Product Description
Gould's subject is nothing less than geology's signal contribution to human thought--the discovery of "deep time," a history so ancient that we can best comprehend it as metaphor. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Does history repeat itself or does it generate a sequence of unique events?
Does history repeat itself or does it generate a sequence of unique events? This is the fundamental question "Time's Arrow and Time's Cycle" asks. It is my third favourite Gould book, after "Wonderful Life" and "Bully for Brontosaurus". From a literary and philosophical point of view, it's possibly his best book, being more tightly focused than WL and more developed than the essays in BfB.

You'll find here many standard Gould devices such as fascinating segues and the rehabilitation of discredited thinkers. For instance we read the story of how James Hampton built his masterpiece, his throne to the glory of God, out of discarded junk (it's now at the Smithsonian). Gould also rehabilitates the 17th century thinker Thomas Burnet and his unsubstantiated cosmological theories. He also presents two more orthodox thinkers, James Hutton and Charles Lyell, and contrasts their gradual uniformitarianism with the sudden catastrophism of Burnet.

Gould explicitly dismisses Burnet's scientific credentials but still uses Burnet's vision as a starting point. It is by opposing Burnet to Hutton and Lyell that Gould asks the question as to what history is: repetive and uniform, or cyclical? The answer of course is a little of both. Again, Burnet's vision provides the clue to the answer. There are cycles, and within the cycle there are shocks and catastrophes. Or is it the other way around? Clearly Time is a difficult concept to grasp!

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

Time's Arrow Time's Cycle
Time's Arrow Time's Cycle written by Stephtn Jay Gould is a book that takes human thought to a new level in comprehending geology's vastness of history... the discovery of deep time.Gould works this book's major theme in the role of metaphor in the formulation and testing of scientific theories as the directionality (narrative history) of time's arrow or the immanence of time's cycle (immanent laws).

This book is both an account of geology's greatest discovery and philosophical commentary on the nature of scientific thought.As this thought takes us from thought of time in thousand of years to billions of years, inspired by empirical observation of rocks in the field.

Gould follows a single thread through three documents that mark the transition in our thinking:Thomas Burnet's four-volume "Sacred Theory of the Earth" (1680-1690), James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth (1795), and Charle Lyell's three-volume "Principle of Geology (1830-1833).Gould shifts through these writings giving the reader a history and background needed for a progressive march to the truth of the geological history through an enlightened observation.

Reading this book will captivate the curious reader and helps the human mind understand the vastness of time and the struggle to understand it.

curve ball that looks like a slider
The title of the review is an homage to Gould's oft mentioned love of baseball.This book is a cogent explanation of how European scientists (natural philosophers) recounciled the narrative tradition of history inherited from the Judeo-Christian template with the eternal return perspective of the Classical civilizations.Both view points-as-metaphors shed light on interpretation of the geological record.There are both serial and cyclic elements in the history of the earth, so the scientific community found truth in spite of the fact that individual scientists tended to emphasize one perspective over the other.

Gould exposes the 'cardboard cut-out' Whig version of history that most working scientists have received uncritically as hurried historical preambles to their study of geology per se.James Hutton, for example, is held up as a paragon of the field geologist who supposedly preceded his assertion of the existence of 'deep time' with countless hours in the field.Not so, says Gould.In fact, Hutton did his field work after he conceived the idea of a lengthy earth history and merely used his field observations to bolster his claim.Thomas Burnet, author of the much made-fun-of Sacred Theory of the Earth, is revealed to have been a champion of uniformitarianism before Hutton even conceived of it.Burnet refused to advance causes for events described in the Bible that could not be explained by the laws of physics as advanced by Isaac Newton.Finally, Charles Lyell is exposed as a master of rhetoric who conflated methodological and substantive aspects of uniformitarianism in order to sway his audience.No member of the scientific community contemporary to Lyell clung to the Mosaic timescale.He merely used it as a strawman.It was Lyell who managed to mate the narrative and eternal return perspectives into a coherent view of Earth history.First he did so by insisting the apparent progress observed in the fossil record was caused by the immense scale of the cycles of Earth history.Eventually he conceded the reality of evolution and allowed for the existence of an arrow of time whose path did not curve.

Gould's book is modified from a series of lectures, which is probably why there is so much uncharacteristic repetition of themes and ideas in this book.It was the only aspect of this book that I found irritating.Gould is also candid about his pride at uncovering various inaccuracies in the received wisdom and unearthing original themes to explain patterns in the history of geology.I have heard other people complain about this personality trait.I have no problem with it and believe that his satisfaction with his own cleverness is quite justifiable.

Meet the mythmakers
Stephen Jay Gould's love of science history really shows through in this work, which focuses on changing ideas about time and geology. It's well-researched and makes some very intriguing points about science ingeneral, but if you have no patience for geology you probably won't getthat far - it's nowhere near as accessible as his essay collections, butthat's only to be expected. Every science major should read this book, andso should anyone who likes to think of themselves as well-informed abouthistory and science. ... Read more

Product Description
Here is bestselling scientist Stephen Jay Gould’s tenth and final collection based on his remarkable series for Natural History magazine—exactly 300 consecutive essays, with never a month missed, published from 1974 to 2001. Both an intellectually thrilling journey into the nature of scientific discovery and the most personal book he has ever published, I Have Landed marks the end of a significant chapter in the career of one of the most acclaimed and widely read scientists of our time.

Gould writes about the themes that have defined his career, which his readers have come to expect and celebrate, casting new light upon them and conveying the ideas that science professionals exchange among themselves (minus the technical jargon). Here, of course, is Charles Darwin, from his centrality to any sound scientific education to little-known facts about his life. Gould touches on subjects as far-reaching and disparate as feathered dinosaurs, the scourge of syphilis and the frustration of the man who identified it, and Freud’s “evolutionary fantasy.” He writes brilliantly of Nabokov’s delicately crafted drawings of butterflies and the true meaning of biological diversity. And in the poignant title essay, he details his grandfather’s journey from Hungary to America, where he arrived on September 11, 1901. It is from his grandfather’s journal entry of that day, stating simply “I have landed,” that the book’s title was drawn. This landing occurred 100 years to the day before our greatest recent tragedy, also explored, but with optimism, in the concluding section of the book.

Presented in eight parts, I Have Landed begins with a remembrance of a moment of wonder from childhood. In Part II, Gould explains that humanistic disciplines are not antithetical to theoretical or applied sciences. Rather, they often share a commonality of method and motivation, with great potential to enhance the achievements of each other, an assertion perfectly supported by essays on such notables as Nabokov and Frederic Church.

Part III contains what no Gould collection would be complete without: his always compelling “mini intellectual biographies,” which render each subject and his work deserving of reevaluation and renewed significance. In this collection of figures compelling and strange, Gould exercises one of his greatest strengths, the ability to reveal a significant scientific concept through a finely crafted and sympathetic portrait of the person behind the science. Turning his pen to three key figures—Sigmund Freud, Isabelle Duncan, and E. Ray Lankester, the latter an unlikely attendee of the funeral of Karl Marx—he highlights the effect of the Darwinian revolution and its resonance on their lives and work.

Part IV encourages the reader—through what Gould calls “intellectual paleontology”—to consider scientific theories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in a new light and to recognize the limitations our own place in history may impose on our understanding of those ideas. Part V explores the op-ed genre and includes two essays with differing linguistic formats, which address the continual tug-of-war between the study of evolution and creationism.

In subsequent essays, in true Gould fashion, we are treated to moments of good humor, especially when he leads us to topics that bring him obvious delight, such as Dorothy Sayers novels and his enduring love of baseball and all its dramas. There is an ardent admiration of the topsy-turvy world of Gilbert and Sullivan (wonderfully demonstrated in the jacket illustration), who are not above inclusion in all things evolutionary.

This is truly Gould’s most personal work to date. How fitting that this final collection should be his most revealing and, in content, the one that reflects most clearly the complexity, breadth of knowledge, and optimism that characterize Gould himself. I Have Landed succeeds in reinforcing Gould’s underlying and constant theme from the series’ commencement thirty years ago—the study of our own scientific, intellectual, and emotional evolution—bringing reader and author alike to what can only be described as a brilliantly written and very natural conclusion.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

Essays on natural history and almost any other topic...
The author shows a wide range of interests, from baseball to classical music and from medicine to biblical texts. The most astonishing is that his interest is not of a general kind, like anyone of us could have. His interest leads him to dig deeply and painstakingly into each topic with an extreme passion for the details, for precision and for the oddities of the subject, without shying away from looking for the original sources even if they are old manuscripts in foreign languages. The author says of himself "I have never been lazy" and he proves it. Along the pages you will find myriads of unexpected information bits that you will hardly find somewhere else. Even if just for these asides, I will definitely buy some other of his books, otherwise I will surely miss some important Info nugget. This is the first book I read by Mr. Gould, but other reviewers recommend some others.

In my opinion, the second half of the book contains the best essays, namely those devoted to his expertise fields: natural history, taxonomy and paleonthology and in which he explains some interesting aspects of evolution. In the first part of the book there are some essays that did not interest me much, as for example the one which mentions the reason why some rather old-styled scientist went to Marx's funeral (they were friends despite of their differing ideologies). Fortunately, this book is so wide ranging that you will surely find something of your liking.

Mr. Gould uses very long sentences with complicated sentence structures combined with difficult vocabulary (not technical vocabulary, but rather literary usages; his writing style is kind of "poetic"). It is not an easy reading (at least not for non-native speakers like myself); reading Mr. Gould is a strange experience, since he delivers scientific topics in an epic prose format.

Another characteristic I found a bit strange is that he never misses a chance to lecture his audience on moral issues that "plague" scientists, specifically their duty to honor accuracy and their responsibility about racist usage of their theories. He explicitly mentions that even if they are not racist themselves if somebody can use their theories to advance a racist viewpoint they are responsible. Mr. Gould goes to the extreme of blaming botanists as "racists" for favoring local or "endemic" plants over imported ones and writes a lengthy essay explaining that local plants are not perfectly adapted or the best suited from an evolutionary perspective. Finally he acknowledges, very reluctantly in my opinion, that the problem of introducing other species is not that the new ones may be less adapted, but that the delicate equilibrium of the existing ecosystem might be broken. In the end, every theory can be used with a propaganda purpose and I believe responsibility lies with the ones who use it and with the people who follow it, everybody is obliged to think by oneself.

Classic
Gould was not only a great writer of science, but a tireless defender of science and rationalism. His resurrection of the science essay as a popular art form will probably be his greatest legacy. While his prose was not as polished as Loren Eiseley's (by comparison his has a dearth of true poetry and a surfeit of such terms as maximal, contingent, magisterial, and canonical), the man from whom he picked up the torch of science essayry from, he was, along with astronomer Carl Sagan (who died six years earlier than Gould), perhaps America's greatest popularizer of science and learning. Yes, he had faults. His almost comical misinterpretation of the fossils found in the Burgess Shale, in his 1989 book Wonderful Life (one of his few published books that was not a collection of previously published essays), was totally devastated by Simon Conway Morris's 1998 book The Crucible Of Creation. He also denied that there were any trends in evolution when arguing against linearity or determinism, an addendum which kyboshed an otherwise valid point. And, despite his defense and hagiography of Charles Darwin's life, all the while undermining Darwinism's mechanism with his own ideas of the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium (developed with Niles Eldredge), Gould was correctly seen by rivals such as Richard Dawkins as often overstating his ideas about evolution, and not taking seriously enough the threat to science and rationalism posed by the troglodytic mindset of Creationists and their ilk. To his credit, in this book's preface, Gould admits his occasional faux pas: `Although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments, at least I have never been lazy.'

