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摘要
摘要
In his ninth collection of essays, bestselling scientist Stephen Jay Gould once again offers his unmistakable perspective on natural history and the people who have tried to make sense of it. In tandem with the closing of the millennium, Gould is planning to bring down the curtain on his nearly thirty-year stint as a monthly essayist forNatural Historymagazine. This, then, is the next-to-last essay collection from one of the most acclaimed and widely read scientists of our time. In twenty-three essays, Gould presents the richness and fascination of the various lives that have fueled the enterprise of science and opened our eyes to a world of unexpected wonders. Part I treats the most absorbing period in Gould's own subject, paleontology--the premodern struggle (from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century) to understand the origin of fossils while nascent science grappled with the deepest of all questions about the nature of both causality and reality. Are fossils the remains of ancient organisms on an old earth, or manifestations of a stable and universal order, symbolically expressed by correspondences among nature's three kingdoms---animal, mineral, and vegetable? Part II discusses the greatest conjunction of a time, a subject, and an assemblage of amazing people in the history of natural history: the late-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth century in France, when a group that included some of the most exceptional intellects of the millennium--Georges Buffon, Antoine Lavoisier, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck--invented the scientific study of natural history in an age of revolution. Part III illustrates the greatest British challenge to this continental preeminence: the remarkable, and wonderfully literate, leading lights of Victorian science in Darwin's age of turmoil and reassessment: Lyell's uniformitarianism, Darwin's own intellectual development, Richard Owen's invention of dinosaurs, and Alfred Russel Wallace on Victorian certainties and subsequent unpredictabilities. The last three parts of the book do not invoke biography so explicitly, but they use the same device of embodying an abstraction within a particular that can be addressed in sufficient detail and immediate focus to fit within an essay. The interlude of Part IV presents some experiments in the different literary form of short takes. Part V, on scientific subjects with more obvious and explicit social consequences (and often unacknowledged social origins as well), also uses biography, but in a different way, to link past stories with present realities--to convey the lesson that claims for objectivity based on pure discovery often replay episodes buried in history, and prove that our modern certainties flounder within the same complexities of social context and mental blockage. Finally, Part VI abandons biography for another device of essayists: major themes (about evolution's different expression across scales of size and time) cast into the epitome of odd and intriguing particulars.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
Harvard paleontologist Gould (The Panda's Thumb; Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, etc.) first became known to nonscientists through his monthly essays in Natural History magazine, delving into topics involving fossils, geology, evolutionary biology and the history of science. After 27 years of columns, Gould has announced that he will stop writing them at year's end: these 24 essays represent his next-to-last assortment. The first two-thirds of the book address unknown or misunderstood figures from Renaissance, Enlightenment and Victorian natural history. Often Gould uses their careers to debunk triumphalist notions of foreordained, linear scientific progress, reminding us instead "that scientists can work only within their social and psychological contexts." Eighteenth-century scholar Johann Beringer wrote a treatise on the wondrous "lying stones" (Lugensteine) of Wurzburg, a hoax cruel colleagues planted to make him look dumb: "Beringer could not have been more wrong about the Lugensteine, but he couldn't have been more right about the power of paleontology." A colleague of Galileo's, "the sadly underrated Francesco Stelluti" deserves attention both as a pioneer of empirical method and as a demonstration of its limits. A subsequent moving but lightweight segment collects six short pieces, among them commemorations of Carl Sagan and Joe DiMaggio. Other essays retell with vigor and asperity the stories of how some right-wingers have misused Darwin, and of how later racists (some witting, some un-) have misinterpreted genes in order to justify social inequities. Reentering the debate about human genetics and behavior, Gould offers a nuanced view of the nature-nurture interaction: "Both inheritance and upbringing matter," he summarizes, but "an adult human being... cannot be disaggregated into separate components with attached percentages." Gould says he hopes to "fuse the literary essay and the popular scientific article into something distinctive": the digressions, ideas and arguments here demonstrate once again that he has done so. 45 b&w illustrations. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
