Re-read review: Bully for Brontosaurus, by Stephen Jay Gould

 

It’s been a while since I’ve revisited Stephen Jay Gould’s natural history essays, which were one of my big inspirations when I was a kid when it came to thinking of biology as a career. I’m always pleased to find how well they hold up! Not always in terms of the state-of-the-science – it would be weird if there HADN’T been updates in the last 30-40 years! – but in terms of Gould’s wit and his ability to make his readers think about an issue more expansively and from new angles. I found myself pausing to consider if I needed to re-think how I teach certain evolutionary concepts in my own college courses, especially when I got to essay 10, which talks about the way stuff gets copied from one textbook to the next without anyone questioning why it is there!

 

Gould’s thoughts on biology and society also hold up better than many. One of my other science heroes when I was young was E.O. Wilson – who certainly made multiple key contributions to ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation that should be honored. However, shortly after his death I learned that he had, on the down-low, supported researchers who were proponents of “scientific racism”. Wilson himself tended to avoid publicly talking about race, in part because of fellow-Harvard-prof Gould! Which puts a whole new spin on their better-known intellectual beefs, and which I think was a reasonable fear of danger to his sterling reputation. Gould had already written a whole book demolishing ‘The Bell Curve’ (‘The Mismeasure of Man’) and had no patience for contemporaries who tried to over-extrapolate things, particularly if he thought that misapplication of science was actively harmful! (For a more recent explanation of why ‘The Bell Curve’ is based on bad science, see this video).

 

At the same time, in these essays Gould extends quite a lot of grace to people who have gone down in popular myth as crackpots or enemies of science. For instance, he shows that Willams Jennings Bryan’s attacks on the teaching of evolution (most famously via the Scopes ‘monkey’ trial) were not a deviation from his earlier progressivism, but rather him applying the same principles in a misguided way. Bryan was well aware of the dangers of ‘social Darwinism’ and the eugenics movement…he just didn’t understand the basics of evolutionary theory well enough to know that those are not actually part of it! Likewise, Gould talks about anarchist author and scientist Pyotr Kropotkin and his book ‘Mutual Aid’ in the context of Russian evolutionary thought, which more heavily emphasized cooperation in nature as a way to survive harsh environmental conditions. He concludes that, while Kropotkin’s political ideology and early intellectual environment may have influenced him to over-emphasize the cooperative aspect, many of his British and American contemporaries were over-emphasizing the ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ stuff to an equal degree (influenced by their own political-economic ideas) – but nature contains both!

 

These natural history essays also contain an amount of historical, artistic, and biographical material that might be surprising to those unfamiliar with Gould’s style. He clearly had a lot of interests beyond evolutionary biology, and he loved finding ways to tie it in. Some of these efforts might have some readers going “Jeez, where are the dinosaurs already?” but do eventually reach the science-related point he was going for, while others are likely to be delightful and engaging to most people right from the start.

 

Thoughts on individual essays

 

Prologue – Rarely is there an intro piece this fun or worth reading! Gould reflects on the importance of popular science writing and which of the two main forms he falls into, as well as the importance of conservation for humans.

 

George Canning’s Left Buttock and the Origin of Species - The momentum is lost a bit here, in my opinion. This essay is a rambling set of historical facts that ends up as an illustration of contingency – a point Gould liked to stress when it comes to how evolution played out and whether it had to play out exactly that way.

Grimm’s Greatest Tale – This essay relates the study of the relationships between languages to the construction of evolutionary trees. This was written just as we were beginning to get any genetic information to trace the relationships between human groups, and Gould is intrigued by the degree of congruence between the language family tree and the genetic family tree, which suggests that languages diverged from one another as humans moved around the globe.

