Title:
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
Author:
Steven Jay Gould
Publisher:
Random House, 1998
ISBN
0-609-60141-5

I found this book sitting on the library shelf one day, and the title caught my eye. I guessed what Gould might be referring to - Leonardo's work on paleontology and Luther's confrontation with the Catholic Church - but I couldn't guess, of course, how Gould, one of the world's foremost writers of popular science books, would make these two relevant to each other. I picked up the book, mostly to find out. I kind of hoped it wouldn't be one of those fatuous "Connections" stories.

Gould explains in the beginning of the book that in the course of writing his essays - published in Natural History as the longest running series of such essays in history - he has found a somewhat unconventional voice. His is a humanist's approach to science, a humanistic natural history.

[...] I am even more fascinated by [...] the history of how humans have learned to study and understand nature. I am primarily a "humanistic naturalist" in this crucial sense.

It is this exploration of our perverse journey of discovery that leads him to such diverse topics as examining Leonardo da Vinci's genius, or probing into the quarrel between Thomas Henry Huxley and Richard Owen. He presents the dead ended efforts of Mendes da Costa's classification of rocks and soils, as well as the detective story that finds its crucial clues in pictures drawn 30,000 years ago.

Each essay is well written, self contained, and highly interesting. It was no surprise, seeing that Gould has had about 270 essays worth of practice.

Sometimes Gould's efforts seem to lead him to contradict himself. So, for example, he wants to show that Leonardo da Vinci was not a "space man," a "time traveller," marooned somehow in the sixteenth century. To present Leonardo's human face, he asks us to ignore his amazing body of work on fossils - his "mountain of clams" - and consider why Leonardo was going to this effort. Gould explains that Leonardo's motivations were eminently those of a medieval scientist, working to defend a hypothesis that was very much a product of his time: to show that Noah's flood really did happen.

A few essays later, however, Gould refers to Richard Owen's argument with Huxley over the evolutionary relationship between apes and humans. Here, Gould asks us to ignore the motivation (Owen disagreed with Darwin, and wanted to show that humans and apes could not have evolved from a common ancestor), and pay attention instead to Owen's work, which according to Gould was correct, although it was advanced for the wrong reason.

To Gould the apparent inconsistency is not a concern. His purpose is, after all, to illustrate how human beings have investigated their world. This includes showing us the human side of Leonardo, who is almost deified in modern accounts for his apparent prescience, as well as re-humanizing Owen, who for his opposition of Darwin's theory of evolution has been much maligned among scientists.

It is clear that to Gould any scientific investigation of our world is worth while, and can teach us valuable lessons. Meanwhile, Gould collects these lessons and presents them for our edification, where we might otherwise have completely overlooked another way of considering the matter.