From the distinguished and eloquent Gould (Zoology & Geology/Harvard; Leonardo's Mountain and the Diet of Worms, 1998), a characteristically genial and stimulating intellectual stroll. Contemplating his impending retirement from a nearly 30-year stint as the monthly essayist of Natural History magazine, Gould offers here what he promises will be his next-to-last collection of essays. Despite the subtitle, most of these disparate ``penultimate reflections'' do not discuss natural history, but the history of natural history. Gould's first three essays, presented as discussions of the ``nature of fossils and the history of the earth,'' are really erudite treatments of historic errors: a crude 18th-century hoax involving fake fossils; mistakes by 17th-century Italian scientists (including the great Galileo) relied too heavily upon direct observation; and the misclassification (for over 200 years) of the molds of brachiopod shells as ``vulva stones'' based on an accidental similarity to female genitalia. Thoughtfully and charmingly, Gould then talks about the observational, taxonomic, and theoretical work of 18th- and 19th-century French and British naturalists, linking his insights to developments in the growth of geology and natural history as scientific disciplines: Lavoisier, Lamarck, Lyell, Darwin, Richard Owen (who developed a theory of dinosaurs), and Alfred Russel Wallace (who conceived the theory of evolution after Darwin, but before Darwin published his identical theory) all receive this treatment. Often departing the realm of natural history altogether, Gould discusses (in a pleasantly rambling fashion) the popular love of science; the origins of excellence in Mozart, Mark McGwire, Carl Sagan, Joe DiMaggio, and Mel Allen (the ``voice of the Yankees''); Darwinism vs. ``social Darwinism''; the tendency to confuse mental systems with reality; cloning and individuality; chemical warfare; short-term and long-term evolution; and spatial competition among species. Vintage Gould: stimulating, erudite, and eminently enjoyable.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
One welcomes Gould's new book with a touch of melancholy, as he has announced it will be his next-to-last collection of essays. With Montaigne as his muse and paleontological history as his material, Gould contrasts in intriguing ways the contemporary popular perception of inevitable progress in science with the actual arduousness, errors, and human dramas by which it has been advanced since the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Gould has little truck with our retrospective superiority (How could people not understand that fossils were ancient life?). Rather, he dwells on the great issues, for example, the origin of fossils, to which figures famous and obscure devoted their entire intellect. This biographical hook introduces readers to one Dr. Johann Beringer, whom "canonical" science condemns for proclaiming as genuine some fraudulent fossils, an episode Gould then links with his modern-day encounter with the same fraud--being foisted on tourists in Marrakech. Eighteenth-century French naturalists, such as Georges Buffon and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, elicit Gould's inquiry into the subject of sic transit gloria: Why are they, famous in their day, dismissed in ours? Next up is a quartet of British Victorians, including the coiner of the word dinosaur (Richard Owen), whose lives produce another Gouldian harvest of insights and connections. Adding a group of nonscientific pieces on baseball, Mozart's Requiem, the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, and more, this collection evinces no dimming of Gould's humanistic brilliance. --Gilbert Taylor
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
Month after month, for nearly 30 years, Gould has written articulate, substantial, and provocative essays for Natural History magazine. With equal regularity, every two years his latest articles have been republished in anthology form. This new installment follows the standard, successful format. There is an integrative preface and six topical, interrelated sections: "Episodes in the Birth of Paleontology," "Present at the Creation," "Darwin's Century and Ours," "Six Little Pieces on the Meaning and Location of Excellence," "Science in Society," and "Evolution at All Scales." Throughout, Gould employs his familiar techniques of using biography to humanize science and relating episodes from the history of science to illuminate contemporary issues. This is the promised next-to-last collection in the series, which lends it a feeling of building toward finality. Gould's books are always popular in public libraries, and some are even cited in primary scientific literature, so this is a solid purchase for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/99.]--Gregg Sapp, Univ. of Miami Lib., Coral Gables, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
摘录
摘录
