| Title | : | The Flamingos Smile: Reflections in Natural History |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0393303756 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780393303759 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 450 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1985 |
The Flamingos Smile: Reflections in Natural History Reviews
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This book is 30 years old and still highly readable. It's about biology, more specifically about Darwinian evolution and the history of science. Quite good and gripping writing explaining what is still pretty much the current state of our knowledge.
Gould has a fondness for rehabilitating scientists who were wrong for interesting reasons. In this volume those figures include: Edward Tyson (who sought to place chimpanzees next to humans as the next link in the great chain of being theory), the Rev. William Buckland (who misinterpreted evidence of past glaciation as proof of The Flood), Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (who straddled the epigenicist/preformationist embryology debate of the 18th century), and the father of taxonomy himself, Carolus Linnaeus (whose work was also skewed by the false great chain of being theory).
Gould is always careful to point out that no science is without its limiting cultural or social preconceptions. Scientific knowledge, moreover, is conditional, never fixed, and changes with our ever modifying understanding of it. He writes:Good arguments don't provide nearly as much insight into human thought, for we can simply say that we have seen nature aright and have properly pursued the humble task of mapping things accurately and objectively. But bad arguments must be defended in the face of nature's opposition, a task that takes some doing. The analysis of this "doing" often provides us with insight into the ideology or thought processes of an age, if not into the modes of human reasoning itself. (p. 284)
Also see my reviews for Gould's
Dinosaur in a Haystack,
Bully for Brontosaurus,
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, and
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. -
There is a lot more than meets the eye to this esoteric collection of paleontology/biology articles.
Whilst working through some of the strangest topics, for example (i) the special variation among Caribbean sea snails and (ii) why pre-Cambrian worms aren't actually worms, I was surreptitiously being taught the intricacies of the scientific method.
These articles are lessons in critical thinking concepts such as - open-mindedness, acknowledging errors (including your own), recognizing false assumptions and poorly reasoned conclusions, pursuing truth over ego and differentiating between evidence and speculation. Using real world examples this book is a kind of training manual in critical thinking. -
I read Flamingo's Smile – and many of Stephen Jay Gould's other collections of essays when they were first first published in Natural History 35 or so years ago. I was dismayed when he died, as his descriptions of science and the scientific process were so erudite, engaged, and engaging that I couldn't imagine anyone else taking his place. (They haven't, at least for me and in this genre.) Who else would start a discussion of the paradox of siphonophores – are they an organism or a colony? – by discussing Pirates of Penzance and end with a joke? His questions and his analyses keep me reading.
When an inquiry becomes so convoluted, we must suspect that we are proceeding in the wrong way. We must return to go, change gears, and reformulate the problem, not pursue every new iota of information or nuance of argument in the old style, hoping all the time that our elusive solution simply awaits a crucial item, yet undiscovered. (pp. 77-78)
Should I be reading 35-year-old science essays? Probably not, if I want to learn evolutionary science, but if I want to understand scientific thinking better and read good, smart scientific writing, YES!
The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion (p. 102). -
The greatest modern voice for the neo-Darwinian synthesis. He and a colleague, whose name I forget, re-purposed Kipling's term "just-so stories" to describe evolutionarily plausible but unprovable explanations for things. An amazing critical thinker, Gould realized that if you didn't establish some way of critiquing evolutionary explanations, they would become the equivalent of folk explanations, overpredicting to the point that they could never be disproven. Once evolutionary explanations became non-disprovable, it stops being a science and starts being a belief, like believing in god. So he spent a lifetime not just doing his own research but in popularizing disciplined neo-Darwinian critical thinking in this series of essays in Natural History magazine or Nature magazine, I forget. Most of my understanding of the neo-Darwinian synthesis comes from reading Gould.
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This is volume 4 of the collected essays by the late Stephen Jay Gould. As before, it is the usual mixture of some rather esoteric ones that go a bit over my head and subjects I find more interesting. I had to skip the article on baseball however, being from the UK and unable to drum up any interest. The discussion of mass extinctions was interesting, given that these essays were written during the period when the theory that the dinosaurs (and many marine invertebrates) had been wiped out by an asteroid strike was beginning to gather sufficient evidence to be accepted. Some of the articles have no doubt been superseded by more recent scientific developments which is problematic when a reader such as myself doesn't know which have been affected. So all in all, I rate this at 3 stars.
