[In the following review, Sullivan examines Gould's major arguments in Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, noting Gould's focus on creationism and the different approaches to explaining evolution.]

It is a delight to review another book by the prolific science writer and entertaining author, Stephen Jay Gould (cf. my review of The Mismeasure of Man [7/17/82]), who is on the faculty of Harvard University, where he teaches geology, biology and the history of science. This most recent book is the third volume of collected essays, most of which were originally published in Gould's monthly column in Natural History magazine, entitled “This View of Life.” The reader may also be interested in the two earlier volumes, Ever since Darwin (1977) and The Panda's Thumb (1980). The unifying theme of [Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes,] compiled on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Darwin's death in 1882, is once again biological evolution.

He has grouped the 30 essays into seven categories: Sensible Oddities, Personalities, Adaptation and Development, Teilhard and Piltdown, Science and Politics, Extinction and a Zebra Triology. I especially enjoyed the more offbeat essays such as “Big Fish, Little Fish,” “The Guano Ring,” “Hyena Myths and Realities,” and “What, If Anything, Is a Zebra?” All are spiked with good humor, yet present insights into evolutionary theory and animal behavior.

A debate has been going on among evolutionists concerning two opposing explanations of the process of evolution, neither denying evolution as such, however: the more traditional approach (Darwinian “gradualism”) v. the newer theory of Gould and Eldridge (“punctuated equilibrium”). The author gives an objective presentation of both sides in several essays such as “Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes,” which gives the collection its title. Since the “creationists” have used this in-house debate and twisted it to repudiate evolution, Gould has included several essays repudiating creationism. The readers of America have probably followed this controversy in the news media, which have compared it to the 1925 Scopes monkey trial. Gould correctly dismisses the creationist theory concerning the origin of species as being scientifically untenable. Like many scientists, however, he in turn has a rather restricted understanding of the theology of creation. The fundamentalist exegesis of Genesis is not in the mainstream of modern scriptural scholarship, and the ultimate question is not the origin of species, but the origin of the universe. Or put another way, whence came whatever it was that “banged-big” according to the Big Bang Theory?

Although science must necessarily restrict itself to natural phenomena, Gould implies that there is no supernatural dimension worth considering by any intellectual discipline. This is exemplified in an essay in which he gleefully spends five pages proving that Thomas H. Huxley (a contemporary and defender of Darwin) was really an agnostic, contrary to a statement in the old Moon, Man and Otto biology textbook. Probably true, but what else is new? A secular humanism pervades many of Gould's essays, and perhaps it is this antireligious attitude that was behind his vindictive attack on the Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The 1980 articles are repeated here, in which Gould accused Teilhard of participation in the Piltdown hoax of the ape-man fossil. It was somewhat painful to reread the “Piltdown Conspiracy” once again in which Gould admits that his deduction was based only on circumstantial evidence that has been rejected by other scientists. Yet he is both judge and jury in his conviction of Teilhard, and Gould is especially disturbed by Teilhard's silence on the Piltdown controversy: “I hoped that some old man would come down off a mountain or out of a monastery bearing a yellowed document of confession from Teilhard.”

Such prejudice aside, however, Gould's essays are rich in making apparently insignificant organisms important and providing a new insight for those of us who find biology a rewarding profession or a fascinating avocation. Evolution unifies the diversity of life, and even if hens have lost their teeth, horses still have one toe.