Yet, despite such minor flaws, there is no doubting that Gould will go down in the history of his field as a major voice, and even more as a popular educator. A few weeks back I came across a brand new copy of his last published work, I Have Landed, published just weeks before his death in mid-2002, at the age of sixty. It was the U.K. version of the book, and, as usual, it's an excellent read, much as many of his other books, such as Bully For Brontosaurus and The Mismeasure Of Man, have been. It consists of thirty-one essays, including the last published essays in his This View Of Life series, which reached an even three hundred when he ended them, after twenty-five years, in 2001. It's one of a number of numerical synchronicities he expounds on in the book. The major one being that the title of his final book comes from a notation in his Hungarian immigrant grandfather's journals as he arrived at Ellis Island. He wrote, `I have landed.' on September 11th, 1901- a century, to the day, before the tragedy that still looms large over our times. Gould describes the journal as `'the most eerie coincidence that I have ever viscerally experienced.'....In a sense, this book, along with his monumental tome, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory- a systematic analysis of how Darwinian theory has shaped, and been shaped, by biological, paleontological, and genetic research- are fitting capstones to Gould's career. These essays, in toto, may not have taken the quarter century's worth of time to amass as his magnum opus, but Gould was never afraid to personalize science, nor his writing. His essays are an art form, and he was one of the finest published prose stylists in America upon his death. And it's not as if the essays, themselves, were `mere' popular science. Many of them included original research and could have easily been formatted for peer reviewed research journals, but Gould eschewed much of the snobbery, footnoting, polysyllabism, and arid, styleless writing of those venues, as he states in the book's preface. It is the reason why he was reviled in many scientific circles and also so popular with the layety.

As he might have argued, re: his Nabokov point on the Russian writer's science career, the opposite was true of Gould- he was a great `writer' first, and possibly a great scientist second. As he states in his Nabokov essay, No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts, quoting the Russian: `I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.' The same might be said of Gould's essays' intellectual and literary merits. My only literary quarrel with him was a penchant for quoting and choosing epigraphs from too many mediocre poems and poets. Just because it may directly reference a point is no reason to ward poor writing any place of honor at the head of a piece of literature- even if a `mere' science essay. And my quotes about the word mere are facetious, for, as he paraphrases Alexander von Humboldt in the essay, Art Meets Science In The Heart Of The Andes, which follows Humboldt, Darwin, and the great American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church in their great year of 1859, `great works of science condemn themselves to oblivion as they open floodgates to reforming knowledge, while classics of literature can never lose relevance....' Gould died with his feet on two differing boats, but I suspect long after the ship of his scientific accomplishment has slipped over the horizon, his literary stylings will still be steaming about the same waters that the likes of Loren Eiseley and Barry Lopez do. One could do worse. Far too many have.

Requiescat in Pace, Stephen
This marks the final volume of writings from the Great One and I have read every one of these literary jewels. I can safely state that Gould as an essayist cannot be beat.He is (and most likely will remain) my favorite science writer as much for his personality as his unique and eccentric subjects.I love Gould BECAUSE of his contradictions and frailties:The arrogance, the ability to offer then reject theories, his pitched battles with detractors, his love of stamps, music, snails and baseball, his startling conclusions but most of all his committment to excellence in all things great or small. He was THE quintessential Renaissance Man, the scientist/scholar/writer with a zeal for life in all its ups and downs.

"I Have Landed" reveals an intellect that was curious to the end. He was capable of being surprised and delighted, something many would not admit. In an act of supreme serendipity, his ancestor's arrival on our shore was Sept 11, 1901.The tragedy of 911 evoked four, brief poetic pieces that celebrated the goodness of humanity even as the rubble swirled in the streets. As in his other works, articles range over a vast tableau of ideas, subjects, memories and controversies, always associating them with some point of natural selection. He was a rebel but not a revolutionary; he shied from such acts as the absurd replacement of the perfectly usable BC & AD with BCE & CE - both indicating the same values.

Gould was not afraid to bare his soul - his love for Gilbert & Suillivan, singing in Christian chorales (as a Jew), baseball, finding a rare book or - overwhelmingly tender - being driven to tears by a brief note from a woman to her son.The research was prodigious (reading original documents in their own language) and the writing humorous, enlightening and deeply moving.Favorites include Nabakov & Butterflies, "When Fossils Were Young", Frederic Church, "Atrocious!", the Narthex and my personal favorite, Hadyn's Creation (in which he sung).

Gould was criticized for his sympathetic views of Marx and religion. His Marxism was more from custom (academia/father) than practice. He was NOT not one of the new breed of anti-American Americans. He loved this country and constantly spoke of the freedom it gave to live our own lives. He often quoted Scripture. Since the Bible is the most influential book in Western culture this is not a startling practice for an essayist. The quotes were always apt and seemed perfect for tales about the human condition.He railed (like Darwin) against scientifically irrelevant anti-God crusades (read Haeckel, Huxley, Dawkins and Denning) as both misguided and ultimately damaging.

So Stephen, this is the Long Goodbye - return to the stars from whence you came.

AR

Rhetorical Gibberish
I really did try to get into the book and I read quite a few of the essays. Mr. Gould had some interesting facts and analogies to convey, but the overall theses of his many articles lack any cogent argument. He uses words well and obviously has a great deal of knowledge about natural history, but to extract exactly what he is trying to argue (and I mean exactly)is difficult at best. He basically hides his assertions through lengthy metaphors, mounds of factual tidbits (that are alas not clearly germaine to the argument) and syrupy rhetoric. In the end, a disappointing read, though I am glad I gave it a shot.

At the pinnacle of life
The late Stephen Jay Gould just managed to close this huge chapter in his life before leaving us with an incredible heap of reflections, just in his whole collection of assays (300 of them), not to say in all his other books. Such a fertile writer might give the impression of scarce profundity, nothing more different from the truth. Gould guides us through history, art and science with such an ease that makes you feel a Gaia voyager in a never ending trip. He was such a heuristic and resourceful guide, you end up completely spellbound with his eloquent digresions. Lovely, just lovely, as always. ... Read more

Product Description
In his ninth collection of essays, bestselling scientist Stephen Jay Gould once again offers his unmistakable perspective on natural history and the people who have tried to make sense of it. In tandem with the closing of the millennium, Gould is planning to bring down the curtain on his nearly thirty-year stint as a monthly essayist for Natural History magazine. This, then, is the next-to-last essay collection from one of the most acclaimed and widely read scientists of our time. In twenty-three essays, Gould presents the richness and fascination of the various lives that have fueled the enterprise of science and opened our eyes to a world of unexpected wonders.

Part I treats the most absorbing period in Gould's own subject, paleontology--the premodern struggle (from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century) to understand the origin of fossils while nascent science grappled with the deepest of all questions about the nature of both causality and reality. Are fossils the remains of ancient organisms on an old earth, or manifestations of a stable and universal order, symbolically expressed by correspondences among nature's three kingdoms---animal, mineral, and vegetable?

Part II discusses the greatest conjunction of a time, a subject, and an assemblage of amazing people in the history of natural history: the late-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth century in France, when a group that included some of the most exceptional intellects of the millennium--Georges Buffon, Antoine Lavoisier, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck--invented the scientific study of natural history in an age of revolution.

Part III illustrates the greatest British challenge to this continental preeminence: the remarkable, and wonderfully literate, leading lights of Victorian science in Darwin's age of turmoil and reassessment: Lyell's uniformitarianism, Darwin's own intellectual development, Richard Owen's invention of dinosaurs, and Alfred Russel Wallace on Victorian certainties and subsequent unpredictabilities.

The last three parts of the book do not invoke biography so explicitly, but they use the same device of embodying an abstraction within a particular that can be addressed in sufficient detail and immediate focus to fit within an essay. The interlude of Part IV presents some experiments in the different literary form of short takes. Part V, on scientific subjects with more obvious and explicit social consequences (and often unacknowledged social origins as well), also uses biography, but in a different way, to link past stories with present realities--to convey the lesson that claims for objectivity based on pure discovery often replay episodes buried in history, and prove that our modern certainties flounder within the same complexities of social context and mental blockage. Finally, Part VI abandons biography for another device of essayists: major themes (about evolution's different expression across scales of size and time) cast into the epitome of odd and intriguing particulars.

Amazon.com Review
Celebrated paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gouldhas honed and matured his voice over almost 30 years of writing forNatural History.His tenure at that magazine closes with theend of the century, so The Lying Stones of Marrakech is hisnext-to-last collection of essays from this era.As ever, his worksare clever, thoughtful, and inspiring; however, the longtime readerwill detect a deeper reflection and a longer view taken by Gould inlatter days, perhaps inevitable outcomes of experience and growth.The title essay refers to false fossils carved by Moroccans intent onmaking a few bucks off of hapless tourists, discusses the case ofBeringer's 18th-century fossil hoax, and ends with a plea for astricter separation between commercial and scientificinterests--showing the breadth and scope of his paleontologicalinterests and thinking.

Of course, he also has much to say beyondthe confines of his profession: Joe DiMaggio and Dolly the sheep eachget respectful treatment from the Gould pen, and he discusses thecompeting Christian groups sharing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre inJerusalem.Though his attitudes may have mellowed over time--he's farfrom the crotchety oldster some feared he'd become--his passion forknowledge and scientific freedom is still radiant. Whether you're anold-school fan of Gould's writings or a newcomer to his delightfullybrainy essays, you'll find The Lying Stones of Marrakech a joyto behold. --Rob Lightner ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

The Ultimate Natural Historian
I am just getting around to several works that have rested on my shelves, unreviewed since first read.I just completed "I Have Landed", Gould's last compilation of essays and it is indeed one of the best.But that's always been the "problem" with attempting to classify Gould's writing.First of all, the essay must be two levels - the first (the "catch") is the particular story, moral, fact or tale that serves as the germ of the essay.The second level is how it relates to natural history. The elusive nature of his writing (at least the essays) and their wide breadth of human knowledge make it difficult to choose "favorites" much less "the best".

Gould was an iconoclast who reveled in his deviltry.His fights with the deterministic brand of Evolutionists is legendary and yet he emerged in a stronger position politically if not scientifically. Therefore I loved the section on the French scientists, particularly his take on Lamarckism. Throughout he stresses excellence, the non-progressivity of Evolution, the idea that morality was NOT simply a biological outcome and that choices are what drives human society.For sheer bravura, nothing could beat "Of Embryos and Ancestors" where he ranges from early life on Earth to the nature of fossils to the unbroken lineage of life on Earth while keeping us entertained with tales of Scientific infighting and pure chance resulting in spectacular discoveries.

My Grade = A

Further Natural History Essays of a Master
Stephan Jay Gould was certainly one of the most prolific and interesting of modern essayists on evolutionary theory.He often goes on delightful side trips (a mark of a skillful writer, as such devices can be dangerous to an essay) and rarely (but occasionally) follows the wrong path.Whether you agree with him or not, he is always thought provoking.

"The Lying Stones of Marrakech" is no exception.Another one of his series of books of essays from his column "This View of Life" in NATURAL HISTORY magazine, the essays deal with a number of fascinating biological subjects from fake fossils (the lying stones mentioned in the title) to measuring evolution in the real world.While some editing might have made this book even better, it is still a very good read and certainly thought inspiring.

Gould is often especially forceful in dealing with biological determinism, as in the (I think) false idea that we are totally what our genes make us.Now to be fair there are few proponents of evolutionary psychology or other biological determinist groups that would make such a statement (just as there are few total blank slate idealists, despite Stephan Pinker's views), but the ideas often expressed by such researchers make one wonder exactly where they are leading. From the "killer ape" mentality to the "naturalness of rape" they often tread close to a position that man is not improvable and so why bother?