In the fall of 1973, I received a call from Alan Ternes, editor of Natural History magazine. He asked me if I would like to write columns on a monthly basis, and he told me that folks actually get paid for such activities. (Until that day, I had published only in technical journals.) The idea intrigued me, and I said that I'd try three or four. Now, 290 monthly essays later (with never a deadline missed), I look only a little way forward to the last item of this extended series--to be written, as number 300 exactly, for the millennial issue of January 2001. One really should follow the honorable principle of quitting while still ahead, a rare form of dignity chosen by such admirable men as Michael Jordan and Joe DiMaggio, my personal hero and mentor from childhood. (Joe died, as I put this book together, full of years and in maximal style and grace, after setting one last record--for number of times in receiving last rites and then rallying.) Our millennial transition may represent an arbitrary imposition of human decisions upon nature's true cycles, but what grander symbol for calling a halt and moving on could possibly cross the path of a man's lifetime? This ninth volume of essays will therefore be the penultimate book in a series that shall close by honoring the same decimal preference lying behind our millennial transition. If this series has finally found a distinctive voice, I have learned this mode of speech in the most gradual, accumulating, and largely unconscious manner--against my deepest personal beliefs in punctuational change and the uniquely directive power (despite an entirely accidental origin) of human reason in evolution. I suppose I had read a bit of Montaigne in English 101, and I surely could spell the word, but I had no inkling about the definitions and traditions of the essay as a literary genre when Alan Ternes called me cold on that fine autumn day. I began the series with quite conventional notions about writing science for general consumption. I believed, as almost all scientists do (by passively imbibing a professional ethos, not by active thought or decision), that nature speaks directly to unprejudiced observers, and that accessible writing for nonscientists therefore required clarity, suppression of professional jargon, and an ability to convey the excitement of fascinating facts and interesting theories. If I supposed that I might bring something distinctive to previous efforts in this vein, I managed to formulate only two vague personal precepts: first, I would try to portray all subjects at the same conceptual depth that I would utilize in professional articles (that is, no dumbing down of ideas to accompany necessary clarification of language); second, I would use my humanistic and historical interests as a "user friendly" bridge to bring readers into the accessible world of science. Over the years, however, this mere device (the humanistic "bridge") became an explicit centrality, a feature that I permitted myself to accept (and regard as a source of comfort and pride rather than an idiosyncrasy to downplay or even to hide) only when I finally realized that I had been writing essays, not mere columns, all along--and that nearly five hundred years of tradition had established and validated (indeed, had explicitly defined) the essay as a genre dedicated to personal musing and experience, used as a gracious entrée, or at least an intriguing hook, for discussion of general and universal issues. (Scientists are subtly trained to define the personal as a maximally dangerous snare of subjectivity and therefore to eschew the first person singular in favor of the passive voice in all technical writing. Some scientific editors will automatically blue-pencil the dreaded I at every raising of its ugly head. Therefore, "popular science writing" and "the literary essay" rank as an ultimately disparate, if not hostile, pairing of immis Excerpted from The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.目录
Preface | p. 1 |
I Episodes in the Birth of Paleontology: The Nature of Fossils and the History of the Earth | |
1. The Lying Stones of Marrakech | p. 9 |
2. The Sharp-Eyed Lynx, Outfoxed by Nature | p. 27 |
3. How the Vulva Stone Became a Brachiopod | p. 53 |
II Present at the Creation: How France's Three Finest Scientists Established Natural History in an Age of Revolution | |
4. Inventing Natural History in Style | p. 75 |
5. The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates | p. 91 |
6. A Tree Grows in Paris: Lamarck's Division of Worms and Revision of Nature | p. 115 |
III Darwin's Century--And Ours: Lessons from Britain's Four Greatest Victorian Naturalists | |
7. Lyell's Pillars of Wisdom | p. 147 |
8. A Sly Dullard Named Darwin: Recognizing the Multiple Facets of Genius | p. 169 |
9. An Awful Terrible Dinosaurian Irony | p. 183 |
10. Second-Guessing the Future | p. 201 |
IV Six Little Pieces on the Meaning and Location of Excellence | |
Substrate and Accomplishment | |
11. Drink Deep, or Taste Not the Pierian Spring | p. 221 |
12. Requiem Eternal | p. 227 |
13. More Power to Him | p. 231 |
De Mortuis When Truly Bonum | |
14. Bright Star Among Billions | p. 237 |
15. The Glory of His Time and Ours | p. 241 |
16. This Was a Man | p. 245 |
V Science In Society | |
17. A Tale of Two Work Sites | p. 251 |
18. The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W | p. 269 |
19. Dolly's Fashion and Louis's Passion | p. 287 |
20. Above All, Do No Harm | p. 299 |
VI Evolution at All Scales | |
21. Of Embryos and Ancestors | p. 317 |
22. The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant | p. 333 |
23. Room of One's Own | p. 347 |
Illustration Credits | p. 357 |
Index | p. 359 |