The director of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre has been surreptitiously re-reading his own book, Darwin鈥檚 Fishes: An encyclopedia of ichthyology, ecology and evolution (Cambridge). 鈥淒arwin had far more to do with fishes than with finches.鈥�
During the Fourth World Fisheries Congress in May, a visiting friend gave him Galileo in Rome by William Shea and Mariano Artigas (Oxford, 2003). The last of Galileo鈥檚 six visits to Rome involved his being shown instruments of torture, as an inspiration to cease propagating his heliocentric heresies. The book was sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, which seeks 鈥渢o pursue new insights at the boundary between theology and science鈥�. Pauly says this 鈥渕isguided book鈥�, with its 鈥渂enevolent representation of prelates who used torturers to get their point across鈥�, reminds him of the price scientists still pay for tangling with bishops, or mullahs for that matter.
He also enjoys Jorge Luis Borges鈥檚 Collected Fictions (Viking, 1999, and others), notably 鈥淭he Library of Babel鈥�, which describes a library containing every single book that can be generated through permuting the letters of an alphabet. 鈥淚 used this essay last year in a science literacy course,鈥� Pauly says, 鈥渢o illustrate neatly why organisms must be similar to their parents, lest they get lost in non-functional DNA-space, like the inhabitants of the library.鈥�
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