Dinosaur in a Haystack!

Our book today is the late Stephen Jay Gould’s 1995 essay collection Dinosaur in a Haystack, but no matter which of Gould’s dozen essay collections I revisit, the little pang of that “late” is always the same: even after more than a decade, there is no settlement with this man’s death – the present-day intellectual world needs him as exigently as ever, and so a part of my mind always uses that “the late” with a lick of irritation: not dead, but “the late” as in we’re impatiently waiting out his temporary absence.

Alas, not so. This warm, voluble, disarmingly erudite man is gone, and his books remain to catch faint echoes of the rapid-fire brilliance of his talk.

The essays that comprise Dinosaur in a Haystack were all written on Gould’s monthly deadline for his berth in Natural History magazine, an extremely happy partnership that lasted for years and gave Gould a schedule of production that did his writing and even his thinking a world of good. That regular deadline forced Gould, in between his duties teaching at Harvard and consulting deep in the bowels of the American Museum of Natural History, in between all the other demands on his time, to mentally organize a new discourse every month. Such deadlines were a boon to those essays – almost all of them are impeccably shaped and controlled (the control is especially welcome when even favorably-inclined readers behold with horror the sprawling bagatelle that is Gould’s 2002 magnum opus The Structure of Evolutionary Theory).

And they’re so various! You can find everything in a book of Gould essays. Due to random timing, some of the essays in Dinosaur in a Haystack spin out their span under the huge shadow of Stephen Spielberg’s cinematic hit Jurassic Park, which caused Gould no end of minor irritation, since anybody who knew anything about him knew he was “in dinosaurs” and so assumed he must have lots of opinions about the movie. And he did, of course:

For paleontologists, Jurassic Park is both our greatest opportunity and our most oppressive incubus – a spur for unparalleled general interest in our subject, and the source of a commercial flood that may truly extinguish dinosaurs by turning them from sources of awe into cliches and commodities. Will we have strength to stand up in this deluge?

Predictably – wonderfully predictably – Gould takes the opportunity to point out that the truth of dinosaurs will always be more amazing than the fiction of dinosaurs:

Our task is hopeless if museums, in following their essences and respecting authenticity, condemn themselves to marginality, insolvency, and empty corridors. But, fortunately, this need not and should not be our fate. We have an absolutely wonderful product to flog – real objects of nature. We may never entice as many visitors as Jurassic Park, but we can and do attract multitudes for the right reasons. Luckily – and I do not pretend to understand why – authenticity stirs the human soul. The appeal is cerebral and entirely conceptual, not at all visual. Casts and replicas are now sufficiently indistinguishable from the originals that no one but the seasoned expert can possibly tell the difference. But a cast of the Rosetta Stone is plaster (however intriguing and informative), while the object itself, on display in the British Museum, is magic. A fiberglass Tyrannosaurus merits a good look, the real bones send shivers down my spine, for I know that they supported an actual breathing and roaring animal some 70 million years ago.

And depending on his mood, Gould could also frequently turn from the playful to the darkly profound. In one of this collection’s best and most moving essays, for instance, he finds himself thinking about the infamous Nazi leadership conference held at Wannsee in 1942 and how the “Protocol” of that conference laid out very specific guidelines for Nazi racist practices (“What can be more insane,” Gould asks, “than madness that constructs its own byzantine taxonomy – or are we just witnessing the orderly mind of the petty bureaucrat applied to human lives rather than office files?”). The part of this Protocol that most tortures Gould is the part closest to his own passions – the Nazi formulators held that those few Jews who managed to survive the longest in their slave labor camps would no doubt be the strongest in terms of natural selection – an assertion which causes an entirely different shiver down Gould’s spine:

Perhaps you do not see the special horror of this line (embedded, as it is, in such maximal evil). But what can be more wrenching than the violation of ones’s own child, or the perversion for vicious purpose of the most noble item in a person’s world? I am an evolutionary biologist by original training and a quarter-century of practice. Charles Darwin is the resident hero in my realm – and few professions can name a man so brilliant, so admirable, and so genial as both founder and continuing inspiration. Darwin, of course, gave a distinctive name to his theory of evolutionary change: natural selection. This theory has a history of misuse almost as long as its proper pedigree. Claptrap and bogus Darwinian formulations have been used to justify every form of social exploitation – rich over poor, technologically complex over traditional, imperialist over aborigine, conqueror over defeated in war. Every evolutionist knows this history only too well, and we bear some measure of collective responsibility for the uncritical fascination that many of us have shown for such unjustified extensions. But most false expropriations of our chief phrase have been undertaken without our knowledge and against our will.

Every chapter in Dinosaur in a Haystack works against those two life-long adversaries of Gould: claptrap and bogus Darwinian formulations, and it’s always bracing to dip into his prose for just that reason: here’s cheerful rationality in ascendence, here’s fun poked at intellectual phonies, here’s a Queens-style nose thumbed at every conformist bully who’s ever browbeat a champion of thought and fact. In Gould’s essays, the nerdy kids, the brainy dinosaur-fanciers, the kind ones, are always on the winning side, and the best of all possible teachers and allies is, for the length of these fantastic essays anyway, not late at all but right on time.