Dinosaur in a Haystack

Dinosaur In a Haystack DIH 1. Happy Thoughts on a Sunny Day in New York City ............................................. 1 DIH 2. Dousing Diminutive Dennis’s Debate (or DDDD = 2000) .................................... 2 DIH 3. The Celestial Mechanic and the Earthly Naturalist ................................................ 3 DIH 4. The Late Birth of a Flat Earth ................................................................................. 4 DIH 5. The Monster’s Human Nature ................................................................................ 5 DIH 6. The Tooth and Claw Centennial ............................................................................. 6 DIH 7. Sweetness and Light ............................................................................................... 7 DIH 8. In the Mind of the Beholder .................................................................................... 8 DIH 9. Of Tongue Worms, Velvet Worms, and Water Bears .......................................... 10 DIH 10. Cordelia’s Dilemma ............................................................................................ 12 DIH 11. Lucy on the Earth in Stasis ................................................................................. 14 DIH 12. Dinosaur in a Haystack ....................................................................................... 15 DIH 13. Jove’s Thunderbolts ............................................................................................ 18 DIH 14. Poe’s Greatest Hit ............................................................................................... 19 DIH 15. The Invisible Woman .......................................................................................... 21 DIH 16. Left Snails and Right Minds ............................................................................... 22 DIH 17. Dinomania ........................................................................................................... 23 DIH 18. Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, Oh! ................................................................. 24 DIH 19. Evolution by Walking ......................................................................................... 24 DIH 20. The Razumovsky Duet ........................................................................................ 25 DIH 21. Four Antelopes of the Apocalypse...................................................................... 26 DIH 22. Does the Stoneless Plum Instruct the Thinking Reed? ....................................... 26 DIH 23. The Smoking Gun of Eugenics ........................................................................... 28 DIH 24. The Most Unkindest Cut of All .......................................................................... 29 DIH 25. Can We Complete Darwin’s Revolution? .......................................................... 30 DIH 26. A Humongous Fungus Among Us ...................................................................... 33 DIH 27. Speaking of Snails and Scales ............................................................................ 34 DIH 28. Hooking Leviathan by Its Past ............................................................................ 36 DIH 29. A Special Fondness for Beetles .......................................................................... 38 DIH 30. If Kings Can Be Hermits, Then We Are All Monkeys’ Uncles ......................... 40 DIH 31. Magnolias from Moscow .................................................................................... 41 DIH 32. The First Unmasking of Nature .......................................................................... 43 DIH 33. Ordering Nature by Budding and Full-Breasted Sexuality ................................. 44 DIH 34. Four Metaphors in Three Generations ................................................................ 45 DIH 1. Happy Thoughts on a Sunny Day in New York City On May 10, 1994, an annular eclipse occurred in parts of New England. In an annular eclipse, the moon is farther away from the earth than usual, and a “ring” (Latin, annulus) of sunlight remains around the moon at totality. Gould describes his anger with himself in not being able to travel to New Hampshire to see the best view, due to a prior commitment in New York City that day. New York would be exposed to a partial solar 1 eclipse, which is not nearly as dramatic. His frustration turned to joy, however, as he walked the streets of Manhattan during the phenomenon. While it never became truly dark, the character of the light did change quite noticeably. Further, every small aperture, from a hole in an awning to gaps between leaves on sidewalk trees, produced an image of the crescent sun via the “pinhole camera” effect. New Yorkers, legendary for always being in a hurry, stopped along the sidewalks in large numbers to marvel at these effects. One of the most diverse groups of humanity on the planet came together to share a fascination and a smile with dozens of strangers. Gould, always the humanist, quickly became more taken with the reactions of his fellow New Yorkers than he would have been with a better view of the eclipse – and he was a big fan of eclipses. The first thing that people must have in order to appreciate science, he argues, is a curiosity about the natural world. Based on this, he concludes, science at the level of the common man is alive and well in the United States. He is also pleased to note that there are events that do not involve tragedy that can bring us together, across all sociological lines. Happy thoughts! DIH 2. Dousing Diminutive Dennis’s Debate (or DDDD = 2000) Gould had more interest than most in the transitions of centuries and millennia. He offers no formal justification for this interest: he is not a numerologist, nor is he a believer in near-term “end times.” [I speculate that it may stem from his self-identified goal of continuing his rewarding but no doubt exhausting monthly essay-writing “streak” through the end of the millennia, but no farther.] He begins this essay with the answers to some basic questions. First, “millennium” has two n’s because it is a contraction of the Latin words mille (thousand) and annum (years); annum has two n’s, so millennium does also. Second, he points out that the term technically refers a thousand-year period of time, rather than the transition between such periods. Moreover, the traditional (biblical) use of the term is as the beginning of a thousand year reign of Christ, culminating in the end of the world, rather than the end the group of years that all posses the same digit in the thousand’s place. Gould then proceeds to discuss the question of whether the 20th century ends on December 31, 1999 or December 31, 2000. Phrased another way, is the year 2000 the last year of the 20th century, or the first year of the 21st century? Gould’s quick answer is that it is actually arbitrary. He gives us the history of the problem’s origin, which is due to a sixth-century Monk named Dionysius Exiguus (literally “Dennis the Short”). Dennis was assigned the task of developing a formal Christian chronology by the Pope. In addition to a few technical errors, such as getting the date of Christ’s birth wrong with respect to the Roman calendar by a few years, he made one big one that is the source of the problem at hand. Rather than defining the eighth day after Christ was born as the beginning of year zero, he chose it to be the beginning of year one. (He did this for B.C. numbers as well – the previous year was 1 BC, not 0 BC, so in numerical terms the date changed from –1 to +1 just after Jesus’s birth.) This has given no end of headaches to Roman scholars, astronomers, and others over the years. It also leaves us with the logical position that if a century is to contain one hundred years, then the end of the first century 2 must be 100 and not 99. This problem ripples through directly to today, although Gould tells us that Europeans did not really start struggling with the issue of what year the century ended until the 1699 – 1701 transition. The “common sense” position is that the centuries change at the “odometer moment.” Gould’s autistic son presented him an excellent rationale for this view: the first century simply had ninety-nine years instead of one hundred. Why not? Gould argues that both views are equally valid, because it is a human construction, rather than an external reality, that is involved. If there is no correct answer to this debate, then can we learn anything? Gould answers yes: we can learn something about societies of the past in the arguments they used in each case. He argues that the “elites” (e.g., the presidents of the Ivy League colleges) have traditionally sided with the logical position of 00-to-01 as the correct moment. The “man on the street” generally prefers the view of 99-to-00 for the transition; Gould actually references the song “1999” by Prince in this category, in addition to references from earlier centuries. DIH 3. The Celestial Mechanic and the Earthly Naturalist This essay discusses the concept of determinism in nature through the perspectives of two great 18th century French scientists, Georges Buffon (1707-1778) and Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827). Gould begins with Laplace, who survived and even thrived during the French Revolution, and contributed greatly to several fields of science and mathematics. One of his great accomplishments was to use Newtonian mechanics to solve a set of challenging problems in

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