Science update: The general pattern described has more or less held. However, mitochondrial vs. Y-chromosome markers has helped with tracing descent from mothers vs. fathers, and the thousands of SNP markers on the recombining chromosomes can identify areas of higher intermixing in both ancient and modern times. This can help with understanding origins of cultures that were otherwise historically obscure. For instance, most Ainu (the indigenous people of Japan) belong to a small Y chromosome haplotype group that includes theAndaman islanders (a very dark-skinned group living some ways off the coast of Myanmar). That suggests that both descend from an early group of eastward migrants who adapted to their local environments - lighter or darker skin, depending on the UV levels - and that was replaced in regions in between by a later wave of human migrants. If this scenario is true, I would expect a good amount of “mutational divergence” in the Ainu and Andaman languages reflecting the long time gap, but a closer affinity between the two than between either one and either Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. However Ainu is spoken by very few people and may already have adopted a lot of words from proto-Japanese, so the attempt would have to try to identify words that weren’t borrowed and focus on those.

The Creation Myths of Cooperstown – Here Gould basically asks: If we know for sure that baseball “evolved” from pre-existing stick-and-ball-games…why do so many people still want to believe the fake “invented whole cloth by one guy” myth?

The Panda’s Thumb of Technology – If you ever wondered about the origin and persistence of the QWERTY keyboard, this essay will give you all the details you could want. The connection to Natural History is that historical processes often show themselves most clearly in the dumb and poorly-designed more than the perfect!

 

Bully for Brontosaurus – Explains the changes in how scientific naming works and why it matters via “Brotosaurus or Apatosaurus?”

Science update: Brontosaurus is back! While the original type specimen got reclassified as Apatosaurus, in 2015 Tschopp et al. proposed that it is  valid to distinguish the two separate genera … but not all paleontologists agree.

The Dinosaur Rip-off – Gould reflects on the dinosaur mania that was sweeping the world in the 1980s – quite a change from his own days as a lonely dinosaur-obsessed child! He proposes, while mostly marketing-driven, this trend could be channeled to get more people genuinely interested in science.

 “We [Americans] are a profoundly non-intellectual culture, but we are not committed to this attitude; in fact, we are scarcely committed to anything.”

 

Of Kiwi Eggs and the Liberty Bell – An essay about how the huge size of the kiwi egg may not be an adaptation, per se, so much as a result of the body shrinking while the egg remained almost ostrich/moa sized.
Science Update: DNA evidence suggests that moas and kiwis are not each other's closest relatives among the ratites and that ratites evolved flightlessness 3-6 different times AFTER the breakup of Gondwana, rather than riding the fragments of that ancient supercontinent to their present locations ! However, elephant birds (the kiwi’s closest relative) also have larger eggs relative to their body size than other ratites, and it is likely their common ancestor did too - so the basic gist of the argument may still hold.
Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples – Gould explains how two features of humans that often puzzle people who assume that every trait is an adaptation (male nipples and clitoral orgasms) are very easily explained if you can let that assumption go. He points out that male and female bodies are formed from the same developmental pattern and basic set of genes. Therefore, male mammals have nipples not for any special purpose that needs to be explained, but because female mammals have them. And nerves are concentrated in the clitoris rather than the vagina because clitorises and penises start out as the same little bud of tissue in the embryo. BUT – that doesn’t invalidate either feature! He notes that he is personally quite attached to all his bits, however they happened to arise.

If I were to update this essay, I’d up the emphasis on how erogenous zones that are not directly related to getting sperm on eggs can still develop social functions. For example, many species (including humans and our cousins the bonobos, but also creatures as varied as porcupines, swallows, and dolphins) use sexual contact that cannot possibly lead to reproduction as a means of social bonding. That doesn’t mean that the bodily features involved evolved for that purpose any more than our fingers and thumbs evolved to type on a computer. BUT once a species has a given feature, they can be put to new purposes. It would also be worth pointing out that the male prostate can also act as an “orgasm button” despite being even less likely to be triggered by reproductive sex – another “happy accident.”

Not Necessarily a Wing – How does a wing evolve from something else if half a wing is useless for flight? Gould here describes new evidence from insects that insect wings likely started out as devices for thermal regulation. These increase in efficiency with size, but only up to a point. At around that size, however, they begin to be large enough to glide on – which means that that in some proto-insect lineages, selection could begin favoring more aerodynamic variants.

