Bully for Brontosaurus
"Provocative and delightfully discursive essays on natural history.... Gould is the Stan Musial of essay writing. He can work himself into a corkscrew of ideas and improbable allusions paragraph after paragraph and then, uncoiling, hit it with such power that his fans know they are experiencing the game of essay writing at its best."--John Noble Wilford, New York Times Book Review
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- I have no idea about current textbooks. But certainly the physics textbook that I learned from quoted the myth. And it is easy to find examples online, like https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoret..., that still do.
I wish it were otherwise, but there are some weird dynamics in the textbook industry that reward looking like other textbooks more than accuracy and usefulness.
A classic essay showing this is "The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone" in Gould's book Bully for Brontosaurus" that traces the history of textbooks comparing Hyracotherium* to a fox terrier. This, despite the fact that most students and authors have absolutely no real idea how big a fox terrier is. And it wouldn't help if they did know, given that Hyracotherium actually weighed over twice as much!
Another classic essay showing how textbooks repeat other textbooks without properly questioning what should be taught is https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf. If you've taken some variant of the differential equations course that he discusses, I highly recommend reading his essay. I guarantee that it is far from the only standard course with such levels of silliness.
- I recommend the book "Bully For Brontosaurus" by Stephen Jay Gould.
It is a fun book from the early 90s or so, I got it as a random present, and enjoy reading it.
It talks a bit about popularisation of science and what it means. Has some interesting stories from history of biology, evolution. One relevant set of articles is on Dinomania -- the sudden and unexpected popularity of dinosaurs, specifically with a short story called "Bully For Brontosaurus" (same title as the book). The story kind of disects how Brontosaurus was a fought over label, and of course the Appatosaurus advocates won. The story ends with "I retreat not with a bang of thunder, but with a whimper of hope that rectification may someday arise from the ashes of my stamp album".
If Steven were alive, he would have been happy to know that indeed rectification did happen!
- I enjoyed Stephen Jay Gould's books:
- You would be astonished at how long phrases can last, with little sense behind it at all!
My favorite example is documented in Bully for Brontosaurus (see https://www.amazon.com/Bully-Brontosaurus-Reflections-Natura... if you want to buy it) in the essay, "The case of the creeping fox terrier clone." For close to a century, the first thing that everyone learned about the early horse Euohippus, officially known as Hyracotherium, was that it was "about the size of a small fox terrier". This despite the fact that essentially nobody knew what size a small fox terrier WAS. And despite the fact that later research found that the animal in question actually weighed several times what a fox terrier does! (But the shoulder height is indeed close.)
I've certainly seen the phrase "like the Nobel for mathematics" many times. I couldn't even have cited the original source. But it doesn't surprise me if this is the only thing most people have heard about the Fields medal. And it also doesn't surprise me that it would come from a movie.
- I like your No Caucus vs the Yes Caucus idea. Interesting to think about. Had to look up Gould's punctuated equilibrium to understand it better. I read "Bully for Brontosaurus" by Gould, that's where I heard the term first but then forgotten its meaning.
Leaving a link here for others:
