Earth: An Intimate History, by Richard Fortey
Punctuated Equilibrium, by Stephen Jay Gould

Here are two long discursions on natural history, reviewed for the local koraxophiles. They are more “books for buds”: I’d originally planned to read three or four non-fiction monsters in a row, but these took me a long enough as it was. In any case, paleontology and geology are animated by kindred muses, and interact a great deal. Reading about them can be hit or miss.

Any detailed history of the earth would fill (and has filled) volumes. Earth: an Intimate History is less a catalogue and more a survey of well-chosen interesting bits. Richard Fortey relates the world’s geological features like a man telling old family stories by the fireside. You can picture him unwinding them around his pipestem, getting animated at the exploits, chuckling at his occasional and minor wit, and making long sad eyes when the human timeline is inevitably compared against all those great, slow rocks. (Commendably, he resists the urge to lay too thickly on that last bit.) There are a lot of anecdotes at his disposal, and they fit neatly into the arc of history. The reader is carried along with the flow of narrative, finding himself suddenly rubbing his eyes as the storyteller concludes, and stumbles out the door to see a world around him that looks slightly different before, older and bigger.

Fortey struck me with the degree to which geology and biology (and biology’s footnote, sociology) intersect. The earth is bout four and a half billion years old, and has a fossil record of about 3 billion. Geological time scales coincide neatly with evolutionary ones, and in the same time it took the continental plates to dance and drift from the poles to the tropics, open and close oceans, the earth exploded in shellfish, the dinosaurs came and went, mammals scurried from the trees and along the plains. Climates have always been shaped by plate tectonics. Mountains capture rain, and the local rocks supply minerals with the abandon of a drunken youth or the parsimony of an old miser. The appearance of people clinging on the end of the evolutionary chain is an instant in all of this, but just the same, geology shapes cultures too. It supplies water, arability, building materials, and borders. For all the usual talk about biology as a whole outliving the human race, life itself remains an impermanent and mutable scum on this massive and quivering globe of rock. Mull that one over for a couple thoughtful puffs on the briar.

Fortey reveals the earth as a stately dynamic body. The continents float on a gently convecting mantle, bumping and separating like toy boats battling in the bath. The mantle is heated (and this was a big surprise to me) radioactively, and the crust sags into it under the weight of oceans and mountains and glaciers, and the whole ball jiggles like torpid gelatin as they bang into one another. It leaks into the ocean floor, and resorbs the rigid plates at subduction zones, a two-dimensional non-Euclidian lava lamp of rocky masses. It feels wrong to even try to spread my mind to such scales of time and length.

I’m not a big-time inorganic chemist, but one interesting thing about playing with minerals in the lab, is the general inability of people to reproduce natural materials. We can attain the pressures and temperatures with reasonable ease, but it is impossible to grow crystals at geological slowness. The crystallinity, the phase and compositional distribution, they seem like unimportant things, but they make all the difference in the properties of rocks at the human scale. It seems like the geologist can find nearly as many morphological variations in silicate minerals as the organic chemist recognizes in carbon bonding, and you have to admire the complexity with which molecular tetrahedra can be assembled, and wonder if it ultimately holds the same potential for higher level organization.

Regarding the human race, Fortey’s about as sanguine as I am, which is to say that even while not thinking very much of humanity as a species, he still holds a lot of affection for the thoughtful oddballs he sees as part of his own sphere. He’s got a soft spot for the unsung gatherers and compilers of information, and a bit of reluctant love for the attention-gathering theorists. He makes a point to forgive the sins of closed-mindedness for scientists who enabled greater advances. He puts people and the earth together in a sort of lonely, awestruck, and intimate worldview, and as something of a recreational misanthrope and eschatologist myself, who nonetheless cherishes his human connections, it’s a voice I was able to deeply enjoy.

By contrast, I think Stephen Jay Gould needed something universal to anchor Punctuated Equilibrium to. I’m not at all sure who the intended audience for this book was supposed to be. It seems too jargon-heavy and detailed for the omnivorous science reader, and too fluffy and personalized for a monograph. Most of the book is explaining ad infinitum the way in which the punctuated equilibrium model has affected the field, positively and negatively. If you want to call it something of a memoir and something of a rebuttal to each of his critics, then it succeeded on those levels.

When a physical or chemical principle is in dispute, you can go to the lab and construct experiments that can, in principle, confirm or deny the hypothesis. You can construct mathematical models to validate it and make predictions. In evolutionary biology, there are rarely extra data for the taking, and any predictions are in geological time, and theory (at least if this book represents it) often gets down to pure verbal argument. Next to dropping enormous words with unforgivably compounded suffixes, examining researcher bias seems to be Gould’s chief hobby horse. To hear him describe his field, it’s a disappointingly lawyerly form of inquiry. Late in the book, he gets to some more approachable analogies, but his style doesn’t much change. I expected more from a famous science writer.

Gould identifies three legs of punctuated equilibrium: (1) the fossil record prevalently shows stasis of species accompanied with sudden changes, not the gradual transformation that Darwinism predicts, (2) species are proper evolutionary individuals, not (only) organisms, (3) that this explains the pattern of stasis and sudden change in the fossil record. Point 2 of his triad is the part that’s properly a theory. (1) is an observation, and (3) is a predicted result. I’d have been interested if he worked up a general mechanism for punctuation when it occurs, but it can almost be any old thing, and it may be many things. (Fair enough.) Gould mentions that some various researchers have demonstrated the third part of his theory in simulations, and I think that was worth explaining in greater detail. He spends a great deal of time describing how “enhancing the debate” is a validation of his ideas.

I love the idea of species as individuals though. It seems right in the context of my own way of looking at things, in which populations need to get pushed out of their stable states. I can think of several parallel and unrelated examples. In evolution, interbreeding is what locks that stability in, and in a way, same-species sexual preferences can be better seen to preserve the species-as-individual than transform it (take that old man Darwin). Calling species out as Darwinian individuals doesn’t seem so bold to me, based on my experiences outside biology. Like geology, the part that’s hard to wrap a mind around is that even if speciation may approach human timescales, stasis is spread throughout the ridiculously long geological history of the earth. Speciation is a useful way to look at the quasi-individual at incomprehensible slowness–and Gould went far enough to address every counterargument he could think of on that one–and we talking apes are just fly-by observers of that long slow dance.

Science, it’s said, changes one funeral at a time. I can see what Twiffer was getting at when he hinted that hypothetical immortality could be the death of science. On the other hand, certain branches seem to be more susceptible to cults of establishment, natural history foremost. The 19th century explosion of earth science and biology was, in some ways behind the times, as the astronomers of the day had already survived running afoul of the church, and a culture of doubt and falsifiablity was already firming up. Still, natural history had a tough go of it when it bumped up against the creation myths–there’s more disappointment at stake in dating the age of the earth than in describing whether electrons more resemble particles or waves–and the entrenchment around either side of religious debate surely took some time to break up, and both fields seem to have been reawakening over the last 50 years. When it’s Darwin or mysticism, you can see why you’d defend the former to death, but the guy really did leave some room to work. He could only have.

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