* Max Dresow writes…
I wrote the first installment of my (not-so-) short essay series “Problematica” on January 9, 2023. Since then I’ve written twenty-four more of these things, totaling God knows how many words. My idea at the beginning was to combine scholarly rigor with stylistic freedom. Which is just to say: I’ve tried to write in a way that dispenses with the stuffier conventions of academic prose. I’ve also given myself permission to range as broadly as I want to across the topics that interest me. So far, I’ve checked a bunch of items off my list, from “paleontological colonialism” to “the Darwinized Gaia hypothesis” to “James Hall on mountain-building.” This has been a lot of fun. (Along with being fun, it has freed me up to write during a time in my life when I’ve had trouble making time for more structured forms of research. Also, academic publishing is a racket and it has given me some satisfaction to put my work directly onto the internet without first signing away the copyright to Springer.)
I’ve got plenty more to write about, from agnostic biosignatures to the “Great Taconic Controversy” to a weird line about basalt in a Goethe poem. [Update: find the last essay here.] But for now, here are the twenty-five essays I’ve written along with capsule descriptions. If you’re looking for recommendations, I’m especially fond of essays 1, 2, 6, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17 and 19. (I’ll put a double-asterisk [**] next to these.) Thank you so much for reading!
1. “Comparisons with Teeth: Two Hundred Years of Actualism in Paleontology” **
> An essay that uses early dinosaur paleontology and recent modeling work on Otodus megalodon to explore the nature of actualistic reasoning in paleontology
2. “‘Truth Also Has its Paleontology’, or When Pragmatism Met Uniformitarianism” **
> An essay that takes its inspiration from a single sentence in William James’s book, Pragmatism: “truth also has its paleontology…” What the heck is he talking about?
3. “Hugh Miller, Misplaced Boulders, and a Challenge for ‘Historical Cognitivism’”
> An attempt to sic the history of geology on the position Derek Turner calls “historical cognitivism” in environmental aesthetics (roughly, the idea that scientific knowledge enhances aesthetic experience)
4. “The Trouble with Ancestors”
> A “mini-review” of Ronald Jenner’s book, Ancestors in Evolutionary Biology, which focuses on Jenner’s arguments about the supposed link between basal phylogenetic position and “primitiveness”
5. “Lords of Marble and the Spear”
> An essay that explores a recent episode in the history of paleontological colonialism and asks: under what circumstances might a nation demand the return of a fossil specimen in the absence of demonstrable illegality in its acquisition?
6. “The Once and Future Earth” **
> An essay that explores two attempts to use Mars to learn about the future and the past of Earth, respectively. The first attempt belongs to Percival Lowell, aka, the Martian canal guy. The second belongs to geoscientists interested in using the Martian geohistorical record to learn about Earth before plate tectonics
7. “History, Kindness, and the Great Evolutionary Faunas”
> An essay that tries to put pressure on a recent account of historical natural kinds using Jack Sepkoski’s “great evolutionary faunas”
8. “Stray Thoughts on Contingency Following the MBL-ASU History of Biology Seminar”
> A little meditative essay on historical contingency, motivated by the 2023 MBL-ASU History of Biology Seminar (“Replaying Life’s Tape: Historical Contingency in the Life Sciences”)
9. “How to Change Your Life Using Punctuated Equilibria”
> The first part of a three-part essay on Stephen Jay Gould’s early work in evolutionary paleontology. This one asks why Gould was so invested in a concept he would come to abhor: “biological improvement,” i.e., progress
10. “Paradox of stasis” **
> The second part of my essay on Stephen Jay Gould and evolutionary paleontology. This one asks why the development of punctuated equilibria did so little to upset Gould’s early adaptationist and progressivist leanings— at least at first
11. “Ediacaran enigma: Uncertainty and underdetermination in Precambrian paleontology” **
> An essay that examines the problems involved in interpreting the enigmatic fossils of the Ediacaran biota, as well as some influential attempts to interpret them
12. “Re-thinking living fossils, again”
> A critical look at some recent philosophical work on living fossils by Scott Lidgard, Alan Love, and Beckett Sterner
13. “Goddess in the details” **
> A raised eyebrow history of the Gaia hypothesis, focusing on its run-ins with evolutionary theory. Does Gaia need to be Darwinized?
14. “The first philosopher of paleontology— Er, ‘palaetiology’”
> An exploration of William Whewell’s concept of “palaetiological science” with remarks on the relationship between science and religion, and Charles Lyell too
15. “Equilibrium, disrupted”
> The third and final part of my essay on Stephen Jay Gould and evolutionary paleontology. This part asks why Gould changed his mind about key features of evolution (adaptation, progress) around 1977, but not before
16. “DINOSAUR TIME”
> A short essay that complains about how prevalent the language of political domination is in popular writing about dinosaurs
17. “The importance of background theory, or why James Hall left mountains out of his theory of mountain-building” **
> An essay about a zinger: James Dana’s allegation that James Hall’s remarks about mountain building are “a theory for the origin of mountains with the origin of mountains left out”
18. “Alien versus amphibian: War of the world views?”
> The first part of a three-part essay on Charles Lyell and Eduard Suess. This one examines Lyell’s geology through the lens of a fictional character of his own creation: Lyell’s “amphibious being”
19. “‘What we are witnessing is the collapse of the terrestrial globe’” **
> The second part of a three-part essay on Lyell and Suess. This one explores Suess’s geology through the lens of his “extraterrestrial observer”: a character that greets the reader in the opening pages of Das Antlitz der Erde
20. “Going global: geology between lyell and suess”
> The third part of a three-part essay on Lyell and Suess. This one asks what the comparison between Lyellian and Suessian geology can teach us about the path geological science traveled during the nineteenth century
21. “St. George and the Dragon”
> The first part of a two-part essay on the origin of novel characters in nineteenth century evolutionary science. This one explores several nineteenth century arguments against the idea that natural selection can explain the origin of novel structures, paying special attention to “Mivart’s dilemma”
22. “Mivart’s dilemmA ConFronted”
> The second part of my essay on the origin of novel characters in nineteenth century evolutionary science. This one examines how four different scientists tackled Mivart’s dilemma: Herbert Conn, William Bateson, Vernon Kellogg, and Theodor Eimer
23. “The Bear”
> A tiny after-dinner mint of an essay on Mivart’s dilemma. What did J. B. S. Haldane make of it?
24. “Release the kraken”
> The first part of a two-part essay on “dangerous speculation” in geohistory. This one introduces three examples of outrageous speculation: the Triassic kraken hypothesis, the Nemesis affair, and the vendobiont hypothesis
25. “Wild thing”
> The second part of my essay on dangerous speculation. This one analyzes the reception of the hypotheses discussed in Part 1