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This book is quite old for a pop science read, but certainly not outdated. Stephen Jay Gould has been a great recent find for me, and I'm now quite a fan of his writing.
This collection of essays in particular is pretty diverse ranging over various themes such as peculiarities of natural history illustrating the quirks of evolution, the scientific method illustrated by testable ideas that turned out to be manifestly false, the punctuated equilibrium of speciation and mass extinctions, and also some interesting biographical stories tied in with the progress in our understanding of nature and our place in it. With the benefit of hindsight, I think this book should be read as a collection of short stories, skipping from one to another and reading casually in spurts. Unfortunately I went through it in one go and that essentially meant I strongly appreciated the earlier essays with my attention span decaying towards the second half of the book. This is perhaps also correlated with the quality of essays mildly wavering towards the end.
But undoubtedly the author provides an ideal for pop science writers to achieve, covering vastly different topics with great guile and not at all shying away from difficult concepts while doing a great job of carrying the reader along. I wish there was something of this kind in other sciences, although I imagine it's easier to do so with natural history and biology.
Discussions of nature are also nicely peppered with discussions of pop culture, baseball and human society making it an interesting read even outside the context of the primary focus. What particularly impressed me were the author's deeply thought out ideas about sociology and the interplay with nature, thoughts that have aged surprisingly well for the greatest part. -
This may be my favorite collection of his essays because of the note at the beginning about his personal bout with mortality that occurred at this time and because the essays reflect his initial skepticism of and gradual acceptance of the Alvarez theory for the cometary extinction of dinosaurs and its implications for understanding our evolutionary history more broadly. This volume also documents his concern about the possible impact of nuclear war and his public efforts, together with other scientists and religious figures from around the world, to prevent it.
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I really like his writing style and the essays were all great. Some of them didn't appeal to my interests but that's not the fault of the essay. I'll definitely read more works by SJG in the future but maybe smaller chunks. This book is pretty hefty and though it's comprised of easy length essays it was kind of a lot to read in 1 month as a book club book (sorry about that friends!). Some of what he touched on related to previous books we've read so that was cool. All in all I enjoyed it and I'm glad I read it!
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Gould is that rare public figure who somehow manages to marry a great intelligence, a deep curiosity, an able writership and a empathetic humanism. He is a delight to read. Spanning diverse subjects of evolution he always makes both the specific and the general a fascinating insight into the histories of life. The greatest take away from all these essays is the diversity and robustness of being. There are so many ways things could have (and still could) turn out, and all this wonder around us has been the reverence of contingency. We are incredibly lucky that we are here at all. It is against all odds that it were to be so. And yet it is.
And even with this how much we seem to have screwed up along the way.
Social lessons abound in these essays, sometimes as more observational curiosities, sometimes as staunch condemnations. Always with an eye for understanding and bettering. Gould isn't trying to lay out a theoretical groundwork here so much as he is attempting to excavate and understand the histories of what is. To clear up misunderstandings and impart the knowledge that will hopefully be used for future wisdom. A really refreshing point that he had made, which I haven't seen before in my (admittedly sparse) readings into scientific fields was the idea that old models of thought-though now laughable- still were, in their own way, brilliant consolidations and rationalizations of what was then known. And while this doesn't mean that you have to commend all old ideas, it should be used as a way to try and understand (again to uncover) WHY they came about. Because knowing is power. Even if power to make clearer and more informed changes. To avoid the failings of the past. To strengthen our adaptability and avoid dying out from under our own hand.
Even when confronting religion, Gould avoids the generalist combative atheistic approach (ala Dawkins) and instead leans into a more nuanced appreciation of what likely religion came about for, and a very learned understanding about how even science doesn't have all the answers for all the questions out there. Again, the humanistic approach makes him such a warm and admirable figure to read.
I'll leave off with one of my favorite passages in the book:
"The excitement of new theories lies in their power to change contexts, to render irrelevant what once seemed sensible. If we laugh at the past because we judge it anachronistically in the light of present theories, how can we understand these changes of context? And how can we retain proper humility toward our own favored theories and the probability of their own future lapse into insignificance? Honest intellectual passions always merit respect."
