I Have Landed Read Free

science) of Newton’s generation fully established the notions of empiricism and experimentation that continue to feel basically familiar to us today. By grappling with this “intellectual paleontology” of fascinating, potent, but largely extinct worldviews held by folks with exactly the same basic mental equipment that we possess today, we can learn more about the flexibility and limitation of the mind than any study of any modern consensus can provide.
    Part V explores the different genre of the op-ed format, limited to 1,000 words or fewer. Essays 12 and 13 provide two different takes—one for the fully vernacular audience of
Time
, the other for the professional readers of
Science
—on creationist attacks upon the study of evolution. The remaining four short pieces, from the
New York Times
op-ed page and from
Time
magazine, show how strongly evolution intrudes into our public lives, perhaps more so (in a philosophical and intellectual rather than a purely practical or technological sense) than any other set of scientific concepts.
    Each essay in part VI then discusses a truly basic or definitional concept in evolutionary theory (the meaning of the word itself, the nature and limitations of creation stories in general, the meaning of diversity and classification, the direction—or nondirection—of life’s history). I use a variety of tactics as organizing devices, ranging from my biographical interests (21 on Linnaeus, 22 on Agassiz, Von Baer, and Haeckel), to a more conventional account of organisms (23 on feathered dinosaurs or early bipedal ground birds), to a personal tale about why this evolutionary biologist felt so comfortable spending the millennial day of January 1, 2000, singing in a performance of Haydn’s
The Creation
.Part VII treats the social implications, utilities, and misutilities of evolution, as seen through the ever-troubling lens of claims for false and invidious innate distinctions of worth among organisms, ranging from native versus introduced plants (essay 24) to supposedly inferior and superior races of humans, with three optimistic final essays on three worthy scientists, from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries respectively, who stood among the infrequent defenders of natural equality.
    The short pieces of parts V and VIII first appeared as editorials or op-ed commentaries. The full-length essays of all other sections represent the final entries in a series of three hundred written for
Natural History
magazine from January 1974 to January 2001—with five exceptions from other fora: essay 2, on Nabokov, from an exhibition catalog by antiquarian bookseller Paul Horowitz; essay 4, on Gilbert and Sullivan, from
The American Scholar;
essay 5 from the exhibition catalog for a retrospective of Frederick Church’s great landscape paintings, displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; essay 24, on native plants, from the published proceedings of a conference on the architecture of landscape gardening held at Dunbarton Oaks; and essay 26 from
Discover
magazine.
    In closing (but bear with me for an extended final riff), I cannot begin to express the constant joy that writing these essays has brought me since I began late in 1973. Each has taught me something new and important, and each has given me human contact with readers who expressed a complete range of opinion from calumny to adulation, but always with feeling and without neutrality—so God bless them, every one. In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when