Thanks to alert commenters Katherine Bertolucci and Richard Carter, I spent yesterday morning reading Stephen Jay Gould’s The Lying Stones of Marrakech and remembering how much I miss him. What a mind and what a writer! And I admired his political engagement as well.

In the essay Katherine points to, Gould finds a marginal change Lamarck made in one of his own books. From that Gould shows how Lamarck’s intellectual honesty led him not only to undo his own theory, but to come to a new vision of the role of contingency (history, accidents) in the development of species — a view with much less order, logic and obvious divinity than before. Gould sweeps from the minute to the grand, at every level explaining clearly the scientific, historic and social contexts.

The closest I came to knowing him personally is through my sister-in-law who sang in choir with him. But I feel that I know him personally through his writing. It’s so sad that he died so young.

One passing comment from the book: Gould refers to the New England farmer who has a box of string labeled “Pieces of string too short to keep.” [Technorati tag: StephenJayGould]

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