There are almost no modern scientists (as Gould points out) who would deny genetic influence on behavior.Certain mental diseases, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, have obvious genetic components. Nor would they deny that we are an evolutionary product of our ancestors Pliocene and Pleistocene environments (and even earlier ones). However, humans exhibit a remarkably plastic behavioral ability, which is also evolutionarily derived.What makes us human is exactly that plasticity. Given the current state of the planet we had better hope that we can rise above the pre-civilized part of our brains and alter our collective behavior- otherwise we are dead as a species!

These and other fascinating (and often obscure) biological issues are grist for Gould's mill.To follow his interest in the national sport he even throws in a few short pieces on baseball.Essays on the difficulties of predicting the future of technology, the contributions of Lamark, the career of the great French naturalist Buffon, and how vulva stones became brachiopods (they always were of course!), are also among those in this collection.

This book is well worth the reading, despite the digressions!

Gould is gone, but should not be forgotten
Collections of previously published essays are often disappointing. Not so with Gould's "penultimate reflections in Natural History," published in 2000, just two years before his death. I found them entrancing (despite Gould's trademark parenthetical comments).

Two factors make Gould's essays stand out from most science writing--the depth of his ideas and his unmatched ability to peel back layers of approximate understanding and convenient storytelling to get to what actually happened. Whether he's detailing the founding moments of palentology and geology or excavating Alfred Russel Wallace's forays into predicting the future, you know that you're going to get the real story, impeccably told, straight from the primary sources. As a science writer, I'm awed as much by Gould's impeccable scholarship as by the quality and originality of his thinking. Gould is absolutely clear-eyed about the progress of science. The tales he tells reflect it as a richly human enterprise, groping its way forward despite misconceptions, hoaxes, and the personal quirks of its protagonists.

This book is not a light or easy read, but it is a richly rewarding one.

Robert E. Adler
Science Journalist
Author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation

Essays with a split personality
The first three sections of this book have essays from the magazine Natural History about the history of "natural history."They are drier and of less general interest, covering people and issues in the development of the science.This certainly would not be the perfect introduction to the late Stephen Jay Gould's writing and research styles. . .

Nonetheless, they are well-researched and written in Gould's loving detail for the accurate story, in contrast to the historical myth.You might find yourself skimming the details of animal classifications to find the gems that remind us of major shifts in scientific thinking.

The second three sections are written to a broader audience and start with obituaries of Carl Sagan, Mel Allen and Joe DiMaggio.These essays are more readable (though Gould continues his love for parenthetical additions at least twice on every page). In this latter half of the book, Gould covers subjects such as social Darwinism; Dolly (the cloned sheep) and the nurture vs. nature argument; ways in which evolution is visible among living species; and competitive equilibrium in nature.Here Gould ensures that his essays are relevant to current social issues.

The Lying Stones of Marrakech
The Lying Stones of Marrakech by Stephen Jay Gould is an excellent read; written by one of the foremost original thinkers of our time. His humanistic sensibility and passionate arguments are painstakingly historical... you are nerver left in doubt when reading Gould's prose. When reading this book you see in his writings a musing underlining his brilliant intelligence and scholarship with his signature wit becoming evident.

In these twenty-three essays an erudite discussion comes to light from on of the most fertile minds of science today. We are educated... better enlightened to a point of view which only Gould can provide. As with all good things, they must come to an end since this is the penultimate work of essays... which leaves one more to astonish us.

But I'm sure that we will not see the end of writing from him. I highly recommend reading this brilliant collection of essays from a the most revered and eloquent author and educator of our times. ... Read more

Product Description
ReviewIt is a wonder what Mr. Gould can do with the most unlikely phenomena: a tiny organism's use of the earth's magnetic field as a guide to food and comfort, for instance, or the panda's thumb-which isn't one. . . . Science writing at its best. (The New Yorker)Stephen Jay Gould is a serious and gifted interpreter of biological theory, of the history of ideas and of the cultural context of scientific discovery. . . . The Panda's Thumb is fresh and mind-stretching. Above all, it is exultant. So should its readers be. (H. Jack Geiger - New York Times Book Review) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Second Collection of Great Essays on Science and Life
`The Panda's Thumb' is the second in a long series of bound essays by leading science writer Stephen Jay Gould. As important as these columns from the journal `Natural History' is, this is but a modest part of Gould's importance in American intellectual life. Gould, who died about three years ago from cancer, was a professor of geology, biology, and history of science at Harvard University and one of the world's leading researchers in broadening and interpreting Darwin's theory of evolution.

I was reminded of Gould just yesterday when an advocate of creationism (belief that the accounts of the history of the world as recounted in the Bible have some literal truth) described the theory of evolution as a `dogma'. This is exactly the kind of statement which Gould was so capable of dissecting in the most gentle manner to expose how completely wrongheaded the statement was, using the force of reason alone, without resorting to any appeal to emotion.

Gould was the consummate intellectual whose primary targets were beliefs which were based on mistaken reasoning or which base logically correct inferences on unsound or inappropriate premises.

My favorite example of the first pathology is his arguments showing that in spite of the fact that baseball statistics on performance have been dropping since the 1940's, overall baseball performance has actually been improving. This is one of the many inconsistencies between a rigorous application of probability versus an uncritical intuition.

The application of the word `dogma' to a scientific theory may be an example of the second pathology. The speaker is confusing scientific belief and religious belief. Scientific discourse creates theories whose power of explanation comes from its grounding in observation. As soon as an observation contradicts a theory, the quest to improve the theory or find a better one should begin. In Science, a `theory' is not something that is unproved, it is something which is believed and which is subject to disproof by evidence. A religious belief or dogma is, at least in Christian theology, something that is taken to be true because it was said under the influence of divine inspiration. By it's nature, since it is the result of a private experience (See William James' great `The Varieties of Religious Experience'), it cannot be disproved. That is not to say that the person who witnessed this experience is not free to write it down and try to convince someone else of the truth of what the true believer says they experienced. The whole Bible is composed of such stories. The fact that the Bible has inspired and improved the quality of life of billions of people over the millennia is evidence that it's message is worth advertising. But none of that changes the fact that religious beliefs are based on faith, which by its very nature is NOT based on empirical evidence.

The very best example of this dichotomy is in the methods used by the investigators on the CSI TV show, where the physical evidence is paramount and eyewitness testimony is the least reliable evidence there is. That someone says it is true does not make it so! This includes things said and written down 3000 years ago.

While I am going on a length without talking about the book `The Panda's Thumb', I wanted to state as clearly as possible what Gould was all about. And, I chose a review of this book to explain Gould's general position because it was the finding of this book in a bookstore in 1981 which lead me to the discovery of Gould's writing, and I have been a fan of his writing up to his death.

If I may, my love of Gould's writing is a match made in heaven, as my interest in evolutionary theory goes back to the tenth grade and my interest in the general history and philosophy of science goes back at least to the mid-1960's when I began my study of philosophy. My focus on this book is also based on the fact that Gould's essays in his earlier books seem just a little fresher than his later works. Whether that is because his ideas were coming to paper for the first time of because he was not distracted by the battle with his cancer I do not know. Gould himself says he found his earlier essays somewhat shallow. I simply don't see it. It is possible that the earlier essays were somewhat less technical, but if that is so, the difference is subtle. It may all be due to the fact that Gould revisits certain themes over and over, so my reading them for the first time had a lot more punch than the 10th time around.

The subject of the title essay in this book, the panda's thumb, is all about a sixth digit on the panda's hand which is not a true finger, but something developed out of a bone in the wrist to enable the panda to easily strip leaves off of bamboo shoots, the panda's favorite gourmet snack. While this may seem like a really insignificant detail, this is one of Gould's persistent themes. Most of the best examples of evolutionary theory can be found in some of the most innocent looking cases. I am constantly reminded of this as I discover examples in the oddest of places, as the last book I reviewed on bees and honey gives the story of a little experiment conducted by Charles Darwin on how bees construct their hexagonal cells of beeswax to hold honey.

As with all his books, this collection is divided into eight (more or less) sections covering all his various fields of interest such as Evolution, Darwinania, Human Abilities and Evolution, Science and Politics, the nature of change, geology and fossils, biological conjectures (Were dinosaurs dumb?), biological scale and development.

Gould is arguably the best writer on science for laymen in this generation. Everyone should read him, and this is an excellent place to start.


... Read more

Product Description
A new edition of the beautifully illustrated depiction of the dramatic story of survival and extinction. The Book of Life uses an exemplary fusion of art and science to tell the story of life on earth. The text, under the editorship of Stephen Jay Gould, provides a thorough understanding of the latest research and is accompanied by paintings prepared especially for this book. Never before has our planet's evolution been so clearly, so ingeniously explained.

History is marked by disaster. The Book of Lifeexplains how mammals, having survived at least one of these disasters—the impact of a massive comet—luckily inherited the earth. Next came the rise of modern humans, who would shape the world as no creature has. As this fascinating history unfolds, gorgeous illustrations allow us to observe climate changes, tectonic plate movement, the spread of plant life, and the death of the dinosaurs. We discover the chains of animal survival, the causes and consequences of adaptation, and finally the environmental impact of human life. Color illustrations throughout.Amazon.com Review
An unusual scientific reference work by any measure, The Book ofLife opens with an unusual protest from its editor, Stephen Jay Gould,who worries that it may have left out much of importance discovered betweenthe present and the book's original publication in 1993. Gould's worry iswell placed--in the last few years, many advances have been made in taxonomy and genetics, to name just two areas. Still, the book is a lucid, readilycomprehensible, and largely up-to-date overview of the origins andevolution of life on earth, from the emergence of bacteria 4 billion yearsago to that of Homo sapiens in recent geological time. Written bydistinguished scientists, the text proceeds chronologically, giving anin-depth account of the fossil record. It is matched by hundreds ofpaintings, drawings, charts, and graphs that reinforce the authors'discussions.

More than all that, The Book of Life is a manifesto proclaiming theessential correctness of evolutionary theory, which has come under fire inplaces like Afghanistan and Kansas. "Life has changed through time,"paleontologist Michael Benton observes. "No other explanation will accountfor the sequence and variety of the life forms preserved as fossils, or thehistory recorded since humankind began to draw, paint, and carve, about30,000 years ago." The book's careful documentation of those changes makesit a highly useful reference for high school and university students, and it's abook that rewards casual browsing as well. --Gregory McNamee ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth, Second Edition
Excellent book. The evolution of the vertebrates written by the most important investigators. Images andexcellent graphics. The chapter about the history of the representations of the extinguished animals is very good

A worthwhile addition to any collection of science books
This is an excellent book. I return to it often to skim through and remind myself about the astonishing diversity of life that has thrived on our world.


--Guy P. Harrison, author of

Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know About Our Biological Diversity

and

50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God



-

A nice overview of evolutionary history, but...
...a little behind the times and anthropocentric.These failings are admitted in the book, however, and do not much detract from its being a useful work.

Recommended.

Nice high level view
I think this is a great book. It has a lot of interesting material, but it's also very readable. I consider it an intermediate level book. It doesn't require any previous knowledge, but there is a lot of material and it sometimes comes quite fast. Some of the material is more complex than one usually finds in popular science books, but it is usually put is boxes separate from the main text.

The book opens up with some introductory material. It's pretty standard: geological time, continental drift, fossils and a high level view of the tree of life. The book is biased towards the evolution that lead to humans, but this bias is explained in the introduction.

