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Evolutionary biology is a field plagued by more misunderstanding and misrepresentation than practically any other in science. Adaptive evolution by natural selection is a simple concept, yet the ways in which selection operates are exceedingly subtle and the patterns it generates are easy to misinterpret. Especially in India, the meagre treatment that evolution gets in biology curricula is rife with misinterpretations and over-simplifications; it is also shockingly out of date by over half a century. Stephen Jay Gould wrote extensively and elegantly about misunderstandings of pattern and process in evolution. In the essay reproduced here, which appears as Chapter 11 in ‘Bully for Brontosaurus’, he takes up the tale of the evolution of modern horses, a tale that is familiar to most of us from high school biology texts. Gould shows in his inimitable style how the prejudiced notion of evolution leading to some kind of clear progression up a ladder of increasing perfection was projected onto the data on fossil horses, leading to figures reproduced in biology texts world-wide as canonical examples of adaptive evolution that are, nevertheless, plain wrong.

Amitabh Joshi

Life’s Little Joke

Stephen Jay Gould

I STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND why a raven is like a writing desk, but I do know what binds Hernando Cortés and Thomas Henry Huxley together.

On February 18, 1519, Cortés set sail for Mexico with about 600 men and, perhaps more important, 16 horses. Two years later, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán lay in ruins, and one of the world’s great civilizations had perished.

Cortés’s victory has always seemed puzzling, even to historians of an earlier age who did not doubt the intrinsic superiority of Spanish blood and Christian convictions. William H Prescott, master of this tradition, continually emphasizes Cortés’s diplomatic skill in making alliances to divide and conquer – and his good fortune in despoiling Mexico during a period of marked internal dissension among the Aztecs and their vassals. (Prescott published his History of the Conquest of Mexico in 1843; it remains among the most exciting and literate books ever written.)

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