not likely to notice or consider any alternative definition of individuals as long as the model or ideal "progressive" society was one in which the individualist end of the continuum was obviously either God's idea or the idea that had replaced God.
Perhaps even thirty or twenty years ago a question of the individuality of a vast fungus would have been considered out of bounds. For one thing, what could be the "test" or "evidence" of individuality? Thus the organic complexity of a fungus was left in limbo, but believed to be completely different from the social sense of individuality. In fact, the "Humongous Fungus Among Us" (Gould) was a bit scary ideologically, simply too much like Star Trek's Borg, a cancerous envelopment of individuals who thereby lost their separate beings and were subservient to the oppressive "commune." In the sauve qui peut mindset of nineteenth and early twentieth century, "separation" and "individuation" literally defined the progressive and fully matured individual. From this perspective scientists and philosophers (and psychologists) argued that social insects are not individuals; they have no individual freedom. (See my review of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter mystery, Whose Body? and reference to "a few backward individuals.")
Genetic science has been a major factor in shifting science's purview. And now (perhaps) the fungus is an individual, by genetic analysis. The aphid clone is—a clone of perhaps a billion. All right, billion individuals. Bees and ants are individuals even without individual competition to leave the most (personal) progeny. It seems whenever males are not the kings of a portion of creation, and I am talking of the negligibility of the males in ants, bees and aphids, the Buddhist principle of interbeing is given more room to reverberate. Fish who change gender to suit the needs of the school!! Medusas, or other kinds of jellies, which are individuals without a single brain and without benefit of sexual reproduction, being made up of a big cohort of sisters, or a consort of sorority? I'm straying from Gould here, but no wonder.
I tell you, this evolution/paleontology/biology/science stuff is a gas. And Gould, -- well, he's a mine, from which we derive pure energy. Elegant, thorough, coherent, articulate, and (usually) clear and graceful. This 1995 book is a little on the self-indulgent side of his work, it seems to me, but still: these collections of his Natural History columns are readable, literate, often humorous, and always food for serious thought. Even for non-scientists. Like me. By the way, the anti-gradualist essay was reprinted in book form in 2007 as
Punctuated Equilibrium. Readable. Even for non-scientists. Yes, like me.
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