Science Update: Since this essay was written, much light has been shed on the evolution of bird flight as well. A wealth of fossil dinosaurs with feathers as well as those of early birds have been discovered, revealing that most dinosaurs probably had feathers, with some of the early ones being small creatures covered in fuzzy filaments that would have helped retain body heat like the fur of mammals. Others had long feathers on their wings and tails, likely for display to mates, but would have been far too heavy to fly. BUT, as with the insects, once those long feathers existed, natural selection could modify them into gliding structures. Microraptor was a crow-sized dinosaur that had long feathers on both its legs and arms and toes structured to climb trees, suggesting that it could at least glide like a flying squirrel, and may have been capable of limited flapping flight as well.

 

The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone – This essay reflects on the rather mindless copying of ideas in textbooks, and digs into one in particular: describing the ancient horse Eohippus/Hyracotherium as “the size of a fox terrier”. Gould says he even found himself writing this, before pausing to call a dog fancier friend to ask what a fox terrier looks like!

Science Update: Gould also questions why we keep teaching students about Lamarkism (evolution by inheritance of features acquired during life) when we don’t insist on teaching them about every other discredited scientific idea. However, since the discovery of epigenetic inheritance (that is, modifications that affect whether DNA is expressed – not its underlying sequence – which can be acquired during life over 1-4 generations, I do find it useful to be able to say “Lamark was almost entirely wrong, especially with regard to long-term evolutionary patterns. BUT…”

Life’s Little Joke – The “joke” here is how important horses were for the European conquest of the Americas, considering that they evolved in the Americas in the first place but just happened to go extinct! It also covers how the usual way horse evolution is covered in textbooks gives the mistaken impression of a clear progression from 4 toes to a single hoof. In fact the one-toed horses were a small side-branch of a very diverse set of 3 toed horses. Apparently clear sequences of progressive change (like in horses and humans) are generally result of something cataclysmic happening to most of the members of that group, “pruning” an exuberant bush to that single stalk; you can’t tell a linear story for still-diverse groups like bats or beetles, for example!

The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs – A fun story about how a group led by Lavoisier and Benjamin Franklin scientifically tested and debunked the claims of Mesmerism.

 

Madame Jeanette – Gould revisits the choir he used to sing in as a youngster, and muses on how their old instructor inspired greatness. He’s a little sad that the choir doesn’t seem as popular with boys anymore, though he thinks the woman leading it does a good job, and appreciates the greater diversity of musical styles the kids (a more diverse bunch themselves) are learning. In an afterword, he seems to turn more toward mourning the loss of “islands of excellence”…which seems a little blinkered to me, because I tend to suspect OTHER such islands pop up even as the one you are nostalgic about erodes due to changing fashions (for instructional styles as well as music).

Red Wings in the Sunset – This one is about the artist-naturalist Thayer, who rightly discovered the principles of countershading and disruptive patterns in the concealing patterns of animals, but then went on to be mocked for over-applying the idea of concealment to everything, including the bright plumage of flamingos. Gould is charitable; Thayer got an idée fixe, and “is such passion the exclusive birthright of artists? I have known many scientists equally insufferable.”

Petrus Camper’s Angle – This article deals with the kind of facial measurements that racist scientists used to try and rank human groups, specifically the angle between the brow and the lips…and how Camper, the anatomist and painter who developed that measure, never meant it for that! His primary aim was to more accurately depict people of different races in art (as opposed to, say, drawing one of the Three Kings like he’s in blackface). True, he did think you could rank human races by beauty. But he didn’t think that that implied anything about, say, relative intelligence – that was a later misapplication of the metric.This is kind of similar to how IQ was originally designed only to identify which children in school might need extra instructional help, not to judge which adults were intrinsically smarter…but that’s how people started using it!