The books starts at the beginning, explaining why carbon is essential to life as we know it, describing prokaryotes, describing eukaryotes and it looks at what we know about pre-Cambrian life. Then it moves on to the Cambrian explosion, fish, tetrapods, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals and humans. A lot of very interesting material is presented, a small sample would be: cyanobacteria and the increase in atmospheric oxygen levels, the evolution of legs from fins, biomechanics, mass extinctions and molecular clocks.

I think this book would appeal to a wide range of people. Obviously the amount of material available for a book like this is enormous. So the challenge of an author/editor is deciding what to include and what to leave out. I think this book had a very nice selection. Most of the material is accessible. There is more challenging material and although it adds a lot to the book, even most of this could be skipped without hindering comprehension of the remaining material.I also thought the illustrations were very good. The amount of material is impressive, as is the clarity (in general) of the writing.

Good but not great.
The Book of Life, an illustrated history of the evolution of life on Earth, edited by Stephen Jay Gould is a great gift for any natural history fan.
Chapter after chapter about the evolution of fish, dinosaurs, mammals and mankind by such greats as Peter Andrews, Christine Jones and Michael Benton.How did fish develop and make it to land?Why did mammals do so well after the dinosaurs died?And the illustrations, alone, are worth the price of the book.
Of course most of the questions can't be answered but just exploring the issues and topics is fun.Thinking is good for you and this book plugs into many of my other natural history interests allowing me to have a foundation, a background, before diving into the more advanced books on the same subjects.
True, being first published in 1993 and updated in 2001, means that the information is slightly outdated.For example, we DO know what a dinosaur heart looks like and we DO have soft tissue from a T-Rex bone.Also, they seem to be linking Homo ergaster to Homo habilis while all the other books I have on human evolution seems to link H. ergaster to Homo erectus.
The book is good for any library, new or used, so go buy it.
... Read more

Product Description
Crossing Over, the latest of three collaborations between scholar Stephen Jay Gould and artist Rosamond Wolff Purcell, brings together thought-provoking essays and uncannily beautiful photographs to disprove the popular notion that art and science exist in an antagonistic relationship. The essays and photographs collected here present art and science in conversation, rather than in opposition. As Gould writes in his preface, although the two disciplines may usually communicate in different dialects, when juxtaposed they strikingly reflect upon and enhance one another. Working together, Purcell's photographs and Gould's scientific musings speak to us about ourselves and our world in a hybrid language richer than either could command on its own.

In an essay on individuality, for instance, Gould looks through the lens of evolutionary theory to address the controversial issue of cloning and the often misguided fears it evokes. As a society that exalts the concept of the individual, Gould argues, we sometimes fail to recognize that clones walk among us. Identical twins represent "the greatest of all challenges to our concept of individuality." Rosamond Purcell's photograph depicting the famous Siamese conjoined twins Eng and Chang conveys an eerie feeling that cannot be captured in words.

Through its unique combination of words and photographs, Crossing Over prompts us to ponder not only the basis of the false dichotomy between art and science, but also the distinction of mind and nature, and of all humanly imposed categories of order. Gould and Purcell's work convinces the reader that a provocative interplay between art and science is not only possible, but inevitable and necessary as well. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Inimitable Stephen Gould
What a jewel!I have read all the essays and most of the other works of Gould but this one, while not the deepest or most technical (in fact it is the lightest of all) - is wondrous.The use of art, the meaning and methods and techniques of art, to explain natural selection and the workings of our universe, was ingeniuous.

So many times, scientists (Dawkins, etc) shortchange the artistic side of mankind and this is tragic.This side, much more than our intellectual or specifically, scientific, side is what sets us apart as a species.Our ability to rearrange reality and create new forms and pictures and songs and foods that heighten the senses allows us to respond deeply to these external stimuli.In a way, that is what Gould attempts to do on an intellectual level as he discusses symmetry, layers, size, proportion and other mundane ideas presented in a curiously spectacular but low-keyed fashion.

The photographs or paintings or drawings fit almost seamlessly with the prose, illustrating the short, intended point.These do not approach the length or depth of the articles yet they are just as effective, maybe more so.Once again, Gould mixes the human, the personal, with the scientific and the artisitc to produce a unified message.My grade - A ... Read more

Product Description
Sir Peter Medawar was not only a Nobel Prize-winning immunologist but also a wonderful writer about science and scientists. Described by The Washington Post as a "genuinely brilliant popularizer" of science, his essays are remarkable for their clarity and wit. This entertaining selection presents the very best of his writing with a new foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, one of his greatest admirers.

The wide range of subjects include Howard Florey and penicillin, J.B.S. Haldane--whom he describes as a "with-knobs-on variant of us all"--a spirited defense of James Watson against the storm of criticism that greeted the publication of The Double Helix, and, in the title essay, scientific fraud involving laboratory mice. A merciless debunker of myths, Medawar goes on to reveal the nonsense to be discovered in psychoanalytic interpretations of Darwin's illness and launches devastating attacks on Arthur Koestler, IQ psychologists, and, most notably, Teilhard de Chardin. And throughout, Medawar raises questions about the nature of scientific endeavour--he famously defined science as the "art of the soluble.

Intriguing and informative, this outstanding collection clearly expresses Medawar's desire to communicate the importance of science to the widest possible audience. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Stroke of genius and other ironies
In his introduction (written in 1996), Stephen Jay Gould calls Peter Medawar "our century's greatest spokesman for the power and humanity of science." Certainly, he should rank near the top, but Medawar has never beenas popular as some others.

It may be that his fearsomely sharp tongue frightens people. We think, If Medawar can be so scathing about (insert famous name), what might he say about us? Well, we're safe now. He died in 1987.

Or perhaps he is not romantic enough for us.

As an example of the first: "Disputants so naïve should abstain from public controversy."

Of the second: "There is poetry in science but also a lot of bookkeeping."

This collection includes some of Medawar's most famous essays and debunkings, including his evisceration of psychoanalysis; "Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?"; and his review of Teilhard's "Phenomenon of Man," which exposed a lot of prominent and self-important people -- many of them editors of powerful publications -- to be fools.

Little wonder people were careful around Medawar.

However, he had a mild side. To me, "The question of the existence of God" is the least satisfactory. Medawar did not believe in a god, but he was (uncharacteristically, some might think) inclined to be somewhat wistful about those who did. One would have expected him to have brought them to book for their crimes.

Another reason Medawar's collections of essays may not have worn so well is that many were written for an occasion (often as a book review), which led him to restate his firm positions, such as that there is no such thing as a "scientific method." True, and it very much bears repeating to each new generation. But it does not bear repeating in the same volume so well.

It is too bad Medawar (a very busy man who won a Nobel for his research and was a director of important laboratories besides) never wrote a magnum opus. The collection of essays in "Pluto's Republic" is probably his most popular and solid. The essays in "The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice" do not hang together so well, although anyone who got to know Medawar through "Republic" will want to meet the man in person in "Son of Stroke" and "On living a bit longer," products of his long period of physical debility.

Medawar was among the first to expose the vapidity of Lacan and Foucault -- though in brief fashion -- and this is so surprising coming from an active scientist, who one would have thought had little time to be plowing through turgidtomes of dubious French "scholarship." But he was always interested in what C.P. Snow called "the two cultures," and he was not shy about lampooning the fatuities of overeducated scientific illiterates: "If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility."

He died before the global warming hoax took hold, but he identified one of its vectors when he wrote "reporters want clear stories without the cagey reservations scientists are always introducing." Well, they used to do, but Medawar lived in a more careful age.

Surprisingly, toward the end of his life he was so incautious as to make predictions, four positive ones and one negative one.

"I roundly declare that within the next 10 years remedies will be found for multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes and at least two forms of cancer at present considered somewhat intractable" and "the doctrine of genetic elitism . . . is not thought likely . . . (to) ever again become a major factor in the causation of wars on a global scale."

He was mostly wrong, and, given that he was half-Arab, surprisingly so about that last one. ... Read more

Product Description
In the sixth volume of essays from Natural History magazine, the nation's foremost science writer discusses environmental spoliation and the massive extinction of the earth's species. Reprint. 30,000 first printing. National ad/promo. Tour. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Views on science and other topics
Celebrities, whether they start out as scientists, athletes, musicians or any other of a host of occupations, often share one thing in common; they like to share their opinions on topics outside of their specialty.The deceased Stephen Jay Gould was no exception.His expertise and his training is in evolutionary biology in particular and natural history in general.But his books cover a very wide variety of topics distantly related to the life sciences, such as human behavior, the relationship between science and religion, and the history of science.This book, Eight Little Piggies, is one of over a dozen books authored by Gould.Like the others, it is a collection and condensation of essays previously published in peer-reviewed journals.The title of the book refers to digits.Specifically, humans have ten toes, and human parents sometimes introduce numbers to their children by counting of toes as "one little piggy", two little piggy, etc... all the way up to ten little piggies.The title of this book springs from the fact that not all vertebrates have ten little piggies.Many have 8, 6 or even 4.Hence part of the book examines the evolution of digits in animals.Other parts of the book examine other parts of animal anatomy, language, and the history of scientific ideas such as evolution.

This book does not provide an introduction to evolution; hence do not pick it up hoping to learn about this subject.Neither is this book appropriate for novices in the life sciences.Instead, this book is geared more towards those with a good knowledge of the life sciences, and a want to understand it more.Stephen Jay Gould grew up in the mid-1900s and spent much of his career within hallowed hallways of established places such as Harvard.As such, his writing style can be dry and boring compared to other widely read science authors such as Feynman, R. Leakey, Richard Ellis, and Rachel Carson.But they are just as thought-provoking.As such, this book makes for good, but difficult reading.

A rare engagement between knowledge and common sense
Eight little piggies is just one of a series of essay collections Gould masterly wrote. He was one of the very few people that combines deep knowledge and common sense (by the way, not so common really). Gould was a writer, a teacher, a scientist, an intellectual, and if you allow me, an empirical philosopher to say the least. Reading a collection of essays like this is like making a journey inside one of the brilliant minds of the twentieth century, an experience worth the try (if you dare to compromise your own prejudices to such an elocuent argumentative person). If you are a Natural History lover, don't hesitate, this is for you.

A very human science writer
Gould was an expert in writing about science in a way that ordinary, not-particularly-scientific readers could comprehend, at least in a general way. But more than that, he linked the science to anecdotes that readers could not only understand, but also identify with.

Great Gould!He sure does make natural history fun!
Written in a somewhat reflective style, this set of essays, originally from Natural History magazine, provides a great introduction to the quirks of nature and evolutionary processes.Intended to be entertaining as well as educational, Gould seeks fun topics (such as the tricky nature of memory) that are sure to keep the reader involved in the text.In addition, the abbreviated nature of each of the essays keeps the scientific jargon at a minimum, meaning that laypersons and scientists alike can be entertained by Gould's writing.The best thing about this and other books of essays by Gould, however, is the diversity of information pertaining to the evolution of life and ideas contained therein.Want to be the know-it-all at the next office party?This book contains a wonderful and diverse array of scientific trivia assured to impress your co-workers!

Eight Little Piggies:Reflections in Natural History
Eight Little Piggies:Reflections in Natural History by Stephan Jay Gould is pure Gold or is that Gould.This is the sixth in a series of books on Gould's essays found in "Natural History."

We find Gould in a more contemplative mood within these pages, being reflective and personal as he speaks about the importance within our lives of the connections to our past and ancestral generations.But as Gould would put it, " a theme of supreme importance to evolutionists who study a world in which extinction is the ultimate fate of all and prolonged persistence the only meaningful measure of success."

There are essays on extenction, fishtails and frog calls, the coloration of pigeons, the eyes of mole rats, and an in depth personal essay about his maternal grandfather.This last essay brought some fond memories back to me, as I was growing up... yet time waits for no man.

For variety, range, depth and a refinement in writing style, this tome is one of Gould's best, as you read, Gould hits his stride and leads you toward his conclusions, just like my grandfather taught me to be observent and not take things for granted.But to question, the way things are as they seem, just like Gould does to his readers, bringing information to them and through observation and a brilliant mind making things clear.

This is an eductional book, as well, as you read, Gould makes the reader learn painlessly... a good storyteller of thirty-one essays that are truly fascinating.

Read and enjoy this well thought out collection of essays. ... Read more

Product Description
A noted paleontologist provides the text for this photographic study of eight different collections--from a collection of human artifacts belonging to Peter the Great to Agassy's fish collection--exploring what collections say about collectors. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

"Study nature,not books"Louis Agassiz

I have a personal collection of over 1200 books on Natural History.A large number of my books are about Birds and I have been an avid Birdwatcher for over 20 years. I have also assembled a collection of Minerals and Fossils.Therefore, books of exquisite photographs and descriptions of museum collections and writings about the great pioneers in the study of Natural History are something with which I am quite familiar.When I picked this book up,I did so after only quickly flipping the pages.The high quality of the paper,printing and photography was immediately obvious.As a bit of a collector myself,I never hesitate to acquire a book about collecting,collectors and even museums.

As I started reading this book,I was immediately impressed with it. As much as I have read about famous personalities in Natural History,there were big surprises in store for me. The first impression of this book quickly changed for me,and I found it really got to the heart and soul of the great Naturalists and Collectors.
As an avid Birder,I am very aware of the ongoing debate as to whether Photographs or Illustrations or Drawings are better when trying to describe the various species. Until the development of computer enhancement of photographs,generally the preference has been for illustrations.It was very interesting to see how this issue was so well discussed and demonstrated with fossils. The same points come up when discussing the merits of various Bird Field Guides available today.
The book also shows the wide range of personality traits these great Naturalists had,as well as touching on the rivalries that occurred among them.
The photography in the book is simply awesome ,and as one would expect, the text and knowledge that is always with Gould's writing makes this book something spectacular.
After finishing my first read ,I was convinced it it is a book that will be read again.
Impressed as I was with the book;I decided to see what it was selling for ,particularly on the used book sites.It didn't surprise that it is commanding prices several times its original published price.I suggest that anyone who appreciates excellent Natural History and the excellent books that have been published about it ,seriously think about acquiring this book.

Eight Collectors Collecting
I have to start out by confessing that I bought this book for the pictures.I am fascinated by the photography of the grotesque, and Rosamond Purcell holds high rank in this rarified genre.She is noted both for her own original work and her recording (museum, collection, etc.) work.Her photography in "Finders, Keepers" is remarkable, strong carefully composed images with lush color.Just as notable is her reliance on natural light and the simplest of Nikon cameras and lenses.

The only part of the book I originally read was Purcell's Afterword.It is a delightful exposition on her romance with collectors and museums, revealing a thoughtful, philosophical professional with a strong creative sense.After that much reading I was satisfied, and the book took its place on my shelves with Purcell's other works, to be referred to when opportunities of my own appeared.

Having decided to review it, I discovered, to my embarrassment, that the book was actually about something.The text, far from being the filler that often appears in photographic volumes, turned out to be a series of gemlike studies of eight collectors of note, consisting of Peter the Great, Phillip Von Siebold, Willern Von Heurn, Eugen Dubois, Walter Rothschild, Agostino Scilla, Thomas Hawkins and Louis Agassiz .Some of these men are popularly famous and others are known only to other naturalists, but they are all interesting.Their collections, sometimes known only from fragments are breathtaking.

The author of these essays is Stephen Gould, paleontologist and occupant of the Alexander Agassiz Chair of Zoology and Curator at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.Despite these rather awe inspiring credentials his style is delightfully accessible as he reveals each collector's life and passion to the reader.If you like paleontology, or natural history, or glances into the strange mind of the collector you will find this a refreshingly pleasant volume, providing an equal share of education and delight.

Lush, fascinating view of collecting and natural history
One of the most beautiful books I own, combining Purcell's precise andbeautiful photographs with Gould's intelligent and accessible writing.Finders, Keepers combines the diversity of living things, history,scholarship and art in an immaculately designed and printed whole.Absolutely stunning from start to finish. ... Read more

Product Description
In this new edition of Questioning the Millennium, best-selling author Stephen Jay Gould applies his wit and erudition to one of today's most pressing subjects: the significance of the millennium.

In 1950 at age eight, prompted by an issue of Life magazine marking the century's midpoint, Stephen Jay Gould started thinking about the approaching turn of the millennium. In this beautiful inquiry into time and its milestones, he shares his interest and insights with his readers. Refreshingly reasoned and absorbing, the book asks and answers the three major questions that define the approaching calendrical event. First, what exactly is this concept of a millennium and how has its meaning shifted? How did the name for a future thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ on earth get transferred to the passage of a secular period of a thousand years in current human history? When does the new millennium really begin: January 1, 2000, or January 1, 2001? (Although seemingly trivial, the debate over this issue tells an intriguing story about the cultural history of the twentieth century.) And why must our calendars be so complex, leading to our search for arbitrary regularity, including a fascination with millennia? This revised edition begins with a new and extensive preface on a key subject not treated in the original version.

As always, Gould brings into his essays a wide range of compelling historical and scientific fact, including a brief history of millennial fevers, calendrical traditions, and idiosyncrasies from around the world; the story of a sixth-century monk whose errors in chronology plague us even today; and the heroism of a young autistic man who has developed the extraordinary ability to calculate dates deep into the past and the future.

Ranging over a wide terrain of phenomena--from the arbitrary regularities of human calendars to the unpredictability of nature, from the vagaries of pop culture to the birth of Christ--Stephen Jay Gould holds up the mirror to our millennial passions to reveal our foibles, absurdities, and uniqueness--in other words, our humanity.Amazon.com Review
In this slender volume, Stephen Jay Gould addresses threequestions about the millennium with his typical combination oferudition, warmth, and whimsy: As a calendrical event, what is theconcept of a millennium and how has its meaning shifted over time? Howdid the projection of Christ's 1,000-year reign become a secularmeasure? And when exactly will the millennium begin--January 1, 2000, orJanuary 2, 2001?

"Our urge to know is so great, but our commonerrors cut so deep. You just gotta love us," he statesdisarmingly in the preface. "And you gotta view misguidedmillennial passion as a primary example of our uniqueness and ourabsurdity--in other words, of our humanity." Gould's owncuriosity about time and calendars was triggered by a 1950 issue ofLife magazine, which cut the century in half with itsevaluation of what had happened and its prediction of things to come,propelling his third-grade mind to the year 2000. In Questioningthe Millennium, Gould promises to make no predictions (other than"an orgy of millennial books"); court no millennialepiphanies; and put forth no theories on the collective angst thattypically accompanies a century's end. Instead, he answers themillennial questions which, for him, represent the intersection ofundeniable reality (i.e., natural fact) and humaninterpretation. Gould's questions and learned answers, weaving manyhistorical and scientific facts, are a loving inquiry into the humanneed for order in a vast and teeming universe. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (27)

Still timely, another millennium is coming up fast!
When does a new millennium begin? What special meaning do we ascribe to "nice round" years with lots of zeros? Why does anyone care?This work by one of our best modern essayists swan dives into the, then, looming calendrical event and comes up smiling. To ice the cake, the illustrations are wonderful reprints of (mostly) medieval art depicting the Last Judgment, the winged devils of Hell, tragically tormented souls being dipped in brimstone and lots of other fun stuff. As his subtitle suggests ("A rationalists guide to a precisely arbitrary countdown"), Gould is after wheat and skips the chaff in this merry intellectual romp through the historical wait for Godot.The author looks at human thinking -- our love of duality (good/bad, before/after) and of numeration (numbering our days and grains of sand, counting stars in the sky and fish in the sea), coupled with the urgent necessities of planting after the flood and launching boats at high tide, to spin a thoroughly engaging disquisition. This little book reminds us that nature doesn't deal in nice round anythingsin the matter of solar or lunar cycles, or day length. Hence leap-years, and even leap-seconds, to keep our human-made clocks and calendars in some sort of sync with the seasons. Gould also gently reminds we Gregorian sorts that ours is only one calendar among many -- the Jewish, Islamic and Chinese versions are still lunar instead of solar and bear no direct relation to our tabulation -- and the Mayan method was arguably more accurate. Gould also wanders into glitch-land -- the little mistakes that make us human. For example: long after BC/AD became institutionalized, the discovery that Herod died in 4 BC threw the Biblical tale out of whack until Christianity decided to allow that Jesus was born before that date ... which surely makes the "true" millennial shift 1996 or earlier, depending, naturally enough, upon whether you care that there is no year "0" in our calendar. So the millennium ended either on January 1, 1997 (or earlier) or ended on January 1, 2001...You get the drift. Enjoy!

"Nothing ages faster than relevance"
(To quote John Meier) and it is ashame too because this is a wonderful book with lots of interesting bits, sardonic humor and even spelling tips. This book is too much fun to have it drop out of existence because we won't have to worry about the end of time for another thousand years -- or so!

the millennium question unsolved
In his lively book Stephen Jay Gould offers a lot of fascinating material as to how the millennium question has been treated with in modern times. But when it comes to the fundamental matter, that is to the establishment of the Chistian numbering of years in the 6th century, Gould commits the all too common mistake to believe he can solve a historical question by common sense. He should have taken his time to look into the sources at hand concerning Dionysius Exiguus and Beda Venerabilis. He would then have detected that the millennium question is of an even more intricate nature than he had imagined, and in particular has something to do with the calculation of the full moon.

A joy to read
A joy to read.Gould makes a normally dry and tastless topic, humourous, and enjoyable.I loved the book, and everthing else by Gould I've ever read.

Questioning the Millennium
Stephen Jay Gould is entertaining.His work Questioning the Millennium is that questioning, but entertaining.I like Gould as an author and his essays are thought provoking.

This work is no different.Complex calendars and the idea of a millennium and how it effects us as a whole.A whole host of ideas brought to us from Gould's questioning mind.

This is a rather short work of essays, but no less provoking.As with all of Gould's essays... either you like them or despise them, idiosyncrasies and all.

Nonetheless this is entertaining. ... Read more

Product Description
In his characteristically iconoclastic and original way, Gould argues that progress and increasing complexity are not inevitable features of the evolution of life on Earth. Further, if we wish to see grandeur in life, we must discard our selfish and anthropocentric view of evolution and learn to see it as Darwin did, as the random but unfathomably rich source of 'endless forms most beautiful and wonderful'. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Life�s Grandeur or Considering the Full House
A Review of Stephen Jay Gould's, Life's Grandeur, the Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin.

Stephen Jay Gould does an excellent job again, this time a very thorough introduction into statistical analysis with regard to natural systems and baseball. One must pay attention when reading Gould, but otherwise he gives insight to the world of science, particularly Palaeontology and Evolutionary Biology.

Don't be put off by the Baseball introduction, it's his way of explaining some facts about systems that reveal themselves when considering the statistics and why our tendency to use averages and means to describe something often gives a distorted picture of the whole system that can give a false trend. The whole system, by the way, is the "Full House".

Being pattern recognition creatures, we can identify trends early on and can act to avoid disaster or take advantage for profit quite frequently, but we also see trends where none exist by looking at limited data, or from a skewed viewpoint. Gould initially explains this with his baseball example which he sufficiently covers so someone like me can understand it, (I live in Australia and culturally more likely to understand Cricket than some North American game).