I know, right? -
Most of Stephen Jay Gould’s books are collections of his essays he wrote for years (until his untimely and unfortunate death in 2002) that appeared in “Natural History” magazine. “The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History” is the fourth such collection.
Gould was a prominent paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and astute historian of science, who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard. His essays are a mix of science and history.
I'll take my lead from Dr. Gould. This book’s curious title comes from the very first essay to appear. A flamingo's smile is almost as enigmatic as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa's. Why? In this essay, Gould explores the theme of form follows function and the question of just why do pink flamingos have upside-down smiles?
Gould writes: “In most birds (and mammals including us), the upper jaw fuses to the skull; chewing, biting, and shouting move the mobile lower jaw against this stable brace. If reversed feeding has converted the flamingo’s upper jaw into a working lower jaw in size and shape, then we must predict that, contrary to all anatomical custom, this upper beak moves up and down against a rigid lower jaw. The flamingo, in short, should feed by raising and lowering its upper jaw.”
Which, by the way, it does. Flamingos are filter feeders that feed with their heads upside down, submerged in water. So, for a practical purpose, in nature, the jaw that is actually on the bottom during feeding is the movable one. Most curious. Most curious, indeed. -
Reflection in Natural History as the subtitle says. Gould had a natural gift in explaining or in just talking about science. Not very unlike Asimov even if he was much more restricted in his subjects. But impressing enough. The Darwin worship is a little annoying but there are excellent pieces, like the one False premise, Good Science about Kelvin’s refutation of the “Doctrine of Uniformity”. And even better: “For Want of a Metaphor”. Here Gould gives a good example how progress in science is dependant on metaphors. It is the story of preformationists vs. epigeneticists. Gould rejects the usual good guy vs. bad that is so natural in the history of science.
How asks the protagonist Maupertuis (*1698), can Albinos or polydactyly be possible if they existed as homunculi from the beginning of time? He felt there must be something from father and mother that comes together. What he missed was the metaphor of programs, that makes it so easy for us to understand what is going on.
“Carrie Buck’s daughter” is remarkable because of the extraordinary coincidence that I read it just after watching “Judgment of Nuremberg”.
“Losing the Edge” explains why baseball players in the past were better. Would be interesting to see if that is also true for football. -
This was a very different read for me. I don't typically read a lot about geology or paleontology. I found Gould's writing approachable and understandable. Sure, there were things I had to read a couple of times but overall I think I understood his arguments and I learned some new things - and now have a lot to think about/ was challenged. I looked forward to reading Gould's perspective. Would love to see some of these updated with current research!
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Gould covers a lot of ground in these essays - evolution (both in the biological sense and in the pattern of thought as it relates to our natural world), dinosaurs, ETs, extinction and even baseball with references to Casey Stengel and an entire essay on the disappearance of the .400 hitter. A little bit of a slog though; while Gould has a somewhat breezy manner, the topics he covers are very sciency and he breaks up the narrative with asides on Latin word origins, or even asides in Latin.
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There are few scientific authors who can write so well, presenting science tidbits as well as sweeping overviews to keep the audience entertained and enlightened. Writers who specialize in science may be as engaging in their style but they lack the scientific background to also present a new hypothesis or critique science from the inside out.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book and admire the author. -
This is not an easy book to read--Gould's language and style are aimed at educated, but non-professional readers. Each essay is a gem in its own way, on a wide diversity of subjects. Gould sheds much light on how science is done, and the importance of the process rather than the conclusions. Highly recommended!
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I love all of Gould's books. There is nothing more fascinating than the world we live in with all it's peculiarities. Gould is THE expert in paleontology. His books are very scientific, so not an easy read, but for anyone who is really interested in paleontology he's the best.
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"The Flamingo's Smile" capture a unique moment in science. The excitement of the Alvarez finding of an asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous is palpable throughout the essays. Thirty years later, the theory is a given and it is a joy to see the excitement from a top scientific mind when a great idea first comes to light. The rest of the essays are of the quality to expect from the series. I particularly enjoyed the collaboration with Carl Sagan and the Pope (!?) to describe nuclear winter. Overall four stars.
