The Lying Stones of Marrakech Read Free

immediate focus to fit within an essay. The interlude of part IV presents some experiments in the different literary form of short takes (op-ed pieces, obituary notices, and even, in one case, an introductory statement for Penguin CD’s series of famous classical compositions). Here I include six attempts (the literal meaning of essay) to capture the most elusive and important subject of all: the nature and meaning of excellence, expressed as a general statement about substrates (chapter 11) followed by five iterations on the greatness of individuals and their central passions across a full range of human activity—for excellence must be construed as a goal for all varieties of deeds and seasons, not only for mental categories—from bodily grace and dignity within domains debased by the confusion of celebrity with stature; to distinctive individuality within corporate blandness; to the intellectual innovations more commonly cited by scholars to exemplify this most precious (and uncommon) of human attributes.
    Part V, on scientific subjects with more obvious and explicit social consequences (and often, unacknowledged social origins as well), also uses biography, but in a different way to link past stories with present realities—to convey the lesson that claims for objectivity based on pure discovery often replay episodes buried in history, and proving (upon exhumation and linkage) that our modern certainties flounder within the same complexities of social context and mental blockage: Spencer’s social Darwinism, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and modern eugenics (chapter 17); contemporary boasts about the discovery ofgenes for specific behaviors, Davenport’s heritability of wanderlust, and the old medical theory of humors (18); Dolly the cloned sheep, the nature of identical twins, and the decapitation of Louis XVI (19); J.B.S. Haldane on the “humaneness” of poison gas in warfare, and the role and status of unpredictability in science (20).
    Finally, part VI abandons biography for another device of essayists: major themes (about evolution’s different expression across scales of size and time) cast into the epitome of odd or intriguing particulars: fossil embryos nearly 600 million years old (21); three stories about measurable evolution in snails, lizards, and fishes (22), conventionally misinterpreted as modest enough to prove the efficacy of Darwin’s mechanism extended across the immensity of geological time, but far too rapid and convulsive to convey any such meaning when properly read at this grand and unfamiliar scale; and avoidance in antipathy among several Christian groups (23) that “share” Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre (the traditional site of Christ’s crucifixion).
    At this equipoise, with one more foray into the breach yet to come, I can only thank readers who have joined me on this rocky journey. For only the conjunction of growing fellowship and increasing knowledge—a loop of ethical and intellectual, emotional and rational feedback that positively rings with the optimism of potential survival, maybe even transcendence, in this endlessly fascinating world of woe—can validate the accident of our existence by our free decision to make maximal use of those simple gifts that nature and evolution have granted us.

I
    Episodes
    in
    the Birth
    of
    Paleontology
    The Nature of Fossils

and the

History of the Earth

1

The
Lying Stones
of Marrakech
    W E TEND TO THINK OF FAKERY AS AN ACTIVITY DEDI cated to minor moments of forgivable fun (from the whoopie cushion to the squirting lapel flower), or harmless embellishment (from my grandfather’s vivid eyewitness tales of the Dempsey-Firpo fight he never attended, to the 250,000 people who swear they were there when Bobby Thomson hit his home run in a stadium with a maximal capacity of some fifty thousand).
    But fakery can also become a serious and truly tragic business, warping (or even