Literary Bias on the Slippery Slope – How the story of the discovery of the Burgess Shale fossil beds shifted to become a more pleasing (but less historically accurate) tale.

 

Glow, Big Glowworm – The tale of the glowworms of New Zealand and Australia, an organism that illustrates why we shouldn’t treat the adult form of metamorphosing organisms (eg. butterflies or frogs) as automatically the “true” or most interesting form. (Note - I saw these guys in their natural habitat, and in a large cave they are absolutely spectacular)

To be a Platypus and Bligh’s Bounty – Essays about the platypus and the echidna, respectively, illustrating why being a basal lineage does not mean that every feature is primitive! In the case of the platypus, their bill is a highly specialized feeding tool full of sensitive nerve endings that helps them find prey in dark water. In the case of the echidna, far from being the dumb primitive beasts many early scientists assumed, they have quite large brains for their size and can solve puzzles as well or better than rats and cats.

Science update: The evolution of platypuses in particular is much more complicated than used to be assumed. Recent fossil evidence indicates that not only were there ancient platypuses that weighed as much as a spaniel, but their aquatic adaptations are derived traits relative to echidna-like ancestors. In addition, platypuses are fluorescent, but it is still unclear why!

Here Goes Nothing – The focus here is the gastric brooding frogs of Australia (now sadly extinct), and how their odd method of brooding their eggs in their stomachs might have evolved. Here Gould gets to expound on the old theme of luck/chance. Such a strategy requires a bit more of a leap to get to than we often see in evolution. But low probability events can still happen…just not as often as smaller changes like a shift from lighter to darker coloring.

 

In a Jumbled Drawer – Gould recounts his experience as a new curator finding one drawer with a note in it that proved to have been written 100 years ago from N.S. Schaler to Louis Agassiz apologizing for its messy state. Agassiz never found the note or the disordered fossils, apparently, but it did get Gould musing on why the intelligent Schaler was so…boot-licking, frankly, toward Agassiz (and his wrong ideas about evolution), when other equally intelligent people like William James viewed the old master more skeptically. And James has an excellent reply to the old anthropic principle (or, rather, fallacy) that Agassiz and Schaler fell prey to, and which seems to keep cropping up in every generation. 

Kropotkin was no Crackpot – See notes above!

Fleeming Jenkin Revisited – The titular person is famous to biologists for getting Darwin to concede a point about inheritance unnecessarily (since Mendel disproved blending inheritance, but his work was not well known yet in England). However, Gould argued that Darwin recognized that, even if Jenkins was right that a single mutation would be blended away, repeated mutations need not be, especially if they conferred an advantage. And Jenkin presents another point about the possible limits of variation in a species that is actually quite worth considering.

The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier –In an essay mostly about on Lavoisier’s execution, Gould muses on timescales of creation and destruction:
“I have heard people argue that our current wave of extinctions should not inspire concern because the earth will eventually recover…But what can a conjecture about 10 million years from now possibly mean to our lives…others could do the unfinished work of Lavoisier, if not so elegantly…But how can this mitigate the tragedy?”

The Godfather of Disaster – The historical figure covered here is William Whiston, the successor to Newton’s seat at Cambridge, who wrote a book trying to argue that everything the bible says about creation is perfectly reasonable…if you assume convenient comets doing convenient things (sometimes to contradictory effects) whenever the story needs them to! While agreeing with the satirical Jonathan Swift that Whiston took things way too far, and was not following proper scientific procedure, Gould notes that we have discovered that things like asteroid impacts can indeed sometimes interrupt Lyellian or classical Darwinian gradualism, with important effects on the history of life!

 

Knight Takes Bishop? – About how the legendary exchange of barbs between T.H. Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce over Darwin’s theory was exactly that – an exaggerated legend. But the debate, in which the botanist Hooker really did more heavy lifting, did inspire Huxley to improve his oratorical skills, enabling him to actually become “Darwin’s bulldog” in later years.

