The Flamingo's Smile

One is tempted to say Good as Gould and be grateful for this latest compilation of columns that the Harvard paleontologist has turned out every month for Natural History - in spite of a fight against cancer. Yet he himself admits that the essays have grown longer. They have also taken on a more didactic tone. Gould is brimful with knowledge he uses to illustrate Larger Themes. He is also ever ready to take up the lance to defend someone old or something new. And he is unrestrained in his spleen against ignorance or evil, whether manifested as creationism or a new racism. All this makes for essays that are eminently commendable, but tipped toward the heavy side. Gould the righteous inveighs against the sterilization laws that meted out unjust punishment on three generations of a family of Virginia white women. He is determined to set the record straight in dethroning claims to modernism made for the 17th-century Englishman Edward Tyson, ridiculing Arthur Lovejoy's attempts to stratify the human races in the Great Chain of Being (with you-know-who on top), or in telling the compelling story of the Hottentot Venus, a woman ignominiously exhibited in a cage for the prurient delectation of white Europeans. Elsewhere, Gould resurrects the reputation of geologist William Buckland, who first explored caves for evidence of a universal deluge and later recanted in favor of successive waves of glaciers. In this and other instances, Gould uses the essay to reveal the contingent nature and historical context of science - its dependence on the times and on data and theory that can be altered or refuted by later Findings. In this context, Gould discusses Lord Kelvin's incorrect estimates of the age of the earth and also provides some original insights from a 17th-century French savant, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Gould's explorations of scientific personnae and what shaped their thinking include (inevitably) Darwin and Wallace, as well as Alfred Kinsey, Philip Gosse and the black biologist Ernest Everett Just. The title essay is one of the few where Gould turns his fine eye to nature's curiosa, in this case the flamingo whose characteristic of eating upside down has led to corresponding anatomical changes in jaw and mouth parts. There is also a pleasing essay suggesting that we are misled in believing that females mantises and black widows devour their mates. About the only essay that strays from nature proper is an amusing takeoff on why 400 batting averages have declined (and what this means in terms of trends in evolutionary history). Gould's concluding essays have him supporting earth-bound searches for extraterrestrial life, lamenting the threat of nuclear winter, and, finally, exalting the dull field of paleontology as it summons the evidence for cataclysmic extinctions and births of species at 26-million-year intervals. A gamut of moods, styles and substance - but plenty of gems withal. (Kirkus Reviews)