The issue he uses with Baseball is the 0.400 average hit rates for the batter. A rate that's frequency has dropped considerably over the last 50 years. Using the batting averages for all the players, with the exception of those that only batted once or twice a series, a curve is drawn. Then a statistical analysis is conducted of the resulting curve, called a Bell curve. The right tail is the part of the curve we are interested in, that is where the 0.400 hist rate resides. Summing all the seasons up, and graphed over each year, a trend is shown where the curve tends to move to the right and the differences between the poor hitters and mostest hitter is reduced.

Then we begin to see the "Full House", the skill of all the players has had an effect on keeping the better batters from achieving the 0.400 or right wall of Baseball fame. The whole game has improved, the variation of the hit rate has reduced, and a further analysis of the bowlers and other players does in fact show the same facts.

Therefore, anyone saying that batting has dropped in performance is only looking at the right tail, not the whole curve of performance of batters, or the statistics for the whole game, every player.

We then move onto an analysis of the left wall case of similar cases in nature in relation to the belief that nature is in constant progression from simple to complex organisms so Man was inevitable, at the top of the tree. His analysis with ample data of various clades and phylum like the ubiquitous horse and its progenitors to small aquatic shell creatures, the variations of the creatures do not indicate anything of progress except a random difference or variation that indicates a skewed bell curve with a right tale of a small level of complex creatures.

Demonstrating the variation of a total random series of events of a drunk moving from the left wall to the gutter across a foot path, a apparently constant demonstration of how, given enough time, the right side will be reached. The same with the development and variation of creatures over time from a left wall of single cell simple creatures to the right wall of most complexity, the samples appear to be of the same order of randomness.

Thus, if we rewind the tape of life, the right tail will occur but at a random time and a random variation, so Man would not appear again, or even his sized brain. It certainly puts us in a minor position in nature with this well argued discussion of the analysis of data.

It will be interesting to see how the creation of the world fits in with science and religion in the future. Perhaps Our Heavenly Father stepped in at the stage that Man, just before agriculture started or maybe sometime during this period and then taught Man within the Garden of Eden to establish the first righteous prophet, Adam. Who knows at this stage of civilisation, maybe sometime soon a prophet will be able to find how the two ideas from the scriptures and science can work together?

Life�s Grandeur or Considering the Full House
Life's Grandeur or Considering the Full House
A Review of Stephen Jay Gould, Life's Grandeur, the Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin.
Stephen Jay Gould does an excellent job again, this time a very thorough introduction into statistical analysis with regard to natural systems and baseball.One must pay attention when reading Gould, but otherwise he gives insight to the world of science, particularly Palaeontology and Evolutionary Biology.
Don't be put off by the Baseball introduction, it's his way of explaining some facts about systems that reveal themselves when considering the statistics and why our tendency to use averages and means to describe something often gives a distorted picture of the whole system that can give a false trend.The whole system, by the way, is the "Full House".
Being pattern recognition creatures, we can identify trends early on and can act to avoid disaster or take advantage for profit quite frequently, but we also see trends where none exist by looking at limited data, or from a skewed viewpoint.Gould initially explains this with his baseball example which he sufficiently covers so someone like me can understand it, (I live in Australia and culturally more likely to understand Cricket than some North American game).
The issue he uses with Baseball is the 0.400 average hit rates for the batter. A rate that's frequency has dropped considerably over the last 50 years.Using the batting averages for all the players, with the exception of those that only batted once or twice a series, a curve is drawn.Then a statistical analysis is conducted of the resulting curve, called a Bell curve.The right tail is the part of the curve we are interested in, that is where the 0.400 hist rate resides.Summing all the seasons up, and graphed over each year, a trend is shown where the curve tends to move to the right and the differences between the poor hitters and mostest hitter is reduced.
Then we begin to see the "Full House", the skill of all the players has had an effect on keeping the better batters from achieving the 0.400 or right wall of Baseball fame.The whole game has improved, the variation of the hit rate has reduced, and a further analysis of the bowlers and other players does in fact show the same facts.
Therefore, anyone saying that batting has dropped in performance is only looking at the right tail, not the whole curve of performance of batters, or the statistics for the whole game, every player.
We then move onto an analysis of the left wall case of similar cases in nature in relation to the belief that nature is in constant progression from simple to complex organisms so Man was inevitable, at the top of the tree.His analysis with ample data of various clades and phylum like the ubiquitous horse and its progenitors to small aquatic shell creatures, the variations of the creatures do not indicate anything of progress except a random difference or variation that indicates a skewed bell curve with a right tale of a small level of complex creatures.
Demonstrating the variation of a total random series of events of a drunk moving from the left wall to the gutter across a foot path, a apparently constant demonstration of how, given enough time, the right side will be reached.The same with the development and variation of creatures over time from a left wall of single cell simple creatures to the right wall of most complexity, the samples appear to be of the same order of randomness.
Thus, if we rewind the tape of life, the right tail will occur but at a random time and a random variation, so Man would not appear again, or even his sized brain.It certainly puts us in a minor position in nature with this well argued discussion of the analysis of data.
It will be interesting to see how the creation of the world fits in with science and religion in the future.Perhaps Our Heavenly Father stepped in at the stage that Man, just before agriculture started or maybe sometime during this period and then taught Man within the Garden of Eden to establish the first righteous prophet, Adam.Who knows at this stage of civilisation, maybe sometime soon a prophet will be able to find how the two ideas from the scriptures and science can work together? ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

A Surprisingly Readable Collection of Papers
Generally, I find that I am unable to read scientific papers.But, although I have no formal education in biology (except for a freshman class a few decades ago), I was able to read most of these papers.I find that very appropriate since the collection is a memorial to Stephen Jay Gould, who is well known for his extremely readable essays for non-scientists.

These papers were published by a scientific journal and are still much more technical than Gould's Natural History essays.I have found a phrase which I think shows the general technical level of these papers: "...the monophyly of the triploblasts, those bilaterians possessing true mesoderm."If you are comfortable with that, I think you will enjoy and learn from this collection.

At least that was my experience I did have to struggle with parts.For example, evolution at the level of species as opposed to individuals was difficult; a few examples would have helped a lot. (If it would help you to know more about my technical level, you can click on my name, above, or on "See all my reviews".)

Each paper expands on some aspect of Gould's writings, especially his technical writing.Fans of his essays will be familiar with contingency, exaptation, punctuated equilibrium, the neutral theory, and, probably, some other topics.But these papers go deeper.For, example, in reading the essays, I couldn't understand why there was controversy about punctuated equilibrium; the concept seemed too obvious.Not surprisingly, I now find that there was a lot more to the theory, enough for the controversy to make sense.

The term "macroevolution" refers to changes that are more rapid than those Darwin wrote about.Besides the topics I mentioned above, developmental genes, mass extinctions, and variations in the timing of development promote rapid evolution.Most of what I've read about macroevolution has been about animals; to give a little bit of balance, there is a paper here about plants.

To sum up: if you're a nonscientist and have read several elementary and somewhat advanced books about evolution and you want to go one step further, this may well be the book you want.I certainly enjoyed it and will read it again.

[Original review 8 April 2006.Revised for clarity 6 June 2006.] ... Read more

Product Description
Gould's seventh collection of essays covers a wide range of subjects in natural history, literature, and popular culture--from the wisdom of Charles Darwin to that of the Old Testament Psalms, from the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park to the dinosaurs of the latest scientific theories, from the thwarted human ity of the Frankenstein monster to the inhuman fallacies of eugenics and other pseudoscience. Illustrations. Nationals ads/media. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Intersting
Not bad, not amazing. This collection of essays does a good job of opening the mind and they're decently written. Nothing awe-striking, but commendable.

Neither Gould Nor Sagan Will Be Replaced In Our Era

Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History, by Stephen Jay Gould, is one of the twentieth-century's great, approachable thinkers presenting what turned out to be among his final projects. Consisting of a collection of his articles as well as additional thoughts written strictly for this book, Dr. Gould herein tackles topics that range from Poe to the environment, dinosaurs to nautical lore, modern museum architecture, to, yes, of course, his favorite subject, one he rightly or wrongly unfailingly championed to the too-soon end of his days, evolution. These easily-readable and quotable essays are invaluable in this time after this great and good man has left us, and I have re-read this book several times since I first got it as a birthday present in 1995. To be able to make people laugh, think and debate, even after your life has physically ended is not a bad legacy for anyone. Don't let Stephen Jay Gould rest in peace, read this book and stir things up a bit in his name.

Elegant and erudite
Gould's 1996 collection of essays for "Natural History" magazine ranges over the broad and varied terrain of his intellect and curiosity, educating and satisfying the reader with elegance, wit and powerful reasoning.

Gould delights in juxtaposing literature and science, the familiarand the unexpected. He chooses "Cordelia's dilemma" - her refusal to compete with her sisters in making loud protestations of love for their father, King Lear - as an analogy for "publication bias" - the reluctance of journals to publish boring negative results in favor of more interesting successful experiments. A positive result in a study of AIDS or cancer treatments wins headlines while later failures to duplicate those results are read by few. And most negative results never see publication at all. "Lear cannot conceptualize the proposition that Cordelia's silence might signify her greater love - that nothing can be the biggest something."

In this collection, Gould divides his essays into eight sections. "Heaven and Earth" includes his marvelous experience of the effect of a solar eclipse on the citizens of New York City, and in "Literature and Science," he ruminates on the moral lesson of Frankenstein and Hollywood's subversion of it.

"Origin, Stability, and Extinction" argues that the Cambrian explosion is even more the "key event" in the history of multicellular animals than previously believed, "Stability" includes "Cordelia's Dilemma," "Extinction" includes the title essay on Darwin's view that "all observation must be for or against some view."

"Writing About Snails" delves into women's Victorian writings (I'm reminded of the value of negative results), "The Glory of Museums" explores "Dinomania" and "The Disparate Faces of Eugenics" revisits the hilarious arguments of an eminent scientist who argued that cancer causes smoking.

"Evolutionary Theory, Evolutionary Stories," explores the arguments of Creationism and the origin of evolutionary science's best one liner (in answer to a question on the nature of the Creator) "an inordinate fondness for beetles," and "Linnaeus and Darwin's Grandfather" uses the whimsical observation of the "curious conjunction" of Linnaeus and Gustav III on a Swedish banknote to explore the scientist's classification theories (still used today) and his adherence to a religious Creationism.

Certain themes recur in these essays. Gould is a staunch evolutionist and defends Darwin's theories vigorously, even when pointing out mistakes and misconceptions. He takes Creationism seriously - as a threat to scientific reasoning. His interest in natural history extends to the history of human thinking about nature and science.

His essays are beautifully crafted, full of literary allusions, anecdotes and turns of wit but always to the point. He loves tracking down the precise source and context of oft-used quotes as much as he enjoys tracing the origin of flatworms, and manages to arouse his reader's interest in both. He is not a writer of wasted words. Best of all, Gould's essays are always as thought provoking as they are entertaining.

Storytelling Dinosaurs
Evolution is probably the most exciting natural
truth that science has ever discovered.
And Stephen Jay Goulds essays tells about it
with an infectious enthusiasm. On the way everything
from flat earth myths to ancient Greece and
men like Diogenes the Cynic gets their say.
Rigorous and numerous historical details makes it
a serious, but fun read.
All in all, it is all about the nature and essence
of humanity.
How sad that Stephen Jay Gould is no more.
But at least we have his books!

