Note: I wrote this review sometime before Gould's death. How does one write about a book of essays? Ever Since Darwin is a collection of essays drawn from Natural History magazine for which Gould wrote a monthly column entitled "This View of Life." While not especially easy reading, all the essays provide an intellectual delight that make them well worth the effort. A common thread running through all is the wonder and amazement Gould has for the extraordinary variation and adaptability of nature. One can see in these essays the development of ideas more fully defined in Wonderful Life The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
His examples are most absorbing and occasionally bizarre. He explains how the tiny gall midge reproduces in two ways: either normally from eggs as sexually reproducing flies; or without the aid of a father, i.e., via parthenogenesis, otherwise known as virgin birth. When food is abundant (midges feed primarily on mushrooms) the young grow in the mother's body feeding on her flesh. After she has been consumed they emerge and within two days their own children begin to feed off the parent. This matricide which at first glance might appear somewhat foolish is not just a disgusting freak of nature. As Gould points out, in light of evolutionary theory, the behavior is truly efficient and adaptive. As long as food is plentiful reproduction remains parthenogenetic. As food inevitably becomes scarcer the flies reproduce normally (hate to use the word normal in this context) at which point they can fly and scout out new food sources. "The flightless parthenogenic female stays on the mushroom and feeds. When it exhausts its resources it produces winged descendants to find new mushrooms." This still does not answer the question of why matricide? Gould explains better than I (read the essay entitled "Why should a fly eat its mother?;" but, basically it has to do with adaptability to environments which impose irregular catastrophic mortality (fairly common in nature,) or where food sources are hard to find but abundant when located. The best adaptability is to "reproduce like hell while you have the ephemeral resource, for it will not last long and some of your progeny must survive to find the next one." Whether this lesson should be applied to Man I will not hazard a guess.
Gould recognizes the social and cultural influences of the scientific imagination. Theories, at their best, should free us from our prejudices, at their worst they support the biases of their creators (witness Wolcott and his misinterpretation of the Burgess Shale), illustrated also in the attempts to find parallels between individual development and evolutionary history. (Gould has another book Ontoqeny and Phyloqeny dealing with just this issue which I have not yet read, but will soon?) Gould is very skeptical of biological determinism. (At a recent conference I witnessed E.O. Wilson, author of Sociobiology The New Synthesis, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition , a proponent of biological determinism, and Gould argue these points, much to the fascination of the audience.
Gould argues for biological potentiality.) Biological determinism has become popular in Gould's mind because it allows us to escape responsibility, e.g. the homeless are inevitably thus because they inherited the wrong genes; we can fob off responsibility for war to man's inherent aggressiveness rather than to blame the political structures we have created. Several essays deal with just such issues. Obviously I have not come close to doing justice to this richly diverse and fascinating collection of essays. Read the book, I guarantee you will be fascinated.
