Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms Read Free Page A

anachronisms of a transcendent and largely unfathomable genius. But the full document of the Leicester Codex sets the proper context, when readin its entirety and understood by the physics of Leonardo’s own time.
    2. In most cases, I do not report observations never made before, but try to place unfamiliar (or even well-known) items into a novel context by juxtaposition with other subjects not previously viewed as related—invariably in the service of illuminating a general point about the practice of science, the structure of nature,or the construction of knowledge. In reviewing the essays for this volume (not planned as an ensemble when first written, but collected from my monthly series for Natural History magazine), I noticed that I had most often made such a juxtaposition by the minimal method of pairing, or contrast between two—perhaps a general mode of operation for the human mind, at least according to several prominentschools of research (discussed here in the context of paleolithic cave art in chapter 8). For example, all the essays in part 2 on mini-biographies, although focusing on one previously unappreciated or misunderstood character, interpret their subject by his contrast with a standard figure—Linnaeus and the eighteenth-century English Jewish naturalist Mendes da Costa (chapter 4), James D. Danaand his British soulmate Darwin (chapter 5), Richard Owen versus T. H. Huxley (chapter 6), and the tragic Russian genius Vladimir Kovalevsky (and his equally tragic and more brilliant wife, Sophia, one of the greatest mathematicians of the nineteenth century) with Darwin on the potential of error to illuminate scientific truth (chapter 7).
    Many other essays also pursue this strategy of illuminationby paired contrast, with novelty in the joining: Boyle and Darwin on natural theology and evolution (chapter 15); Percival Lowell versus Alfred Russel Wallace on the canals of Mars and the uniqueness of life (chapter 18); sloths and vultures as prototypes for traits that we, in our parochial and irrelevant way, judge as negative but yearn to understand (chapter 20); the Diet of Worms and theDefenestration of Prague as events of European history, related by more than their shared initial D and funny names (chapter 13); the Abbé Breuil and André Leroi-Gourhan for two sequential and maximally contrasting (but strangely similar) theories about the genesis of cave art (chapter 8); the great artist Turner and the prime engineer Brunel on the similarity of art and science (chapter 2); aforgotten theory about the origin of vertebrates with stunning new data to validate an even older view, all as an entrée to the subject of major evolutionary transitions and the prejudices that impede our understanding of this topic (chapter 17); the dodo of Mauritius and the first New World victims of Western genocide (chapter 12); and the striking difference between two popes in their common willingnessto support the factual truth of evolution (chapter 14).
    3. If my second category works by joining disparate details, a third strategy operates by careful excavation—elucidation by digging rather than elucidation by joining. As the mineshaft widens and deepens, one may reach a richness of detail justifying promotion to an essay because the requisite generality has been attained by one of two routes:(1) By casting a truly novel, or at least sufficiently different, light on an old subject, so that readers become willing to devote renewed interest, and may even obtain some provocative insight (Darwin always wrote to his creationist friends that he dared not expect to change their minds, but did hope to “stagger” them a bit)—as when intricate details of the life cycle of the maximally “degenerate”parasite Sacculina suggest new attention to the fallacies of evolutionary progress (chapter 19), and when the subtle (and almost entirely unreported) distinctions in the affirmation of evolution by two very different popes (Pius XII and