-Simon

Filling the Gaps
This is a review by a non-paleontologist and non-biologist, just by someone interested in science since he was a child in the 60's.All my life I have followed the marvels of Space science, the moon shots and Aviation in general, since subscribing to the Eyring e-mail list, I have found I lack basic knowledge in the fields required to discuss Evolution.Now I have finally done something about it, although some of you may have given recommendations as to what to read, my local library limits me, so I am starting with Stephen Jay Gould, whose recent passing was noted on this very list.
Dinosaur in a Haystack, Reflections in Natural History, (Stephen Jay Gould: 1996 Random House and various issues of Nature magazine).
This is a review of a collection of Essays published in Nature Magazine before 1996 I should imagine.I would have liked the editors to include the original publication dates in Nature with each essay.The essays themselves revolve, sometimes loosely, on the topic of evolution; he always relates it back to that somewhere in the essay.
For someone like myself, a complete novice in the fields discussed by Gould, his style of writing is informative without the jargon that sometimes cloud the specialties us humans undertake from the mere mortals in the lower classes.Gould explains:
"I will, of course, clarify language, mainly to remove the jargon that does impede public access... I will not make concepts either more simple or more unambiguous than nature's own complexity dictates."
I am happy he has done just that, in his 7th in this series of essay collections, the first one published in 1977 (Ever Since Darwin).
All the essays revolve around that topic I am trying to understand, "Evolution."I decided to start with Gould, because of his readily available material at my local library and his prominence in his field.The continuing argument between theology and science on "the origin of man" and hence the oxymoronic term "creation science" was coined by the proponents, or at least, the more prominent proponents of the biblical literal view of the world.Being a Christian, I felt I should find out the truth!
Now, back to Gould, two essays gained my interest for clearly pointing out two points of discussion between Old School and New School on the one hand and between Evolution and Creationists (a better word, don't you think?).
The first is "Dinosaur in a Haystack," the second, "Hooking Leviathan by its Past".
Dinosaur in a Haystack
Observation follows theory or is it theory follows observation? Gould explains how at the time of Erasmus Darwin (Grandfather of Charles Darwin), the Geological Society banned theoretical discussion.It was felt that observation was essential, when sufficient data was collected, and then theories could be entertained.When Charles Darwin came to the discussion some 30 years later, he then indicated the necessity for theory before observation.After all, how we look at the world is based on a theory, what we go out in search of is based on theory, etc.The two are dependant on each other and cannot be separated without making each meaningless.
Thus we come to Gould's paleontology field and the theory of The Late Permian Debacle, and how an asteroid hitting the Earth caused it.The great extinction at this time was a matter of how extant it was amongst the fossil species and, of course, what contradicted it.
The evidence pointed to a gradual extinction of the animals over geologic times.The new theoryrequired additional evidence.Gould tells us about the ammonites ( a name which sounded like a Biblical tribe) and how they had appeared, given the current evidence and how a more thorough look, in the field, at the fossil record (needle in the haystack) might bring up ammonites closer to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (225 million years ago).
The problem is described as this, the rarer animals in the virtual slice of time take at a geological cut, cliff face, or whatever, may be distributed randomly and infrequently through it.Thus, it is conceivable that they did expire at the KT event, indicated by a layer of mud, literally dividing two epochs of time, rather than at the latest recorded disposition in the strata.If the above is true, then a more detailed look, excavation, needs to be made.The end result was the finding of the ammonites near the boundary, and thus dispelling the gradualism of the neo-Darwinists amongst the palaeontological world.
We know the fossil record is incomplete and sparse, so some logical; indeed, rational analysis is needed to flesh out theories.This means, sometimes, hard work, which makes the armchair theorists obsolete in a heartbeat.
Hooking Leviathan by its Past.
Or, another case of filling in the gaps!!!
He starts the essay with a serious error by Darwin himself, who speculated that the North American Black Bear, swimming with its mouth wide open catching insects, could easily, over a serious long time, evolve to something approaching a whale.The origin of the whale thus is introduced.
This is case where the creationists insisted that evolution was inadequate to explaining life; in this case it was the origins of the leviathan of the deep, the mammalian whales that confused these poor people.
"Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence."
Are you a "creationist incubi"?
Gould takes us through the discovery of the very intermediate fossils that prove the evolution of whales, where it had been inferred, now it is established beyond a doubt.With Gould's now famous explanatory skills we are taken for a journey of exploration in Pakistan (Science knows no national boundaries) where 1983 produced Pakicetus, a discovery by paleontologists Phil Gingerich (University of Michigan) and N. A. Wells, D. E. Russel, and S. M. Ibrahim Shah, found it buried in ancient river sediments, where one would expect to find it.The find was only the skull, but further field work produced the remaining body 10 years later. An excellent essay, and one that will remain embedded in my cranium for sometime.
I am currently furthering my reading in this field of paleontology with a taxonomic dalliance into Eugenics, lead by the 3 essaysunderthe heading "Disparate Faces of Eugenics" in this same book to Gould's 1981 book "The Mismeasure of Man".
I highly recommend Dinosaur in a Haystack, and if that is any guide to the style of Gould's work, his other writing should be quite enlightening.
Clifford M Dubery ... Read more

Product Description
"Lively and fascinating. . . . [Gould]writes beautifully about science and the wonders of nature."—Tracy KidderOver a century after Darwin published the Origin of Species, Darwinian theory is in a "vibrantly healthy state," writes Stephen Jay Gould, its most engaging and illuminating exponent. Exploring the "peculiar and mysterious particulars of nature," Gould introduces the reader to some of the many and wonderful manifestations of evolutionary biology. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

natural history
I was very happy to find this in a hard cover. It is an excellent collection of essays by Stephen Jay Gould. It arrived in excellent condition,and with hardly any wait at all. Net shopping for books is the greatest.

My first, and still my favorite
This is the first of the many of Gould's book that I have read over the years. I remember being captivated by by essays' titles and by the book description on the back cover of a cheap Italian translation published by Feltrinelli. I think it was the summer of 1990, just before starting college, and I recall reading this book while on vacation with my grandparents in the Alps. You get the idea. A wonderful book for a wonderful summer, and maybe that's why this remains to date my favorite Gould.

Interesting, full of surprises, readable and at the same time deep and well-researched (unlike some scientists-writers, Gould rarely if ever "dumbed down" a topic). Also, this being one of his early books, Gould was not yet (let me say it) as self-obsessed and self-adoring as in all his last writings, which I find a little bit obnoxious.

The chapters on Theilard de Chardin read like a mystery thriller. The chapters on the "monkey trial" should be compulsory reading for anyone with an interest in the evolution-creationism-ID debate. The section on the big impact of small mutations are brilliant and among the most interesting essays I have read. After this book, I was hooked and ended up reading most of Gould's popular science, but this still remains my favorite collection. Highly highly recommended to anyone with an interest in biology/zoology/evolution. These essays will keep you usefully entertained for hours, and will make your brain happy.

What, if anything, is a zebra?
Like any collection of essays republished from other sources, this one--the third of many such anthologies from Gould--is a mixed bag. All but three pieces originally appeared in "Natural History" magazine, but Gould updated many of them with postscripts incorporating responses to and criticism of the original articles.

The range, as always, is impressive: tours of the controversies and unforgettable characters that pepper the history of science; examinations of the politics of science (which, sadly, hasn't changed much in 25 years) and the threats to teaching posed by creationists; explorations in paleontology and evolutionary theory; and some dabblings in "hard science" that might leave a few folks scratching their heads. There's even a typical Gould curio reminiscent of his essays on baseball: an analysis of the inexorable trend towards smaller Hershey bars. The only truly outdated essays are those which focus on genetics and the discovery of the structure of DNA.

For me, the defining moment in this collection is the question posed by Gould: "Is a zebra a white animal with black stripes or a black animal with white stripes?" It's really a damn good question, but to be honest, such a problem would never have crossed my mind. (I feel doltish for not even knowing that there are three species of zebra.) Gould's certainly not the first biologist to consider the issue, but he's surely the first to offer for the everyday reader not one, but three easily understood and (one might even say) riveting essays on "striped horses." And that's just what makes Gould's works so worthwhile: a charming combination of his fascination with history, his inquisitiveness about nature (especially in areas "outside his expertise"), and the patience needed to write clearly about such matters for the non-scientist.

As always, Remarkable
I admit it, I'm a Stephen Jay Gould fan. As always, it was delightful to lay back and read each and every one of the essays in this book. This is not just science, this is reason, objectivity, philosophy and history (at least). Stephen's prose is remarkable, his style is so unique, something in between nineteen and twentieth century. Although this book is not new, Stephen is profound in every aspect and so meticulous in his work that ten or twenty years from now you can read it again and still learn something from it. If you like science, evolution or biology, even if you just enjoy good, logical and profound arguments, I guarantee you will like this book.

Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes written by Stephen Jay Gould introduces the reader to the many and wonderful manifestations of evolutionary biology in this book of essays. Gould wrote many essays for "Natural History" and this book covers thirty of those essays as he takes us on an evolution ride of a tour de force magnitude.

Gould is unparalled when it comes to taking complicated theory and having the ability to evoke enlightenment to the general mass public as he brings a passion to his explanations and an understanding par excellence. Reading Gould's rather convesational tone in this book brings a wealth of information to the reader in a painless fashion.

Gould is truly a natural philosopher when it comes to spinning a story as he brings to the table a wealth of information as you read and the conclusion comes to you in a rather lively and fascinating manor. Gould has hit his stride with these essays.

This book was a joy to read and educational, bringing the reader witty learned sense making you follow till you see his conclusion. The prose flows well and you will feel that you are in capable hands as you are guided throughout the book. ... Read more

Product Description
This lost novella by the century's most renowned paleontologist has been called the greatest time-travel story in more than one hundred years.

Vanishing from Earth on February 30, 2162, while working on a problem of quantum theory, research chronologist Sam Magruder is thrown back 80 million years in time. Endowed with the intelligence of a twenty-second-century man, Magruder struggles to survive, feeding on scrambled turtle eggs and diligently recording his observations on a stone-slab diary, even as menacing tyrannosaurus try to gnaw off his limbs.

Filled with magnificent descriptions of the dinosaurs as only Simpson himself could render them, The Dechronization of Sam Magruder is not only a classic time-travel tale but a philosophical work that astutely ponders the complexities of human existence and achievement.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Story Within a Story - Great Read
This is a book-within-a-book story of a man who goes back in time 80 million years, proving that his theory of time travel works yet living out his life absolutely isolated from human contact.

Sam Magruder lives in 2162. We first learn of his amazing adventure when slabs of stone from 80 million years ago are discovered to contain "universal Swahili" - the language of 2162 - chronicling Maguder's amazing time jump. He writes of how he figures out "when" he is, how he survives, and of his musings on his purpose now that he can't ever get back to his life in 2162.

This is a treasure of a book. I really enjoyed the descriptions of how he survived the first days, how he tried to make sense of what happened to him, and how he got through his life.

Surrounding the 8 slabs of Magruder's story is philosophical argument about his life and its meaning by the Universal Historian, the Common Man, the Pragmatist, the Ethnologist, and Pierre Precieux, discoverer of the slabs. Each represents a different philosophical viewpoint. One thing that was terribly amusing was that Magruder's discussion of his (lack of) sex life was eliminated from the general translation available to the general public, but kept, for scientific accuracy in the official text.

Surrounding the book-within-a-book, are an introduction by Arthur C. Clarke, an afterward by Stephen Jay Gould, and a memoir by Joan Simpson Burns, daughter of the author, George Gaylord Simpson. All are well thought out and interesting reads on their own.

This book was found after the author's death by his daughter. He was the preeminent paleontologist of the 20th century, and this book is, according to Clarke, Gould, and his daughter, unconsciously autobiographical and revelatory of his strengths and weaknesses.

