Antidotes the Flamingo's Smile

By R.Z. Sheppard

When Physicist C.P. Snow and Literary Critic F.R. Leavis squared off in their two-cultures debate some 25 years ago, it was already apparent that science was reshaping language and that humanism was trying to give itself laboratory airs. Leftists hardwired literature to Marx's social engineering, psychoanalysis cut the classics to fit the couch, and professors of English gave their essays titles like "The Entropy of the Imagination." Today words like process, systems, positive and negative are plugged into common discourse like so many microchips. The result can be toxic to the imagination and mother tongue.

The essays of Stephen Jay Gould are good antidotes. In his fourth collection, the paleontologist, evo- lutionary biologist and Harvard lecturer continues to combine precision with an energetic style. On the ever-hypnotic copulatory practices of the praying mantis, for example: "The male, blessed with paired organs for transferring sperm, inserts one palp, then, if not yet attacked by the female, the other. Hungry females may then gobble up their mates, completing the double-entendre of a consummation devoutly to be wished."

Gould excels at using the familiar to introduce the arcane. The flamingo of Florida postcards and golf courses seems to smile because it feeds with its head upside down. The adaptation suggests that evolution does not always take the easiest way up. Sex Researcher Alfred Kinsey developed his investigative skills studying vespid insects, thus giving fuller meaning to the term stirring up a hornet's nest. The disappearance of .400 hitters in baseball, says Gould, may have less to do with equipment changes than with standardizing methods of play.

As a student of the fossil record, the author takes the long view: given world enough and time, accidents take on aspects of a plan. But does nature "know" this, or is a grand design the projection of the human brain? The relationship between quirkiness and meaning is the book's dominant theme, perhaps best appreciated in Gould's retelling of the joke about a woman shopping for a large chicken. The butcher puts a two-pounder, his last bird, on the scale. "Not big enough," says the woman. Pretending to weigh a larger one, the butcher presses his thumb on the scale until it reads three pounds. "Fine," says the customer, "I'll take them both."