The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould
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The most entertaining and enlightening writings by the beloved paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and celebrant of the wonder of life. Publishers Weekly Harvard professor and National Book Award winner Gould was one of science's best ambassadors to the general public until his death at 60 in 2002. These 44 essays represent his best-known pieces from his books and from essays for Natural Historymagazine, as well as never before published speeches. The editors have selected pieces on a wide range of subjects from the ever-shrinking Hershey Bar, to his and Niles Eldredge's theory of punctuated evolution and Freud's adaptation of the (now abandoned) biological notion of recapitulation which showcase Gould's immense curiosity as well as his skill at explaining even the most obscure topics with clear and vivid language. Autobiographical essays are followed by scientific ruminations on evolutionary theory and how it has been understood, misunderstood and misused, ever since Darwin put pen to paper. This collection demonstrates Gould's passion for life as well as his enthusiasm for, and awe at, the "majesty" of "the continuity of the tree of life for 3.5 billion years." Gould's many fans, as well as new readers, should find this collection intriguing as well as entertaining, an eminently suitable last hurrah for an amazing thinker. (May)Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
List of Figures ixForeword Oliver Sacks xiIntroduction 1Autobiography 11I Have Landed 15The Median Isn't the Message 26The Streak of Streaks 32Seventh Inning Stretch: Baseball, Father, and Me 41Trouble in Our Own House: A Brief Legal Survey from Scopes to Scalia 49Of Two Minds and One Nature 59Biographies 65Thomas Burnet's Battleground of Time 71The Lying Stones of Marrakech 85The Stinkstones of Oeningen 103The Razumovsky Duet 114The Power of Narrative 127Not Necessarily a Wing 143Worm for a Century, and All Seasons 155The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral: Resolving Evolution's Oddest Coupling 166The Piltdown Conspiracy 182Evolutionary Theory 205The Evolution of Life on Earth 209Challenges to Neo-Darwinism and Their Meaning for a Revised View of Human Consciousness 222The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: Revising the Three Central Features of Darwinian Logic 238The Episodic Nature ofEvolutionary Change 261Betting on Chance-and No Fair Peeking 267The Power of the Modal Bacter, or Why the Tail Can't Wag the Dog 278The Great Dying 286The Validation of Continental Drift 290Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars 297Size, Form, and Shape 303Opus 100 307Size and Shape 319How the Zebra Gets Its Stripes 324Size and Scaling in Human Evolution 333Stages and Sequences 359The Ladder and the Cone: Iconographies of Progress 362Up Against a Wall 376Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology 391Pervasive Influence 395The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Program 423More Things in Heaven and Earth 444Posture Maketh the Man 467Freud's Evolutionary Fantasy 473Racism, Scientific and Otherwise 487Measuring Heads: Paul Broca and the Heyday of Craniology 490The Most Unkindest Cut of All 534A Tale of Two Work Sites 546Carrie Buck's Daughter 564Just in the Middle 574Religion 587Non-overlapping Magisteria 590The Diet of Worms and the Defenestration of Prague 604Darwin and the Munchkins of Kansas 616Hooking Leviathan by Its Past 615Sources and Acknowledgments 636Index 641
