Category: Reading

Gould discusses how the conflicts between science and the humanities (religion) are fabricated to put an illogical conflict that should not exist and only drags down both. Instead, science and the humanities should learn to work together. The humanities pride themselves on having one single tactic that works (the method of the hedgehog) while the sciences pride themselves on having a variety of tactics that work (the method of the fox) and that both should learn from each other in order to propel their respective studies into the future. The Magister’s Pox was the method of creating the conflict so that they could remain in control.

Interesting tidbit: Gould argues an unusual point for a scientist: that the perfection of the earth and the biosphere should do more to prove that there is a God than anything short of actually seeing Him. Evolution has one of two possibilities: that nature figured out how to do things by its self or that God put things into such a perfect organization and alignment that He did not need to continually intervene.

This book is a history of the fascinating evolution of the field of molecular biology, particularly the ground breaking work of Seymour Benzer. It was interesting to note that this field has been growing so quickly that few students in the field today have heard of Benzer or his fruit fly experiments.

Interesting tidbit: all fruit flies, and most other animals, have a built in “rest” mechanism that tries to put them to sleep in the afternoon. They think this is to encourage us to survive the afternoon heat and thus be more productive in life.

When you get a bunch of small and simple things together and give them simple commands, clear patterns of behavior begin to emerge. This is true for ant colonies, computer program logic and even cities full of people. We are finding more and more that we need more simple and basic programming and planning to achieve greater and more complex results.

Interesting tidbit: Queen ants do not direct the actions of the colony, in fact no ant is “in charge”. Instead, each individual ant lays down and detect pheromone trails that indicate what is going on in the colony. If an ant detects too many pheromones from harvesting activities it will go check on the nursery.  If the nursery is full of “happily taken care of” pheromones then it will check on the gardens. Using this system of pheromones, the ants can quickly adapt to the changing needs of the colony. Additionally, the system is self healing because no single ants (or small collection of them) calls the shots.

Good murder mystery. An unknown stranger gathers together ten people onto an island for a weekend getaway. One by one, each of the patrons get voted off the island through their mysterious death. The remaining patrons band together to find the killer, but fail in their attempts. In the end, we learn that each member has committed so crime that they were not successfully tried for thus justice has finally been served.

Gould is a notable researcher in the fields of paleontology and natural history. He also has really good analogies to  describe his arguments. In Full House, Gould discusses how the human form is not evolution’s ultimate goal, but that the goal of evolution is to try every possible variation at least once. He notes that if we track evolving life we see that once a new species is created, it tries a myriad of variations and then stabilizes on an average. Though his arguments sometime get repetitive, he is thorough and sure to cover as many counter arguments that he can think of.

Interesting tidbit: Bacteria, by quantity and and variations, is by far the most dominate life form on earth. Also, the horse (which is often epitomized as the finest example of evolution because of its nearly straight line succession) is actually a bad example of evolution because where the history of the horse resembles a branch most other species look like a bush (think of rodents: where there is one kind of horse, there are dozens of kinds of rodents).