royal road of science, The

Spectator, The, Oct 24, 1998 by Appleyard, Bryan

LEONARDO'S MOUNTAIN OF CLAMS AND THE DIET OF WORMS:

ESSAYS ON NATURAL HISTORY by Stephen Jay Gould Cape, 1799, pp. 405

This is Gould's eighth volume of essays collected from his monthly series in the magazine Natural History. That series has now established him as one of the great essayists of his time. Clever, accessible, conscientious and humane, he has become science's finest and most persuasive advocate. Even if this volume were a total disaster, Gould's reputation would remain intact.

But, of course, it is not - though, for a while, I feared the worst. The introduction is weak and ponderous. Gould has a tendency to cuteness and whimsy that can lead to a meandering and somewhat smug contemplation of his own thought processes. He is pleased with himself - he has much to be pleased about - but, at his worst, he makes us oppressively aware of the fact.

His worst, however, is rare and his best fills most of the rest of this volume. He is, perhaps, the greatest living and working Aristotelian. He is sceptical of Platonic forms and grand schemes. Indeed, scientifically, he is perhaps most famous for his resistance to the hard, purist Darwinism of Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. For Gould, reality is too complex and too subtle to be caught in such a simple net. Natural selection happens - no writer is more convincingly in awe of Darwin's insight than he - but it happens in the midst of many other strange and contingent things.

And, above all, it is not, as is commonly assumed, progressive. For moral, political and scientific reasons, Gould is opposed to the idea that evolution is a process of inevitable improvement. Such a view, as he has written elsewhere, tends to encourage eugenics, a destructive, anthropocentric view of nature and, in any case, it is wrong. Organisms go neither back nor forwards, they merely adapt to changing environments.

Within science, Gould is a dissident. Though hard Darwinism has taken on many modifications and nuances, it remains the dominant mode of thought in biology and, increasingly, in psychology and sociology. His essays are, therefore, genial protests against this orthodoxy as well as a broader appeal to a humane sense of the wonder, variety and ultimate irreducibility of life. Above all, he sees science both as the royal road to the truth and as an essentially human and cultural enterprise. Idealistically he believes that the one view does not compromise the other.

So, for example, his opening essay takes on the popular idea that Leonardo da Vinci was a kind of time traveller, a contemporary figure who happened to live in the 15th and 16th centuries. Much ink has been expended on establishing the `modernity' of Leonardo. This is an illusion according to Gould. Why, Leonardo asked, do we find fossilised sea-shells on the tops of mountains? His answer was the modern one, that these rocks were once under the sea. But his reason for this answer was the distinctly unmodern belief that the earth was the macrocosm to the microcosm of the human body. It moved and breathed like the body. The mountain-top fossils were evidence of this. Leonardo was, in short, right for the wrong reasons.

Such an argument puts Leonardo's science back where it belongs - in the culturAl context of the Renaissance - and subverts the arrogant claims of modernity. The past is not prologue, it is autonomous and true to itself.

Similarly, in his essay `The Great Western and The Fighting Temeraire', Gould takes on the familiar formula that science progresses and art does not. As a result of this view, artists tend to be remembered as unique creators, and scientists and technologists forgotten as merely stepping-stones on the way to something better. Brunel, the builder of the Great Western, is forgotten - this may be true in America - and Turner, painter of The Fighting Temeraire, is remembered.

Gould points out that the fire-breathing tug in this hugely popular painting is routinely seen as the bad modern set against the wonderful old of the ethereal warship that it draws to the breaker's yard. In fact, Turner loved technology and its visual effects, so the tug is `not spiteful or demonic', it is a `workaday boat'. The real villains of the picture are `the bureaucrats of the British Admiralty who let the great men-ofwar decay, and then sold them for scrap'.

One can quibble with this interpretation - indeed I think Gould weakens his case by implying the picture needs villains. But I don't think one can argue with the importance of the idea that

Art and science are different enterprises, but the boundaries between them remain far more fluid and interdigitating, and the interactions far richer and more varied, than the usual stereotypes proclaim.

From these and from every other essay in this book, one glimpses the characteristic Gouldian vision of an integrated and humane culture in which science's royal road passes through and is defined by specific times, places and purposes. Furthermore, this culture is continuous. The scientists of the past may have been found to be wrong, but they are not irrelevant. By learning of their efforts and errors, we can better understand ourselves. And, in the minutiae of their lives and works we can grasp something of the best that we can be.