Eight Little Piggies Read Free

most focused on particulars of little public knowledge or approbation. I am not hopelessly rarefied or ethereal, and I do feel quite warmly towards some of the most evident (if vital) themes and homely illustrations—as in musings on distortions of memory and myths of past golden ages (Essays 13 and 14). But I do so wish that some of the more complex pieces could receive some share of attention. I especially like Essay 29 because focusing on specimens rather than scientists so well highlights the crucial duality of all scientific activity—tension between the necessary social embeddedness of all scientific thinking and progress towards more adequate factual knowledge of an external reality (by pathways often tortuous and circuitous). If everyone knew the beauty and oddness of actual Cephalaspis fossils, this essay would be a sure winner, but knowledge is a prerequisite for this kind of love. For this reason, we need more “hands-on” science education, and we must resist the terrible current trend to confuse museums with theme parks (wonderful things in their proper domain), and to replace real specimens with large, throbbing, blinking glitz in order, ultimately, to pack more bodies into the gift shop. Also, please study Essay 25, even if you revile pigeons. C. O. Whitman was one of our greatest biologists and the key theme of his pigeon work really does speak to the nature of mind as a product of evolution.
    I adore all the odd animals and anatomical bits that I pack into these essays, but I have always liked my “people pieces” best (my favorite essays in the last three volumes are “The Titular Bishop of Titiopolis,” on Nicolaus Steno in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes , “Adam’s Navel,” on Gosse’s bizarrely magnificent treatise Omphalos in The Flamingo’s Smile , and “In a Jumbled Drawer,” on the conventional career of N. S. Shaler and the iconoclasm of William James in Bully for Brontosaurus ).
    People ask how I keep finding honorable intent in reviled characters by the simple expedient of rediscovering either the full logic of their argument or the social context of their claims. Are all thinkers so worthy of respectful resurrection? Of course not; many are reviled in their own time for good reasons that remain equally cogent today. For the most part, I don’t choose to write about these people (though see my book The Mismeasure of Man for proof that I do not only seek virtue in historical figures). I praise Archbishop Ussher (Essay 12), so falsely labeled as a unique reactionary shoving his finger into the crumbling dike of revealed religion in order to hold back the flood of science, when he actually represented a large research tradition, humanistically motivated and successful in its own terms (though wrong about the age of the earth due to a false premise at the core of the argument). I warm to a paranoid dyspeptic like Eugene DuBois (Essay 8) when he fairly sticks to his guns in a noble (if losing) argument, but when posterity, not even trying to grasp the subtlety, invariably reports that he finally labeled his precious “ape-man” a giant gibbon, although he actually, by this trope of argument (and when you grasp his full system rather than picking at isolated straws), tried to affirm the immediately ancestral status of his Homo erectus .
    But the saints often need intellectual resurrection as well (though I’d rather be misunderstood in clouds of celestial music than bubbles of boiling magma). Halley is so tied to his eponymous comet that his work on the earth’s age is largely ignored and usually interpreted ass-backwards when mentioned at all (Essay 11). Goethe’s oracular reduction of all plant form to a leaf archetype needs to be read for its unconventional form of scientific excellence (Essay 10).
    I also like to find unusual entrées to important subjects generally treated under conventional formats. Thus I approach Darwin’s personal views on race and sex not by analyzing the