Dinosaur In a Haystack - A Website About Stephen Jay Gould's ...

sense of an overwhelmingly complex world. However, we can fall into the trap ofoversimplifying in this way. This is partially due to the rather limited number ofstorylines in the human repertoire, which can force us to shoehorn reality into one of afinite number of established channels. (He refers us to his concept of “literary bias,”introduced in BFB 16.) Gould acknowledges that it is in our nature to do explain theworld in terms of stories, and we never will – nor should – stop trying to do so.However, he offers, it pays to be aware of the common storylines we draw on, as thishelps us to identify our biases, or preferred modes of thought. (It also helps to increaseour repertoire of stories.) One common storyline in Western culture for the past fewcenturies is that of progress, involving changes from small to large, simple to complex,and primitive to advanced; the word “evolve” itself implies this [ESD 3, IHL 18]. (Gouldhas discussed in several of these essays how this storyline has been misapplied toevolution, with Homo sapiens as the end of the story.) Here, he presents two examplesthat illustrate his point that a simple system or structure is not always a primitive versionof a more complex one. Both involve the Caribbean island of Curacao; the first involvesthe local Creole language, and the second the land snails that Gould did his early researchon.The majority of the island’s inhabitants are mostly the descendents of African slaves.When these ancestors arrived, they spoke a plethora of languages that were mutuallyunintelligible. As has been well-documented in similar cases, people in suchcircumstances begin to communicate with each other through a “pidgin” which is notnative to any of them. Pidgins have no grammar to speak of. However, and remarkablyrapidly – often in a single generation – the pidgin proto-language evolves into a Creole,which is a true language with a characteristic but simple grammar. This occurred onCuracao, leading to a unique Creole language called papiamentu. Most of the words areclearly related to the Dutch and Portuguese languages of the former slaveholders, but thegrammar is unlike either of them. This is where the concept of progress falsely appears:for centuries, linguists thought of Creole languages as primitive forms of our own. Thatis, scholars believed that human language “progressed” over time from meaningfulgrunts, through pidgin and Creole-like forms, into modern Indo-European and otherlanguages. What more recent studies have shown is that the grammars of these Creolelanguages resemble each other far more than they resemble, say, the language of the localruling class. Gould references the famous linguist Noam Chomsky, who argues thatthese grammars reflect a universal, evolutionarily-developed human grammaticalstructure. The point, Gould tells us, is that Creole languages are not an “in-between”state reflecting partial progress toward our own language, but instead something else;something different.In the second example, Gould recounts his early professional research in the field of landsnails on the very same island of Curacao, and is quite autobiographical. The genusCerion is very diverse and widely distributed throughout the Caribbean, but only a singlespecies exists on this island. He discusses how two previous research efforts had come toopposite conclusions about the distribution of variations within this population onCuracao. One study concluded that there were distinct regional differences; the otherconcluded that all of the variations were due to the immediate local conditions (elevation,35