Remora

Gould's is a demise foretold -- why else would he have written in his last book of essays that they were, indeed, the last book of essays -- but LI is sad about it anyway. On first reading, we found the NYT obituary ill-tempered. On second reading, the quote from John Maynard Smith about the "uselessness" of Gould's contribution to evolutionary theory was not the poke in the eye (some emergence of the mole from the ever vigilant network around Robert Wright?) than a on the one hand, on the other hand kind of thing. Although we doubt that Richard Dawkins obituary will suffer from this rather cheap shot:

"Some charged that his theories, like punctuated equilibrium, were so malleable and difficult to pin down, that they were essentially untestable."

We don't imagine the Times repeating the complaint that Dawkins use of the term gene has stretched it way beyond any correspondence to the physical thing, the gene. In Dawkins hands, the gene becomes something like one of Quine's event zones.

Thinking of Gould leads us to recommend this review, in Ha'aretz, of a terminally silly book entitled: "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom," by one Gerald Schroeder:

"...there is the Mishna in Tractate Sanhedrin that states: "The following will have no share of the Next World: Those who say that the resurrection of the dead is not mentioned in the Bible." Rashi's commentary on this passage is: "Those persons who admit and believe that the dead will be resurrected, but who claim that there is no allusion to this resurrection in the Bible are heretics because they are denying that the Bible mentions the resurrection of the dead."

Gerald Schroeder, author of "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom" [the title of the original book in English, published by the Free Press, 1997] takes an even more extreme position than that of the tana (scholar) in the above-mentioned passage in the Mishna. The Mishna demands that Jews look for an allusion in the Bible to something very specific: the resurrection of the dead, an event that belongs more to the next world than to this one. Schroeder, on the other hand, appears to be determined to find - at least, for himself - allusions in the Bible to many basic theories and many scientific disciplines that are related to this world, not to the next: astronomy, paleontology, geology and cosmic and biological evolution. "

The reviewer, Elia Leibowitz, finds Schroeder to be appalling, which of course he is. The Mishna, in fact, would certainly have mentioned his appallingness if God hadn't been distracted by other matters. The Free Press, which published Schroeder's book, is an establishment, conservative press, famously edited by one of Saul Bellow's children. From Leibowitz' description of Schroeder's book, however, it seems pander without any redeeming value to the dumbest hick prejudices out there in the hinterlands. Here's an ace example, set up by Leibowitz's common sense question:

"If the Bible is a human creation, what scientific sources were at the disposal of the authors of this book, which undoubtedly was written many centuries ago? For example, Schroeder does not explain how the author who wrote the marvelous passage on God's revelation to Moses (Exodus 3) knew that there are 26 dimensions in the world. Schroeder suggests - apparently, with total seriousness - that the numerology of God's explicit name (which is not mentioned by Orthodox Jews), which is 26, alludes to the fact that the world has 26 dimensions. Four of these dimensions - the three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time - are known, while the other 22 are invisible. The hidden dimensions - the word for "hidden" in Hebrew is "alum" - give the world its name, which in Hebrew is "olam," a term that can be interpreted as semantically linked to "alum."

Schroeder gets very excited by the numerology here and from the context in which it appears because 26 is the number of dimensions with whose help the world can be described, according to the early versions of the String Theory, which presents an ultra-modern picture of the world and which occupies a position midway between hypothesis and theory in recent thinking in the world of physics. Does Schroeder think that the author of Exodus was familiar with the String Theory? Did the author know, have familiarity with, and use the mathematical concept of dimension? "

There is a certain level of pap that should properly revulse even the editors of the Free Press. Alas, nobody has ever gone broke marketing New Age books or Conservative screeds. Schroeder's low genius was simply to combine the two. It isn't enough appreciated how much the contemporary right owes to Reagan --Nancy Reagan, that is.