Well said, Professor Gould! No, really, very well said indeed. Almost perfect, really. No need to repeat it, I got the idea the first time and . . . well now you’ve gone and said it again in a slightly different way, which makes me wonder if you think I’m some sort of dimwit who needs you to draw...
Mr. Gould was a Harvard professor and since the early 70's has been writing essayson natural history, evolution, paleontology (study of prehistoric life). His essays were bundledand published into books. Dinosaur in a haystack was probably his most notable.I've liked his works as he's very access...
This is a book of essays originally published by Gould in Natural History magazine, during the time that he was its editor (one of several such books, in fact). As such, it is an effort on his part to appeal to an educated popular audience with snippets of information about current research, part...
This book is 30 years old and still highly readable. It's about biology, more specifically about Darwinian evolution and the history of science. Quite good and gripping writing explaining what is still pretty much the current state of our knowledge. Gould has a fondness for rehabilitating scienti...
Stephen Jay Gould was adept at reviewing scientific missteps and errors and building telling lessons from them. His essays are highly discursive, often taking twists and turns through little known bits of history and popular culture, as a means of explicating complex concepts. He was a brilliant ...
There's been a revolution in evolution. A number of them, in fact. If you've been keeping a vision of the perfection of life forms through a crude survival-of-the-fittest paradigm in the back of your intellectual closet, it's time to toss that out for a new model. The revolution examined in Wo...
I started reading this book based a friend's recommendation after a discussion about science and politics. Going into it, I understood it to be two things: An argument against the use of science to "prove" preconceived notions, in particular about the supposedly innate cognitive abilities of dif...
Gould seems to relegate religion to issues of morality, and argues they need to accept scientific claims that miracles don't and cannot happen and that they violate NOMA (non overlapping magisteria) by seeking to get creationism taught in schools. But NOMA cuts both ways though, scientist (which ...
I started reading Natural History magazine several years ago, because I loved the essays of Stephen Jay Gould that appeared in each monthly issue; each essay had something to do with evolution (with Charles Darwin’s name invoked regularly), and were quite entertaining reading, along with being ed...
Published in 2000, this collection of essays from Natural History Magazine is subtitled Penultimate Reflections in Natural History because the "millennial issue" of January 2001 was to carry the 300th in an unbroken series of Gould's monthly columns since 1973, which would be the last. His "Prefa...
Una delle raccolte di saggi che preferisco del compianto Stephen Jay Gould. L'argomento è l'evoluzione, e la storia della scienza. Tra i pezzi fondamentali ci sono i tre articoli relativi a Teilhard e alla truffa di Piltdown, in cui Gould espone la sua tesi sulla probabile colpevolezza del giovan...
Why Not in Wonderland?Once again, I have taken up a book of Stephen Jay Gould's essays. There is no doubt that he was one of the best essayists of our times, writing with humor, intelligence and feeling, But there is one theme that comes up far too often in his later essays to be ignored. This th...
A brief Gould book about the millenium. In structure, similar to other compilations of his previously published articles. Gould's focus is on the millenium itself--not the psychology or sociology of our reactions to the millenium, but specfic calendrical, astronomical, and historical questions a...
Science meets sport in this vibrant collection of baseball essays by the late evolutionary biologist.Among Stephen Jay Gould's many gifts was his ability to write eloquently about baseball, his great passion. Through the years, the renowned paleontologist published numerous essays on the sport; t...
We all recognize, of course, that many folks and movements hold narrow and aggressively partisan positions, usually linked to an active political agenda, and based on exalting one side while bashing the other. Obviously, extremists of the so-called Christian right, particularly the small segment ...
In this section on complexity in the history of life, I shall present something close to a "mirror image" case—an increase in total variation by expansion away from a lower limit, or "left wall," of simplest conceivable form. The cases may seem quite different at first: improvement in baseball as...
Among the more benign manifestations, we might list our own propensity for making lists of the best and the worst where calendrical cycles end by our own fiat. First published as “The Athlete of the Century” in American Heritage, October 1998. Among the various impedimen...
“In the beginning of years,” Rudyard Kipling tells us in his Just-So Stories, “when the world was so new and all, and the animals were just beginning to work for Man, there was a camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work.” Instead, when urged to service...
But they also foisted upon an apparently willing world a literary genre probably unmatched for tedium and inaccurate portrayal: the multivolumed “life and letters” of eminent men. These extended encomiums, usually written by grieving widows or dutiful sons and daughters, masqueraded as humbly obj...
It contained some nifty words, and she would call upon us in turn for definitions. I will never forget the spectacle of five kids in a row denying that they knew what “nymphomania” meant—the single word, one may be confident, that everyone had learned with avidity. Sixth in line...
Kirwan based his accusations on the unlikely charge that Hutton had placed the earth’s origin beyond the domain of what science could consider or (in a stronger claim) had even denied that a point of origin could be inferred at all. Kirwan wrote in 1799: Recent experience has shown that the...
When Leonardo da Vinci, for example, likened our bodily heat, breath, blood, and bones to the lavas of volcanic eruptions, the effusions of interior air in earthquakes, the emergence of streams from underground springs, and the rocks that build the earth’s framework—and then interpreted these seq...
MOST YOUNG MEN OF HIS TIME COULD ONLY FANTAsize; but Charles Darwin experienced the overt drama of his century’s archetypal episode in a genre of personal stories that we now call “coming of age”: a five-year voyage of pure adventure (and much science), circumnavigating the globe on H.M.S. Beagle...
Mark Twain born under the comet’s waning light in 1835, died at its next passage seventy-six years later. But the vast majority of us get only one chance—or none at all. So we celebrate and, if intellectually inclined, we also cerebrate. If any natural happening ever received more tha...
As Marx wrote in his last thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have thus far only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Pristine originality is an illusion; all great ideas were thought and expressed before a conventional founder first proclaimed t...