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to the old forms. But Marx’s book traces the rise of Louis-Napoleon, nephew of the emperor, from the presidency of France following the revolution of 1848, through his own coup d’êtat of December 1851, to his crowning as Napoleon III. Marx seeks lessons from repetition, but continually stresses the individuality of each cycle, portraying the second in this case as a mockery of the first.

To drive home the point Gould finishes this thought with a recommendation for scientists to heed the lesson: “This essential tension between the influence of individuals and the power of predictable forces has been well appreciated by historians, but remains foreign to the thoughts and procedures of most scientists.”24

Similarly, biblical quotations are used to deliver a deeper meaning. In an essay on Charles Doolittle Walcott’s misreading of the Burgess Shale fossils and Gould’s discussion with paleontologist T. H. Clark (who knew and worked with Walcott) on the “true” meaning of the fossils and on how science works, Gould opines:

Lives are too rich, too multifaceted for encompassing under any one perspective (thank goodness). I am no relativist in my attitude towards truth; but I am a pluralist in my views on optimal strategies for seeking this most elusive prize. I have been instructed by T. H. Clark and his maximally different vision. There may be no final answer to Pilate’s inquiry of Jesus (John 18:37), “What is truth?”—and Jesus did remain silent following the question. But wisdom, which does increase with age, probes from many sides—and she is truly “a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her.”25

Gould’s intellectual pluralism is evident in his literary diversity, and he has chosen many strategies for communicating his answer to Pilate’s question.

Essays Thematical

The diversity of Gould’s essays was captured poetically by science historian and lyricist Richard Milner in a tribute song (to the music of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “My Name Is John Wellington Wells”):

I write of cladistics And

baseball statistics

From dodos and mandrills

To friezes and spandrels . . .

I write Essays thematical

Always grammatical

Asteroids, sesamoids,

Pestilence tragical

Ratites, stalactites

And home runs DiMaggical. . .

I write of Cranial capacity

Owen’s mendacity Huxley’s

audacity

Gabon’s urbanity

FitzRoy’s insanity

How Ernest Haeckel, without an apology

Faked illustrations about embryology26

Despite the variety, there is a cladistic pattern from which we may discern a literary baüplan. Figure 14.5 presents the results of a complete classification of all three hundred essays into primary, secondary, and tertiary subjects in thirteen different categories.27

Starting with the lowest figures we see that Gould almost completely neglects to include his personal hobbies, such as baseball and music, as well as his intellectual child, punctuated equilibrium. He dabbles in ecology and environmental issues, touches on geology and the social and behavioral sciences, and, of course, cannot ignore (but does not dwell on) his own trade of paleontology (and its relations paleobiology and paleoanthropology). Obviously natural history, zoology, and biology are regularly featured, even if only on the secondary or tertiary levels, and since the essay genre is, by definition, personal, Gould does produce a fair amount of social commentary, but predominantly at the tertiary level. What is surprising in this graph is the overwhelming dominance of evolutionary theory and the history of science/science studies, comprising 55 percent of the total. Although the personal nature of essays suggests they need not be taken as seriously as, say, major peer-reviewed journal articles and monographs, clearly Gould is using them to a larger purpose involving not only his interest in theory and history, but as an avenue to generate original contributions to and commentary on both. And it would seem from this graph that Gould is, first and foremost, an evolutionary theorist. Or is he? To explore this question further, figure 14.6 shows the