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

DIH 32. The First Unmasking of NatureGould begins by gently spoofing his own ability to produce an analogy under almost anycircumstances. He shows images of the two sides of a 50-Kroner note from Sweden,which shows King Gustav III (reigned 1771 – 1792) on one side and Carl von Linne(“Linnaeus,” 1707 – 1778) on the other. Besides this connection via the mint, both areinvolved in a story of a disguise within a disguise. In King Gustav’s case, he was thesubject of an opera by Verdi that involved a masquerade ball. For many years after theopera was written, due to politics, Gustav could not be identified by name – so thelocation of the story was moved to Boston, where the King was transformed into aGovernor. Hence Gustav was masked twice in Verdi’s tale: first by the characterdonning a costume to attend the ball, and secondly by change in the nationality of thecharacter himself. As for Linnaeus, he is credited by Gould as the man who removed oneof the two metaphorical masks that had prevented people from correctly understandingbiology. (Darwin, in this analogy, would later remove the other.)Thomas Henry Huxley wrote that all sciences proceed through three stages. The first ofthese, which he refers to as Natural History, involves raw data collection with notheoretical construct at all. Gould argues here [as he does elsewhere – see DIH 12, inparticular] that this is actually impossible – some sort of model must be in play, or thedata cannot even be gathered. (He also reiterates his argument that science does notmove in a straight line as Huxley suggests here, but rather in fits and false starts.However, this structure serves his immediate purpose, so he continues.) Huxley’s secondstep is Natural Philosophy, which uses various empirical methods to group the data, butstill has no theoretical underpinning. Finally, Huxley’s final stage of sciencedevelopment is Physical Science, which incorporates a theoretical construct to “makesense” of the organized data, in terms of cause and effect. Huxley was clearly writingabout the transformation of biology into a true science in the 19 th century, with hiscompatriot Darwin as the bridge to the third stage. The source of the transition from thefirst to the second stage, according to Huxley, was Linnaeus. Gould concurs.Linnaeus grouped organisms by their common physical characteristics, rather than bytheir function or behavior. For example, as mentioned in DIH 30, he grouped whaleswith mammals instead of fish. He is credited with being the first to use the “species” inall cases as the fundamental unit of biology. He also invented an important taxonomicnomenclature: the use of single words for the identification of genus and species,formalized in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae in 1758. This seemingly minornaming scheme turns out to be critically important for organizing life hierarchically,much as Arabic (vs. Roman) numerals greatly assist in algebra. However, Linnaeus wasno evolutionist – perhaps not a surprise considering that he worked a century beforeCharles Darwin published Origin of Species. He was a strict creationist, and hisworldview was that he had glimpsed part of God’s thought process in his taxonomicstructure. [Gould discusses how Linnaeus developed a taxonomy that fits evolutionarytheory so well without being an evolutionist in IHL 21, and problems that arise when thisstructure is applied to inappropriate subjects such as rocks and minerals in the same essayand in LMC 4.]43