The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections In Natural History (1987) - Plot & Excerpts
This book is 30 years old and still highly readable. It's about biology, more specifically about Darwinian evolution and the history of science. Quite good and gripping writing explaining what is still pretty much the current state of our knowledge. Gould has a fondness for rehabilitating scientists who were wrong for interesting reasons. In this volume those figures include: Edward Tyson (who sought to place chimpanzees next to humans as the next link in the great chain of being theory), the Rev. William Buckland (who misinterpreted evidence of past glaciation as proof of The Flood), Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (who straddled the epigenicist/preformationist embryology debate of the 18th century), and the father of taxonomy himself, Carolus Linnaeus (whose work was also skewed by the false great chain of being theory). Gould is always careful to point out that no science is without its limiting cultural or social preconceptions. Scientific knowledge, moreover, is conditional, never fixed, and changes with our ever modifying understanding of it. He writes:Good arguments don't provide nearly as much insight into human thought, for we can simply say that we have seen nature aright and have properly pursued the humble task of mapping things accurately and objectively. But bad arguments must be defended in the face of nature's opposition, a task that takes some doing. The analysis of this "doing" often provides us with insight into the ideology or thought processes of an age, if not into the modes of human reasoning itself. (p. 284)Highly recommended. Also see my reviews for Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack, Bully for Brontosaurus, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, and Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.
Most of Stephen Jay Gould’s books are collections of his essays he wrote for years (until his untimely and unfortunate death in 2002) that appeared in “Natural History” magazine. “The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History” is the fourth such collection. Gould was a prominent paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and astute historian of science, who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard. His essays are a mix of science and history. I'll take my lead from Dr. Gould. This book’s curious title comes from the very first essay to appear. A flamingo's smile is almost as enigmatic as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa's. Why? In this essay, Gould explores the theme of form follows function and the question of just why do pink flamingos have upside-down smiles?Gould writes: “In most birds (and mammals including us), the upper jaw fuses to the skull; chewing, biting, and shouting move the mobile lower jaw against this stable brace. If reversed feeding has converted the flamingo’s upper jaw into a working lower jaw in size and shape, then we must predict that, contrary to all anatomical custom, this upper beak moves up and down against a rigid lower jaw. The flamingo, in short, should feed by raising and lowering its upper jaw.”Which, by the way, it does. Flamingos are filter feeders that feed with their heads upside down, submerged in water. So, for a practical purpose, in nature, the jaw that is actually on the bottom during feeding is the movable one. Most curious. Most curious, indeed.
What do You think about The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections In Natural History (1987)?
I loved Gould's essay collections, so humane and erudite (he said somewhere that he had an eidetic memory). I was very sorry that cancer killed him. Also, I enjoyed reading Richard Dawkins' witty sniping at his ideas (that tree used to grow branches, now it only grows twigs). The Mismeasure of Man is the book I most value, Wonderful Life I enjoyed most. His writing style got a bit baroque as time went on, but nonetheless he was a hero among essayists.
—David
My first foray into evolutionary biology. The book held a lot of promise and more than delivered despite the over florid writing that Gould has perfected (who uses words like synechdoche?). It is a book that speaks to the accidental nature of evolution but also puts an entirely different twist on the term "intelligent design". The intelligence referred to here simply means the adaptive nature of how we all came to be who we are - physically speaking. That is we build on small changes over time to accumulate into the current state - meaning that in a couple of million years we would be the sum total of the intervening changes. That and a number of other concepts are illustrated beautifully with a number of examples from the natural world. The science requires a bit of concentration initially to get used to but once you are past that stage it becomes a transformative experience. As easy as it is to dispose off conservative arguments regarding intelligent design this books provides one with the solid intellectual foundation to believe in evolution as well as increasing one's confidence in the primacy of science over religion based arguments for our presence and sustenance as a race. In other words, God created evolution and then watched it unfold and was surprised and delighted at how it turned out (dare I say evolved). A superb book.
—Beatles24