Genesis and Geology – This one is about the meaning some people read into what looks, at first glance, like a correspondence between the sequence of events in the Genesis creation story and what we know about the history of earth in a scientific sense. I’ll admit being rather fascinated by that as a child, though even then I did notice the first discrepancy: flying things show up way too early in the Genesis sequence. Moreover, as Gould points out, we didn’t get ALL the sea creatures and then ALL the plants and then ALL the land animals.

I would add a fact pointed out to me by a literature professor who also happened to go to my church: there are actually two creation stories in Genesis, one that follows this intriguing sequence, and then one after it that starts over with a barren earth, then Adam, then Eve, then plants and animals. This likely resulted from the compilers of the Old Testament attempting to reconcile different versions of key stories, but in some cases just including both. So if we were trying to be literal…which story are we supposed to say reflects the true sequence of events?

William Jennings Bryan’s Last Campaign – See notes above!

An Essay on a Pig Roast – How an incident much mocked by creationists, in which the tooth of an ancient peccary was briefly held up as that of an ancient human, actually illustrates the scientific method working at its best. Because, you see, that hypothesis got tested and rejected really quite quickly!

Justice Scalia’s Misunderstanding – This essay deals with the common misunderstanding that certain scientific fields (like evolutionary biology or geology) always or only seek to explain origins when really they are more about understanding processes which can be observed, not whatever initially kicked them off. Gould points out that there is abundant evidence that species evolve, regardless of how life came to be. Indeed, he argues that that question is outside of the scope of his field – but people like Justice Scalia act like only that question matters, and if you can’t give an definite answer then evolution is either invalid or just as faith-based as “intelligent design” (despite the fact that we can literally see evolution happen in front of our eyes in short-generation species like bacteria or finches).

Science update: Now, while Gould is correct that the origin of life isn’t the primary focus of evolutionary biology, the combined efforts of scientists in other fields as well as evolutionary biologists have yielded some fascinating information about how life may have originated. Astrophysics, can tell us a lot about how the earth formed and when meteor bombardment slowed down enough that it could cool and the oceans could form. Geology can tell us about what the composition of the earth and its early atmosphere was like based on what type of rocks and minerals formed where; for instance, whether oxygen gas was present. Biochemistry has confirmed that “organic” molecules like lipids and amino acids can form outside of a cell under those early-earth conditions, particularly in environments like deep-sea vents, and that lipids can self-organize into membrane-bound bubbles that can grow (by picking up more lipid molecules) and divide. Genetic analyses have let us confirm that all species living today had a single common ancestor – though that last universal common ancestor (LUCA) wasn’t the first living thing, and there were undoubtedly other branches of early microbial life that died out without leaving descendants. Indeed, while LUCA probably had all those features that living cells today share, like DNA chromosomes, the very earliest life may have been RNA-based, given that unlike DNA, RNA can catalyze its own replication – and, indeed, RNA still plays many crucial roles in cells today. While these pieces of evidence are not fully definitive yet, we certainly have a much better idea of how one could get life from non-life through natural processes than we had in the 1980s!

However, Gould is right about one thing: Good science is not so much about asking BIG questions as about asking TESTABLE ones…and what is testable depends both on the framing of the question, and the available technology.

 

The Streak of Streaks – Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak, and statistical fallacies.

The Median Isn’t the Message – Gould gets especially personal here, talking about how his knowledge of statistics actually helped him in dealing with a very scary cancer diagnosis.

The Ant and the Plant – Some musing on chromosome numbers, and how amazing it is that there are some ants (that look just like any other) wandering around with just one chromosome, whereas an equally unassuming plant manages to wrangle over 600 pairs of them for every cell division!

 

The Face of Miranda and The Horn of Triton – These two essays are responses to the amazing images sent back by the Voyager expedition, in which Gould draws a comparison between organisms and planets/moons. Namely, while we can identify general patterns, unlike an oxygen atom, if we really want to know a species, individual organism, or planet, then we need to know specifics about its history and interactions with others. Planets and moons are individuals.