Full House, by Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay GouldThis book is for science nuts who like to have things explained in layman’s terms by an expert who is completely in love with the stories he is telling. I love these kinds of books- the ones where the author is basically writing part mental memoir, part educational text, and part new contribution to scientific knowledge.

Gould’s book is obviously a labor of love for him. It is a series of short chapters, each of which looks at parts of evolution in a new way and explains to you some kind of truth that you either thought you knew or had no idea existed.

Most of us have some concept of evolution- as in the world started out with a bunch of cells underwater someplace and with a little heat and some time we ended up with walking fish and eventually me an you wondering where we came from. Gould does his best to debunk this basic idea with out making you feel like an idiot for believing it all this time.

He does a masterful job of looking into the politics of Darwinism and evolutionary science- talking about who published what when and why. My favorite example that he digs into is about the horse hoof. He lays out the classic chart that shoes the ancient ancestor of the horse with a hoof and no toes. On the chart, it calmly progresses, with skeletal evidence verified by carbon dating and there for all to see, that as the millions of years passed, the successive horse generations sprouted one toe here, then evolved into the great species that we see before us today.

It’s a great chart, and you can imagine a grey-haired bearded scientist in a black & white picture stroking his beard ad explaining it to the room full of scientists. But Gould takes that beard-stroking genius, turns him on his head and smashes the vision. On the next page he is showing a flow chart of how the equine family actually changed over the years. It’s a tangled mess of interbreeding and horizontal changes, dead-ends and big jumps. Some species became large populations while others died out quickly (geologically speaking). And Gould walks you through both why this is the real way that it happened, why this is the way that evolution has always worked, and he even gets into why we are set up to think about it another way- why we are so intent on thinking about evolution as a steady march to perfection that has ended with the human beings we see all around us these days.

He’s funny, he’s professorial, and he’s a good writer. It’s a pleasure to read a book from someone who is a science brainiac who can also put together good sentences and I appreciate that he went to all the effort.

I highly recommend this book to all of you if you are interested in a thought-provoking, educated and question-raising book to read when you curl up with your winter hot chocolate.

Photo Credit: Ryan Somma (via Flickr under CCL)