Rather, today’s science writing is a branch of journalism. It is represented in Britain by the Association of British Science Writers, to which I confess long membership. It is a genre that has grown up in response to the plain fact of life that contemporary science is too complex and difficult for the non-scientist to understand unless translated into plain language.

It is a rare scientist who can double as a science writer, and when he (let’s not get into that argument) does it well, he is likely as not on to a bestseller. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene. Ironically or not, its author, Richard Dawkins, was a principal adversary of another great scientist and science writer, the late Stephen Jay Gould.

Gould, a palaeontologist who held a Harvard chair in zoology, was born in 1941 and died of cancer in 2002. For 27 years he wrote a monthly column in the American journal Natural Selection. This unbroken sequence of 300 essays allowed him to expound entertainingly and informatively on a sweeping range of scientific topics, from the forgery of the Piltdown Man “skull” to continental drift and the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. In his books and academic papers as well, he was always readable and provocative, never condescending and rarely using numbers, appreciating that the reading public is, by and large, innumerate. The US Congress, ignoring his reputation as a political radical, called him “a living legend”.

This selection from Gould’s work, including his monumental Structure of Evolutionary Theory, gathered by Steven Rose and Paul McGarr, allows the reader to share Gould’s enthusiasms and perplexities. How did life emerge 3.5 billion years ago? How did and does evolution work? Gould’s main message is that, contrary to Darwin (about whom he is never less than respectful), the increasing complexity of living organisms does not constitute progress. The process was not one purposeful “ascent of man”, culminating in the human race. Explaining evolution thus, said Gould, is “the tail wagging the dog or the invalid elevation of a small and epiphenomenal consequence into a major and controlling cause”.

Gould was helped in his mission to explain by his specialities. Surely, the study of the Earth’s rocks, fossils and life forms is the most accessible of the scientific disciplines? As a student of the fossil record, Gould was well-placed to challenge Darwin’s idea that individual species originated through natural selection, with the “fittest” surviving. He showed how Darwin’s simple, engaging theory was challenged in the 19th century — by scientists as well as by those who preferred the six-day biblical explanation.

Gould favoured what he called “punctuated equilibrium”. Life’s changing forms were not a steady progression of the superior defeating the inferior, but rather random bursts of mutations. It was not the “fittest” that survived, but those favoured by chance. His development of this idea over the years makes useful reading for anyone trying to follow the current debate over “intelligent design”.

Whatever was going on, Gould makes plain, was not “intelligent”. “Western thought”, he wrote, “has constructed a view of human evolution congenial to our hopes and expectations.” Where he differed from Dawkins was on the level at which evolutionary change occurs. To Dawkins, change happens in the genes; these mutate and pass on the changes in copying themselves. Gould, in contrast, focused on whole species. (While he and Dawkins disagreed, they were as one in opposing the creationists.) To Gould, the most impressive phenomenon in evolution in life are the bacteria. Present from the beginning of the fossil record to today, bacteria were the essential ingredient that emerged from “the primeval soup” — Gould’s catchphrase for “oceans teaming with appropriate organic compounds prior to the origin of life”.

To him, the hardest problem presented by the theory of evolution is its purposeless gradualism. “How can new and complex forms of life evolve if each requires thousands of separate changes, and if intermediate stages make little sense?” The wing did not appear as a flying device. It was originally a heat regulator for insects and birds. That it could produce lift-off emerged only after it was well-developed. Steven Rose’s engaging introduction places Gould’s passion for American baseball (which Gould saw as a metaphor for life) in its biographical context. Gould grew up in the late 1940s, as the grandchild of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, in New York in the borough of Queens. It was a time when the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, were at their peak and for a young boy baseball provided, in Gould’s words, “a major tactic for assimilation”. As did, Professor Rose observes, the city’s superb public school system that opened the door to university and the professions for the children of immigrants.

This “best of Gould” collection leaves two strong impressions. One is that evolution is as proven a fact as gravity but that how it works is an unsolved problem. The other is that, for the practitioners, science is fun. When Gould found a hybrid zone between two varieties of the land snail with which he was obsessed, he wanted to shout for joy. To be able to say: “We have discovered it; we understand it; we have made some sense and order of nature’s confusion! Can any reward be greater?”


The science of simplicity

BILL BRYSON From small island to big planet — in A Short History of Nearly Everything, the American travel writer Bryson takes on the origins of the universe, quantum theory and the evolution of man. Armed with little more than curiosity and wit, he did what Stephen Hawking couldn’t quite manage: he wrote a bestselling science book that people actually read.

JOSTEIN GAARDER It’s difficult to find the middle ground in philosophy: at one end there’s Wittgenstein, at the other, Des’ree. But Gaarder, a Norwegian ex-teacher, hit the right pitch in his novel Sophie’s World, which lucidly explained the history of western thought, becoming a genuine children’s/adult crossover along the way.

OLIVER SACKS A neurologist by trade, Sacks is perhaps the only science writer whose work can also be seen on both stage and screen. His book Awakenings inspired a play by Harold Pinter and a Robert De Niro movie, while his signature piece The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat — a study of various unusual disorders including the agnosia of the title — was dramatised by Peter Brook and turned into an opera by Michael Nyman.

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