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John Alcock called it an “ostentatious display of erudition” injected to persuade “many a reader that he is an erudite chap, one whose pronouncements have considerable credibility thanks to his knowledge of foreign languages and connections with Harvard. By advertising his scholarly credentials, Gould gains a debater’s advantage, which comes into play when he contrasts his erudition with the supposed absence of same in his opponents.” To prove his point Alcock took “a random selection of 20 Gouldian essays” in which he found “nine with at least one word or phrase in German, Latin, or French” and “five of 30 contained quotes from Milton, Dryden, and other literary masters.”23

Setting aside the insoluble question of how many literary references and foreign language phrases are appropriate, a thorough analysis of all three hundred essays reveals precisely how often Gould utilized these tools in his essays. The foreign phrases total includes Latin (sixteen), French (nine), German (six), and Italian (one). Not included in this count were such commonly used phrases as natura non facit saltum (“nature does not make leaps,” a phrase used often in nineteenth-century natural history and the subject of an entire essay by Gould), or such everyday expressions as raison d’être. Included were such phrases as ne plus ultra (“the ultimate”), Nosce te ipsum (“Know thyself), Mehr Licht (“More light”), Plus ça change, plus c’est la mâme chose (“the more things change, the more they remain the same”), and the one Alcock complained about, Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders; Gott helfe mir; Amen, Martin Luther’s fervent cry of defense for his heresy: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me; Amen.” In three hundred essays written over the course of twenty-seven years, a grand total of thirty-two foreign language phrases were employed, amounting to barely 10 percent of the total, or only one in ten essays. If this is a conscious strategy on Gould’s part to gain “a debater’s advantage,” he does not utilize it very often.

Gould’s literary references are more frequently employed than foreign phrases at 119 total, with the Bible (fifty-three) outnumbering the next three most quoted of Gilbert and Sullivan (twenty-one), Shakespeare (nineteen), and Alexander Pope (eight) combined. Again, there are no objective criteria on how many literary references are appropriate here, but we can nevertheless discern whether Gould is using them as a strategy to win arguments and wow readers, or if he is trying to make his point through as many avenues available for written prose in an attempt to take science to a broader audience. Not surprising (given Gould’s admitted left-leaning upbringing), Karl Marx is often quoted. “Men make their own history, but they do not make just as they please” is used three times, but his favorite is this classic line from the Eighteenth Brumaire, quoted no less than seven times: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The context in which these quotations appear reveal, in fact, that Marx is used by Gould not for show, or for any political or ideological purpose, but directly to bolster his philosophy of science and to reinforce two themata that appear throughout his works—the interaction between contingencies and necessities and the nonrepeatability of historical systems (times arrow versus time’s cycle). “In opening The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Gould notes in one essay, “Karl Marx captured this essential property of history as a dynamic balance between the inexorability of forces and the power of individuals.” Even Marx’s title, Gould explains,

is, itself, a commentary on the unique and the repetitive in history. The original Napoleon staged his coup d’état against the Directory on November 9-10, 1799, then called the eighteenth day of Brumaire, Year VIII, by the revolutionary calendar adopted in 1793 and used until Napoleon crowned himself emperor and returned