Pursuing praxis

They go together, for some strange reason. Almost as well as beer and paleontology seem to go together. (The 2000 annual SVP meeting drained the town of Norman, OK to within three cans of Diet Coke, I was told. Give or take.) Be that as it may. I’m new to paleo, I don’t drink beer, and I haven’t cared about baseball since I was 12. I remember Kirby Puckett because of his name, because he hung out in the outfield like me, and because he looked like a big teddy bear. Communication is, at times, difficult for me.

I’ve heard that Richard Lewontin of Harvard, a colleague of Gould’s, said of Gould after he died, that "there were only three things that were really important to Steve: choral music, gothic architecture, and baseball."

In my lab there are two die-hard Red Sox fans, a White Sox man, a bi-coastal split-personality A’s-Yankees fan, and four people of unknown regular-season affinities who pick a side come World Series time, always against the Yankees. If you count the many copies of Gould’s books in lab, you might say we have a resident regular-season Yankees man too.

Now, I’m a big Gould fan, so I tolerate the baseball references. I’m also something of a metaphor junkie, and yesterday Kevin introduced the single best way for me to appreciate baseball: as a metaphor for evolution.

So you say baseball is boring. (It is). You sit there consuming empty calories and un-pronounceable toxins from the overpriced foods you buy as a distraction from the fact that you’re spending irretrievable hours of your precious life watching pudgy guys in unflattering uniforms do … well, not much. Mostly they stare at each other and do little machismo rituals. A foul ball is pretty damn exciting considering how much time it takes just to get the ball and bat to connect, moment to moment, play to play, inning to inning.

Evolution is, broadly, similar. Most of it is organisms just camping out, doing their thing. They don’t change appreciably. It’s business as usual, plus or minus a drought or flood. Stasis is boring. But, as it turns out, stasis is also data. The data say, change is rare. Or at least it’s concentrated into little bursts, then equilibrium is reached and it’s business as usual again. So, if evolution is change (which is a very bad definition of evolution, but we’ll go with it), and you want to study evolution, then change is data. On this view, a paleontologist can sit for hours staring at the fossil record, beer can in hand, intently studying some little-known aspect of some critter’s anatomy, and be as thoroughly unimpressed with evolution as I am with baseball, up in the cheap seats, noting with horror-turned-incredulity-turned-humor the overwhelming hairiness of the kid in front of me’s buttcrack. (True story). No wonder paleontologists drink like fish.

The important question is, of course, why the devil then am I a paleontologist? Er, evolutionary biologist? Er, vertebrate evolutionary paleobiologist? Whatever. That which I am, if I’ve got virtually nothing to study? Well, first off, we can study what change we do see, and we do. And - given that there have been billions of species over earth time - it turns out there’s enough of this change preserved to keep a few thousand paleontologists, worldwide, out of poverty.

But on top of this, the mind-numbingly boring intervals of no-change start to take on a personality of their own when you start asking questions like, "The change that we do see, why is that possible in the first place? What makes it possible? And if that machinery is always there, why don’t we see change all the time? Why is the change clustered? What’s going on, when it looks like nothing is going on?" And you squint at your strata of rock, and double-check your forams under the scope, and look askance, in oblique light, fueled by the dregs of yesterday’s coffee and yesterday’s sleep, at the critters you know better than the back of your own hand. (And you know more about the back of your own hand than most sane people have any business knowing.) And you ponder, How??, and rake your mental library of articles and data and factoids and gossip and speculation. And, when an idea comes - either creeping up on you during your morning commute, following you to work, and knocking civilly on your door during office hours, or springing fully formed out of the clutter of your mind and the particulars of life like the glorious beast that it is - there’s no more thrilling and gratifying and raucous experience then conceivable. You spring to your feet, heedlessly knocking over people or papers or prim sensibilities, your own throaty shout of triumph reaching you from a distance. Friends are called and subjected to a play-by-play recounting of the ramp-up to the mind-warping, earth-shattering moment of brilliance, with breathless exclamations of what this heralds for the future. High-fives and butt-slaps and jarring hugs all around.

And then you sit down and get the **** back to work.

But it’s a moment that never dies, one that lives on through writer’s cramp and thinker’s block, and is called to life to fuel and sustain you through all the callous times ahead. It’s when baseball becomes a participatory sport for the fans in the stands, and science becomes a sport deep down in the trenches, that two world-views run parallel for brief conceptual moments, each speaking the other’s language; where each raises his respective alcohol receptacle in tribute - not to each other, but to the best that each may know.