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I've never read one of Stephen Jay Gould's books before, only heard of him through other science authors in the discipline. I thought he sounded an interesting man, and so I decided to check one of his books out. The essays are interesting, insightful, and strangely dated, which I don't always find in the scientific disciplines when it comes to books. Still, they were all extremely interesting, and in the dating, proof that things have changed, and that we have learned more.
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These essays are easy to read while still feeling precise and technical-enough. They remind me of Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' in their mix of anecdote, revival of the historically overlooked oddballs of the science community, and real insight into the big ideas behind scientific inquiry.
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Uno de los mejores libros de Jay Gould , los ensayos de este libro son realmente a mi gusto son espectaculares, haciendo hincapié en los que hablan sobre las extinciones masivas de la tierra
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508
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https://5cense.com/20/753.htm -
I've long been a fan of Dr.Gould. His prose is a joy to read. his wit and wisdom are an endless source of delight, his insights are as acute today as they were when this was published.
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This book is very fabulos.
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Wow! What a fire hose full of science and history. I listened and listened intently to SJ Gould's essays. It was hard. It was all new. It was often detailed in areas of knowledge where I hadn't yet learned the generalities. Each story was a struggle and in a real way, a disappointment. A disappointment in so far that I knew that no matter how much I enjoyed the essay, no matter how much I felt I learned, how new the point of view or artful the argument made I would not know enough at the end, not remember enough of the vital matter to be able to explain to anyone what I read, or why it was important or even why I believed or did not believe a particular conclusion or line of thought. (Except for the piece on the demise of the .400 hitter in baseball...I was well grounded in that, can assess the validity of argument, regurgitate most of the facts and discuss the essay with ease!)
That being said, his topics are generally very interesting, some fascinating and the learning overwhelming. And, if you've never read him in the New Yorker, he is such a powerfully consistent thinker and wonderful writer that you keep plowing through the 30 or so essays because you know the next one will also be fruitful and possibly inspiring (before, that is, it becomes depressing).
It's hard to recommend the book but if you just want to pick something up that will educate you, make you think and make you wonder, you would not regret plowing through this tome. And, it being essays, you can pick and choose a few and then put it down.
I, for one, am glad I stuck it out and, in fact, am going to read much of it again. -
It took me a while to finish this book, since every time I came upon some new concept or organism I had to google it and read a whole lot more about it. The parts that I enjoyed the most have nothing to do with the baseball part of the book (which aren't really that many, but they show up in unexpected places), but more with the organisms and evolution of different traits that the author talks about with such eloquence.
I am lucky enough to own a (recent edition) copy of
Kunstformen der Natur - Kunstformen aus dem Meer and really enjoy studying the carefully orchestrated plates like never before. I will most probably read some of the other essay collections and books by Stephen Jay Gould, since I believe I have reached that point in my development when I can at least appreciate if not completely understand most of his points and cultural references.
Don't be fooled by the introduction into thinking this book is not interesting. Had I not just ignored the intro, it could have been a reason for me not to continue reading this book. Skip it if you want to, it's nothing more than an overview of the structure of this collection of essays. The essays themselves are rich and buoyant and well balanced. I would recommend this book to anyone with the slightest interest in the natural sciences. They might find that so many beautiful topics await discovery and development. -
It is 2020 when I am writing this, and various scientific papers on climate change make a prediction that we have just about 20 years or so left to reverse the effects of climate change through some sort of carbon capture process or (more drastically) through some sort of geoenginerring scheme. There are yet other papers and reports that think it is already too late and the planet’s temperature will rise by the dreaded 1.5 degree Celsius as soon as 2021 to as late as 2030.
In the one before last essay of Flamingo’s Smile, titled continuity, Stephen Gould mused about nuclear holocaust all the way back in 1984. There he brings up his constantly spoken-of-image of the tree of of evolution and the fact that we are but the tip of a twig of this enormous tree of life and that we are such a peculiar twig that can comprehend its origins and trace its path through 5 billion years to the trunk of the tree. Yet he says, “I cannot imagine anything more vulgar, more hateful than the prospect that a tiny twig with one peculiar power might decimate the majestic tree whose continuity goes back to the dawn of earth’s time and whose trunk and branches house so many thousands of prerequisites to the twig’s existence” His sentiment is nearly 40 years old but rings truer than ever as we slouch toward some form of slow moving disaster that we seem not to comprehend, even as it unfolds day after day on our TV and phone screens.
