Have any of you ever read Gould's essay "The Upwardly Mobile Fossils of Leonardo's Living Earth" in his book, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms? I just reread it, and I have to say that he was quite unfair to Leonardo, in contrast to every fluffy review or mention of the article I can find on the internet. Gould starts off by recapitulating Leonardo's remarkably modern observations on fossils and geology, such as Leonardo's understanding of stratigraphy, and that fossils are the remains of formerly living organisms, and not neoPlatonic whatevers--and neither were such fossils deposited in a 40-day worldwide flood. Leonardo got it right: formerly marine sediments were uplifted to mountainous height. Then Gould analyzes a theory that Leonardo got wrong: why do torrents form near the top of mountain summits? Gould's analysis is of two parts: Gould follows Darwin's saying that all observations are either for or against a particular theory: thus, Leonardo's interpretations of fossil clams are at once urged against both neoPlatonism and paleocreationism, as well as for Leonardo's own pet theory of the Earth--that the Earth is analogous to the human body. Of course, we can turn Gould's method of deconstruction against himself. Gould's analysis of Leonardo is also two-fold: it is against the view that Leonardo was an unmitigated genius, or "spaceman" as Gould put it, and is for Gould's dialectical materialist view of the world--that people and their theories are sociological products "of their own time". Gould says that the modern myth of Leonardo is that Leonardo is like Mark Twain's time-traveling Henry Morgan--a person so far ahead of his time, that he might as well be a time-traveler. And so Gould wants to take Leonardo down a notch and so takes him to task for his theory of hydrology. Of Leonardo's physiological view of the world, Gould says:---Quote---Simply stated, Leonardo was vigorously promoting a common and distinctively premodern view that could not have been more central to all his thought and art: the comparison, and causal union, of the earth as a macrocosm with the human body as a microcosm. We tend to regard such comparisons today as "merely" analogical or "purely" metaphorical--more apt to promoote a deluding sense of false unity than any genuine insight about common causality. By contrast, Leonardo's premodern world viewed such sonsonances as deeply meaningful, in part by invoking the same general theory of symbolic correspondence across scales of size and realms of matter that Leonardo (ironically) had rejected so vigorously in denying the Neoplatonic idea that fossils might grow within rocks as products of the mineral kingdom. (my emphasis)---End Quote---First, allow me to point that Gould's theory of teleology is a flawed straw man: when one compares two teleological systems, it is emphatically not necessarily the case that one is searching for "common causality". This is simply because of the fact that the "same" function can be performed by radically different causal mechanisms. Leonardo, in contrast to Gould's characature was employing Dennett's "intentional stance" to the Earth--that is, Leonardo asked what the Earth "wanted", and then attempted to reverse engineer a mechanical solution that would satisfy the want. Second, the comparison between Leonardo's strategy and the neoPlatonic strategy of "symbolic correspondence" is unfair, because Leonardo was a substance monist (that is, he was pretty much a materialist), and therefore it would not occur to him to invoke nonmaterial substances as causal factors; therefore, there is no irony.Third, Gould's claim that Leonardo's physiological view was "distinctively premodern" and "ever so antiquated" (p. 43) is, I guess, a backhanded allusion to Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. Because isn't Lovelock a modern? If not, then what is he? Here, Gould portrays contemporary science as much more monolithic than it actually is. Truth is monolithic; theory is not. At any rate, Gould goes on to describe Leonardo's theory of how high mountain springs work: they are the result of a circulation system analogous to blood vessels in the body. Just as blood flows uphill in humans, ---Quote---so does the water which is moved from the deep sea up to the summits of the mountains, and through the burst veins [mountain springs] it falls down again to the shallows of the sea, and so rises again to the height where it burst through, and then returns in the same descent. (quoted in Gould's essay)---End Quote--- However, Leonardo couldn't quite come up with a mechanism to make this happen. The best he could come up with is that the land is sort of like a sponge, it sucks up water through capillary action, but the problem is that there is no apparent squeezing mechanism that can then push the water out the top of the sponge. So then Gould asks why Leonardo didn't think of the "'obviously' correct" answer, that high mountain springs near summits are the result of precipitation rather than upwardly flowing subterranean veins. The reason, Gould says, is because Leonardo was so commited to his supposedly medieval, physiological theory of the Earth "and that this analogy required that water flow both up and down within earthly channels that could be likened to blood vessls. Blood does not evaporate and fall as rain in our heads!" (Gould's emphasis)And so Gould reaches his final conclusion: "Leonardo, the truly brilliant observer, was no spaceman, but a citizen of his own instructive and fascinating time." QEDI'm sorry, but this essay is touted as one of Gould's best, but it's just awful as far as I can see. Someone has to say the emperor wears no clothes. Leonardo was not a time-traveling spaceman. Duh! He was a product of his time, yes, but what else could he be? That trivially follows from the fact that he wasn't a time-traveler. Gould's analysis notwithstanding, I still think it's fair to say that Leonardo is the top candidate for history's all-time "Farthest Ahead of His or Her Time" award. If not Leonardo, then who else? Einstein? I don't think so. Maybe Imhotep. . . .Futhermore, Gould errs when he asserts that the precipitation explanation is inconsistent with a physiological view of the Earth. Lovelock certainly doesn't posit uphill-flowing subterranean rivers. But worst of all, Gould carelessly sells short Leonardo's powers of observation when he describes Leonardo as merely "brilliant". The thing is, the precipitation explanation for the high mountain springs of the Italian Alps is not "'obviously' correct". Leonardo visited the region of Lombardi in 1503, and had ample opportunity to make direct observations. And what he must have observed were ice-cold torrents emerging from barren, rocky talus slopes within sight of mountain summits. Why so much cold water would flow at such high altitudes in late summers when there is little precipitation would have been a mystery to Leonardo . Leonardo was well aware that the porosity and permeability of a talus formation is as high as it gets in the geological world--that is, any rain that did fall would rapidly flow through the rocks, and then emerge in short order from the high mountain springs, at which point the springs would slow to a trickle, if they didn't run dry entirely. Instead, relatively steady torrents are observed. Moreover, summer rain doesn't explain the icy coldness of the spring water. So Leonardo, the genius observationalist realized that high mountain springs required a special explanation--and he attempted to provide several. He was not wrong when he realized that a special explanation was needed--and simple rain is not special.And indeed there is a special explanation: rock glaciers. So-called rock glaciers are actually more or less regular ice glaciers, it's just that they're covered up with many meters of talus rock. Such rock glaciers provide a steady source of ice-cold flowing water at high altitudes even in late summer months when there has been little recent precipitation. However, no one really knew that rock glaciers existed until the 1920's, and have only been seriously studied much since the late 1980's--therefore, Leonardo could not have known about them--Gould had no such excuse. One can legitimately question that if Leonardo was such a genius, then why didn't he hit upon the rock glacier hypothesis? My answer is that if all he had to do in his life was to ramble around the mountains of Lombardi, he would have hit upon the correct explanation. Active rock glaciers actually show characteristic flow lines, but at least in Lombardi, active rock glaciers comprise a small minority of the total number of rock glaciers. In other words, Leonardo had too much on his plate. That's the problem with being a renaissance man.To conclude, Gould's essay on Leonardo says more about Gould than Leonardo. Gould's essay truly did and still does a disservice to Leonardo's historical legacy if the uniformly uncritical response on the internet that I've seen is any indication. Gould may have been a bright essayist capable of holding my attention for an hour at a time--but he was no Leonardo._______________________"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions."--Leonardo da Vinci