THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602080637
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES SCHULTZ
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
DINOSAUR IN A HAYSTACK
Reflections in Natural History
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
Harmony Books. 480 pp. $25.
Tired of empty TV sound bites, inane on-line computer chat, and half-baked opinions ceaselessly served up by professional whiners?
Maybe this midwinter it's time to turn down the information age volume and curl up with the latest book of essays from Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard evolutionary biologist and paleontologist.
No light snack, this; just hearty and filling fare that should keep you sated until spring. If, that is, you care to digest the latest on dinosaurs, velvet worms and the occasional blue antelope.
``I am not a modest man . . . '' Gould writes in the book's introduction. ``. . . I can always find legitimate and unforced connections among the disparate details. In this sense, I am an essay machine; cite me a generality, and I will give you six tidbits of genuine illustration . . . ''
Lubricated by equal measures of chutzpah and conviction, the Gould ``essay machine'' has been cranking since 1974. Like the six essay collections (culled from columns produced for Natural History magazine) that preceded it, Haystack is a typical Gould blend of information, history, humor and strong-minded assertion about and on the workings, past and present, of the natural world. Gould reputedly has kept generations of otherwise dozy college students transfixed by the power of his Harvard lectures; the book has much the same appeal.
Haystack contains 34 separate writings, grouped into eight parts. Gould skips from mentions of poet Edgar Allan Poe, to Steven Spielberg's ``Jurassic Park,'' to Frankenstein's monster and even the character of Little Buttercup in the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta ``H.M.S. Pinafore,'' as he considers extinctions, evolution, genetic engineering and humanity's long-range prospects.
Which, according to Gould, are still up in the air. Don't look to Gould for reassurances that humans will endure and prosper. On the contrary, Gould contends, progress is a human invention in a universe where ``we live on a peripheral hunk of rock on the edge of one galaxy among gezillions.''
That human beings have managed to overrun the planet has everything to do with cosmic accident, Gould insists, and nothing whatsoever to do with any grand and orderly blueprint. Our ancestors evolved only after the dinosaurs died, wiped out in the aftermath of a theorized asteroid collision with Earth.
The chief and continuing irritation throughout Haystack is Gould's tireless use of the pronoun ``I.'' The effect is to pull a reader's attention unnecessarily away from the engrossing subjects at hand. Readers don't need to be reminded that an essayist has opinions; the very act of composing a piece is reminder enough.
Fortunately, there will be future chances for Gould to prune his pronouns. He reveals that he plans to produce columns through 2001, and two more books of essays. After that, who knows what will evolve?
``The imminent millennium provides a natural termination,'' Gould writes. ``I must run out my skein, but nature never will - and we should all take the greatest pleasure in this, her infinite bounty.'' MEMO: James Schultz covers science and technology for the Virginian-Pilot. by CNB