© Nature Publishing Group1980

Nature Vol. 288 4 December 1980

More variations on a biological theme Ashley Montagu

The Panda's Thumb. By Stephen Jay Gould. Pp.343. (W.W. Norton: 1980.) $11.95. To be published in the UK in spring 1981, £6.95.

RECENTL y a young student of mine, having ably presented a seminar on Stephen Jay Gould's admirable book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Harvard University Press, 1977), asked me what Gould's specialty was. Only one answer was possible: versa­tility. Gould is a professor at Harvard and lectures on geology and palaeontology; he also teaches courses in biology and the history of science, and writes on physical and biological anthropology, growth and development, evolutionary theory, human nature, intelligence testing and sociobiology, to name but a few areas of his competence. In addition he is a highly regarded reviewer in scientific and literary journals and magazines. To cap it all, he writes a monthly column, "This View of Life", in the magazine Natural History.

It is from the column that this anthology, lightly edited, has been put together. Gould's earlier collection of essays from the same source, Ever Since Darwin (W. W. Norton), appeared in 1977. That volume immediately established him as perhaps the best of our natural history essayists. As a friend remarked the other day, "Whatever he writes is a gift".

In the prologue to the 31 pieces which make up this new volume, Gould expresses the hope that he has avoided that incubus of essay collections: diffuse incoherence. Neither author nor reader need have any qualms on that or any other score: the essays are consistently coherent and follow naturally, one upon the other, as if they were chapters on a single theme. There is a continuity which runs through this eminently readable book like a red thread, giving it a unity behind which an unusual mind is at work trying to figure out, among other things, how multicellular creatures regulate the timing involved in the complex orchestration of their embryonic growth, in the hope that developmental biology might one day unite molecular genetics with natural history to form a unified science of life. In one way or another these essays are mostly directed toward illuminating the routes to be taken to solve that problem.

The book plays variations upon this theme most delightfully, for in addition to being the best-informed of writers, Gould is also one of the most elegant. He is unfailingiy interesting, for he has the rare gift of communicating the excitement he feels about whatever his fertile brain encounters. The reader comes away enriched and entertained at the same time. From the first essay, from which the book takes its title, in which the author discusses

the manner and the method of evolution, to the last, in which he shows, by way of the chambered nautilus, how the palaeonto­logist has come to the rescue of the geophysicist and mathematician in arriving at a sound estimate of the rotational slowing of our planet, Gould holds the general principle of evolution steadily in view.

In an essay on Darwin and Wallace, Gould shows how the latter, one of the most remarkable and underestimated of thinkers, ultimately became an intellectual victim of his own hyperselectionism, in arguing that the excessive complexity of the human brain could not have been produced by selection. In another essay, "Darwin's Middle Road", the author writes reveal­ingly of the fibs that the great man told about his insights. Here it is good to see Gould recognizing what few ever do in discussing the historical background of the Wallace-Darwin theory, namely, the role played by sociopolitical ideas, a fact clarified by Patrick Geddes in the late

Contrary natures Richard Mabey

THE ideal countryside of the book­packager is all things to all possible buyers: visible, walkable, edible, amenable to identification and to technicolour display, wonderfully awesome without ever being fundamentally mysterious . When Felix Gluck Press put together Nature Through the Seasons and Nature Day and Night for Penguin/Viking (now issued as paper­backs at £1.95/$4.95 and £2.50/$7.95 res­pectively) they took this principle to its depressingly logical conclusion and interweaved quite separate contributions by a writer, an artist and a scientist - the days being long past, presumably, when one person could be expected to be all three. The series of cameos in each book begins with an imaginative scene setter (" A Rocky Coast by Day", for example), continues with a "science text" ("Tides and Internal Clocks"), and is rounded off by one of those breathless habitat collages which look as if they are depicting local assembly points for the Ark.

Max Hooper's science notes are, as you would expect, lively and entertaining; David Goddard's set-pieces - all sharp edges and precise little tesselations of colour - are meant, I suppose, to be some kind of half-way stage between the scientific and poetic visions, but end up looking as stiffly unnatural as paintings­by-numbers. Neither seem to grow in any convincing way out of Richard Adams's wonderfully evocative introductory essays. For anyone who finds his fiction a little

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nineteenth century and by Charles Sanders Peirce almost as long ago.

In this essay Gould errs in saying that what was presented at the famous Linnean Society meeting of 1858 was "a joint paper". Though this is often stated, the truth is that what was presented, in the absence of both men, was an extract com­municated in 1844 to Lyell and a letter to Asa Gray of 1857 (both by Darwin) and at the same time, but separately, Wallace's 1858 essay "On The Tendency of Variations to Depart from the Original Type". The communications were presented together. There was no joint paper as such.

But Gould rarely nods. On the few occasions on which he does he challenges one furiously to think. His book is a treasure. 0

Ashley Montagu is a biological and cultural anthropologist. He is editor of the recently published Sociobiology Examined (Oxford University Press).

indigestible these are a revelation. He meanders through his favourite landscapes, sniffing, listening, exulting, reflecting, but without being intrusive in any way, and succeeds in capturing the exact flavour of moments in nature, from the small hint of spring in the first brim­stone butterfly, to the flowing away of the whole year in a leafless winter wood.

The ingredients which have been sand­wiched together in Hodder and Stoughton's series The Natural History of Britain and Northern Europe are a lightning guide to the ecology of each habitat and a European field guide. The latest volume by Brian Whitton, Rivers, Lakes and Marshes (£5.50), ends up being rather unsatisfying on both counts. It was surely a mistake to try and produce a digest of the aquatic flora and fauna of half a con­tinent, couched in scientific language yet marketed for tourists. What would your botanically-inclined riverside picnicker make, I wonder, of a branched bur-reed whose description reads .. L vs erect, <15mm wide, keeled, triangular in section, o and 9 I1s in separate, spherical heads; in branched inflor, 0 above, 9 below"? A bee-line for the sandwiches rather than the glossary, I would imagine.

At least Nature Detective by Hugh Falkus (Penguin, £2.95) takes the view that there is more to the study of nature than the naming of parts, and presents an enter­taining guide to forensic field biology. The countryside is littered with physical clues