topics: |  biology | evolution | paleontology | genetics

Ninth volume of essays based on his Natural History columns - "This View of
Life,".  23 essays.
From the title story, which deals with a forgery in paleontology:

	But fakery can also become a serious and truly tragic business,
	warping (or even destroying) the lives of thousands, and misdirecting
	entire professions into sterility for generations. Scoundrels may
	find the matrix of temptation irresistible, for immediate gains in
	money and power can be so great, while human gullibility grants the
	skillful forger an apparently limitless field of operation. The van
	Gogh Sunflowers bought in 1987 by a Japanese insurance company for
	nearly 40 million dollars - then a record price for a painting - may
	well be a forged copy made in about 1900 by the stockbroker and
	artist manque Emile Schuffenecker. The phony Piltdown Man, artlessly
	confected from the jaw of an orangutan and a modern human cranium,
	derailed the profession of paleoanthropology for forty years until
	exposed as a fake in the early 1950s.

	Earlier examples cast an even longer and broader net of
	disappointment. A large body of medieval and Renaissance scholarship
	depended upon the documents of Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-Great
	Hermes), a body of work attributed to Thoth, the Egyptian God of
	Wisdom, and once viewed as equal in insight (not to mention
	antiquity) to biblical and classical sources - until exposed as a set
	of forgeries compiled largely in the third century A.D.

	In 1726, Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer, an insufferably
	pompous and dilettantish professor and physician from the town of
	Wurzburg, published a volume, the Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (or
	Wurzburg lithography), documenting in copious words and twenty-one
	plates a remarkable series of fossils that he had found on a mountain
	adjacent to the city. These fossils displayed a great array of
	objects, all nearly exposed in three-dimensional relief on the
	surface of flattened stones. The great majority depicted organisms,
	nearly all complete and including remarkable features of behavior and
	soft anatomy that would never be preserved in conventional fossils -
	lizards in their skins, birds complete with beak and eyes, spiders
	with their webs, bees feeding on flowers, snails next to their eggs,
	and frogs copulating. But others showed heavenly objects - comets
	with tails, the crescent Moon with rays, and the Sun all effulgent
	with a glowing central face of human form. Still others depicted
	Hebrew letters, nearly all spelling out the Tetragrammaton, the
	ineffable name of God - YHWH, usually transliterated by Christian
	Europe as Jehovah.... Alas, after publishing his book and trumpeting
	the contents, Beringer found out that he had indeed been duped,
	presumably by his students playing a prank.

The main story tells how Gould makes a trip to Morocco - after observing,
over several years, the virtual takeover of rock shops throughout the world
with striking fossils from Morocco - primarily straight-shelled nautiloids
(much older relatives of the coiled and modern chambered nautilus)
preserved in black marbles and limestones and usually sold as large,
beautifully polished slabs intended for table or dresser tops.

	I discovered that most of these fossils come from quarries in the
	rocky deserts, well and due east of Marrakech, and not from the
	intervening mountains. ... Moroccan
	rock shops dot the landscape in limitless variety; there are young
	boys hawking a specimen or two at every hairpin turn on the mountain
	roads... but the majority of items offered for sale are either
	entirely phony or at least strongly "enhanced." My focus of interest
	shifted dramatically from worrying about sources and limits to
	studying the ranges and differential expertise of a major industry
	dedicated to the manufacture of fake fossils.

Discusses several fakes - mostly "plaster casts, often remarkably well done".

Contents
1. EPISODES IN THE BIRTH OF PALEONTOLOGY
      The Nature of Fossils and the History of the Earth
         1. The Lying Stones of Marrakech: the power of forgery to
         2. The Sharp-Eyed Lynx, Outfoxed by Nature
         3. How the Vulva Stone Became a Brachiopod
   2. PRESENT AT THE CREATION
      How France's Three Finest Scientists Established Natural History in an
      Age of Revolution
         4. Inventing Natural History in Style
         5. The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates [1]
         6. A Tree Grows in Paris: Lamark's Division of Worms and Revision of
		 Nature [2]
   3. DARWIN'S CENTURY—AND OURS
      Lessons from Britain's Four Greatest Victorian Naturalists
         7. Lyell's Pillars of Wisdom [3]
         8. A Sly Dullard Named Darwin: Recognizing the Multiple Facets of
		 Genius
         9. An Awful Terrible dinosaurian Irony
        10. Second-Guessing the Future
   4. SIX LITTLE PIECES ON THE MEANING AND LOCATION OF EXCELLENCE
      Substrate and Accomplishment
        11. Drink Deep, or Taste Not the Pierian Spring
        12. Requiem Eternal
        13. More Power to Him
      De Mortuis When Truly Bonum
        14. Bright Star Among Billions
        15. The Glory of His Time and Ours
        16. This Was a Man
   5. SCIENCE IN SOCIETY
        17. A tale of two work sites
        18. The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W
        19. Dolly's Fashion and Louis's Passion
        20. Above All, Do No Harm
   6. EVOLUTION AT ALL SCALES
        21. Of Embryos and Ancestors
        22. The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant
        23. Room of One's Own