Back to the past!
The Dechronization Of Sam Magruder is a time traveling story by the late great George Gaylord Simpson.The introduction is by Arthur C. Clarke and with an afterword by Stephen Jay Gould.And it is brilliant!
Based very much on the style of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine Mr. Simpson writes a story about a man being sent BACKWARDS in time, about 80 million years, to find himself totally alone among the dinosaurs.The story is less about ancient life as it is about what is means to be a member of mankind.Is this fiction?Is it science?Or is it philosophy? Whatever it may be it turns out to be just plain fun.
A short story any fan of time travel needs for their library.

A IDer enjoyed this
Loved this book.Despite being an adherent of creation science and abhorrer of evolution, I found this a fascinating and well-written story.I enjoyed it so much I read it to my daughter at bedtime.Sam Magruder is a "time" scientist in the future who accidentally falls victim to his own experiment. Simpson's plot is compelling.At first it bothered me that I found an evolution story so interesting, until I remembered that evolution is science fiction anyway.

Stephen J. Gould notes were an interesting insight into just how philosophically-based evolution is.

Worth a look, especially for the essays included.
This slim novella, by the late and distinguished paleontologist, was
found in his papers after his death. It's just so-so as fiction, in my
opinion, but the book is worth your attention for the two elegant essays
included. The first, by Arthur C. Clarke, outlines the history of time-travel
stories,and includes more recommendations for classic dinosaur tales.
Sir Arthur notes, with admirable succintness, that "the most convincing
argument against [real] time travel is the remarkable scarcity of [real]
time travellers."

Stephen Jay Gould was a student of Simpson's, and contributes a
graceful and elegaic essay on Simpson's novella, career and life --
which, I must say, I enjoyed more than the story. An exceptional
piece, not to be missed if you have any interest in Gould or Simpson.

Simpson's novella does have its charms -- it has a nice mock-
Victorian club-story opening, not unlike Clarke's Tales from the
White Hart, and is oddly compelling despite the amateurish writing.
Sam Magruder, a chronologist in 2162, is accidentally "dechronized"
into the late Cretaceous,with no possibility of rescue, and spends the
rest of his life evading, eating and studying dinosaurs. It's certainly
not "the best time travel story since HG Wells" as the cover blurb
avers, but it'sworth a look. Sadly, the story's paleontology is
now quite out of date.

Peter D. Tillman
Consulting Geologist, Tucson & Santa Fe (USA)
(Review first published in the Arizona Geological Society newsletter, 1-02)

Enter Time & Space
I love time travel and I loved this book.Incredibly it was way too short, but a masterpiece for its genre. ... Read more

Product Description
On the Nature of Things commemorates a photojournalistic genius whose passion for his subject has rarely been equalled and whose pioneering techniques continue to define contemporary science/technological photography. Accompanied by commentary from Nobel prize-winning scientists, Goro's extraordinary images create a work of expertise and enchantment.

For almost fifty years, Fritz Goro gave Life magazine readers of all ages an eyewitness view of the greatest scientific and technological breakthroughs of our time. The splitting of the atom; the deciphering of DNA; the invention of the hologram; the coming of fiber optics, lasers, computers, microsurgery--these are only a handful of the momentous discoveries he captured in his consummately innovative photography, providing an intimate look at the way new phenomena work and revealing as never before the infinite shapes and dazzling lights and colors that comprise the universe.

It was Goro who went on-site with the Manhattan Project, actually standing on ground zero while it was still radioactive from the A-bomb test; who first photographed blood circulation in living animals; who documented a minute quality of plutonium as it was being produced, thus marking a milestone of the nuclear age; who captured a fetal image so hauntingly universal, it became the inspiration for the Starchild in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001. Perhaps most remarkable of all, he photographed the first model of explanation of the atom. Photographing subjects that were sometimes abstract and often evasive, Goro became a master of technical improvisation; in order to translate atomic physics visually, he used four lenses of different focal lengths, rotated the film position fifteen times, and made a total of thirty-three different exposures one one sheet of eight-by-ten color film.

Nearly a decade after his death, Aperture accords Fritz Goro the tribute he so richly deserves with the first comprehensive collection of his landmark work. More than a handsome book of 159 photographs, On the Nature of Things draws the reader into the environment of each depicted breakthrough with an immediacy intensified by the comments of eminent scientists--all international leaders in their respective fields, many of whom worked closely with Goro while he was visualizing their great achievements. Among them are Dr. Lennart Nilsson of Stockholm, one of the greatest of all medical photographers; Professor Ilya Prigogine, Nobel laureate in rotating chemical reactions; Professor Glenn Seaborg, Nobel prize-winner in medicine, neurology professor David Hubel; and Oliver Sacks, neurologist and celebrated author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most widely read scientific writers of our time, supplies an introduction; while Goro's grandsons, Thomas, Peter, and Stefan Goreau, all respected scientists, contribute to a biographical essay.

Beautiful, startling, enlightening, On the Nature of Things shines with a rare fascination.
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Customer Reviews (1)

This book will give you new ideas that you never had before.
This book will give you new and great pictures and ideas.I think that it is cool. ... Read more

Product Description
In his ?nal book and his ?rst full-length original title since Full House in 1996, the eminent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould offers a surprising and nuanced study of the complex relationship between our two great ways of knowing: science and the humanities, twin realms of knowledge that have been divided against each other for far too long. In building his case, Gould shows why the common assumption of an inescapable conflict between science and the humanities is false, mounts a spirited rebuttal to the ideas that his intellectual rival E. O. Wilson set forth in his book Consilience, and explains why the pursuit of knowledge must always operate upon the bedrock of nature’s randomness. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox is a controversial discourse, rich with facts and observations gathered by one of the most erudite minds of our time.Amazon.com Review
Though this final book is not the most accessible of Stephen Jay Gould's meditations on science and culture, it is a complex and revealing look at one of the late paleontologist's great passions: the unity of human endeavor. The titular hedgehog and fox refer to the classic dichotomy of persistence opposed to agility of thought, which Gould uses as a backbone in comparing, contrasting, and balancing science and the humanities. Unlike many scientists, he does not consider humanities (nor religion) to be inferior to his discipline. Drawing liberally from Renaissance and Scientific Revolution sources, Gould shows that the perceived differences in the two cultures are mostly false. Readers of E.O. Wilson's Consiliencewill find many similarities here, though Gould emphatically rejects Wilson's conclusion that reductionism is an appropriate way to unite the two cultures and offers examples of when such an approach might fail.

If we discover that a majority of human cultures have favored infanticide under certain conditions, and that such a practice arose for good Darwinian reasons, shall we then claim that we have resolved the question of the rightness of such a practice with a "yea"?

This volume is presented by its editor almost unchanged from the manuscript Gould had finished shortly before his death. The result is a book with such unedited detail that its dense blend of history and philosophy is at times overwhelmingly difficult. Nevertheless, Gould's deeply held conviction that human understanding comes from all our cultural efforts shines through. --Therese Littleton ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

hegehog, fox ,and magister's pox by stephen jay gould
This is the 22nd and last book of the late author.It attmepts to bridge his pereived gap between science and the humanities.It does not achieve this goal and is an unfocused and irritating book full of hubris and unrelated musings.It is not recommended.

The Hedgehog, The Fox, and the Magister's Pox
As a long-time reader of Stephen Jay Gould's books and his years of monthly articles in Natural History, I found this title to be an excellent representation of SJG's best ideas and thoughts on Science and the Humanities. As always SJG's choice of words and phrases is impeccably precise, and lends an aura of anticipation to the next paragraph. SJG does bring a consilience to the dichotomous world of Science and the Humanities and Gould's book "The Hedgehog, The Fox, and The Magister's Pox" deserves a much wider audience.

Need for a prose and style for science
In his highly intensive book Gould discusses science and humanities in an immensely articulated fashion that can be hard to follow many times. Yet the book is highly attentive to style as he argues in p.132 " In fact, this explicit denial of importance to modes of communication, unfortunately, engendered a more than merely mild form of philistinism among many scientists who not only view verbal skills as unimportant, but actually discount any fortuitous stylistic acumen among their collegaues as an irrelevant snare, casting suspicion upon the writer's capacity for objectivity in presenting the data of nature. In an almost perverse manner, inarticulateness almost becomes a virtue as a collateral sign of proper attention to nature's raw empirics versus distilled human presentation thereof".

Articulate and wellprosed he adds on p. 133 that " This lack of attention to style, combined with an active belief that quality of prose cannot impact the power of an argument, at least confers an admittedly undeserved blessing upon those few scientists who, by rare training or good fortune, happen to write unusually well and persuasively".

Well, he writes unusually well eventhough the reader might need to make parallel readings to undertand what he is talking about in the beautifully complex "minding and mending of the gap between science and humanities".

Well, yeah... but so what?
Having picked up this book basically on Gould's reputation, I expected some analysis worthy of such a creative title. Indeed, a brief glance through the material made it seem like I would be getting a lot of erudite historical references and some interesting thoughts on a subject I find personally quite important. After slogging through it, however, it's pretty clear that Gould's ideas don't really merit the kind of space and attention given to them in this book. They could have easily been better presented in a five-paragraph essay.

Gould spends most of his time talking about three things, all of which is underpinned by his criticism of what he feels is a natural human tendency to apply a binary filter to everything ("The Dynasty of Dichotomy"). He spends a disproportionate amount of time discussing what he sees as the overblown nature of the early Church hostility to science, the conflict between Ancients and Moderns, and the "science wars", before he ever gets to "mending" any gap between science and the humanities. Besides the brief "science wars" section, most of the book is centered around historical oddities from his personal library, which he readily admits are not truly central to the issues but merely interesting to him. If you have time to kill, you might appreciate such forays into the wilderness of his imagination. But if you actually want some kind of discussion related to the title of the book, just read Chapter 9, "The False Path of Reductionism and the Consilience of Equal Regard", and skip the rest. This is the only chapter with any real new analysis and it's still not entirely satisfactory, claiming as it does that because of emergent behavior (and other non-additive properties) science will never be able to unify or understand the humanities, or even many new scientific disciplines. He simply asserts that while he finds it wistfully pleasant to imagine a Wilsonian "consilience" of the humanities and science, it just isn't going to happen as their domains are quite separate. They have much to offer each each other (no really?), but they're just destined for separate ways. Most of his thought seems to rationalize already held beliefs. With such a difficult and intangible subject, it's easy to fall prey to these faults. Unfortunately, Gould hasn't escaped it either.

A Good Idea Translated Into an Episodic Essay.
Having read E.O. Wilson's book "Conscilience," and (seemingly) having the same blanching reaction to it that Gould did, I was hoping from the outset to give five stars to to this book. But alas, by the time I finished reading it, though I agreed with all of its major points, my conscience only let me give the book 3 stars. Here's why.

First, the book was published with little editing. This, of course, is hardly Gould's fault. While he lived to write the book (and I'm still very glad he did), he passed away before doing much editing. Be that as it may, the book would have seriously benefitted from having someone look it over. In many chapters, Gould meanders, tosses irrelevant asides, and strays regularly from promising lines of thought. That accounts for one star (that I subtract cautiously because, as i say, it is hardly Gould's fault here).

The other two stars are subtracted because of Gould's strange use of historical anecdotes. Gould, of course, is known for this and many collections of his essays find him historically preoccupied. Be that as it may, the subject of this book seemed more to demand the type of abstract and polemical discussion that Gould avowedly is trying to avoid here. Some of the anecdotes (bringing up Nabokov as a legitimate 'straddler' between science and the humanities) are great as case-bolstering asides, but many simply left me befuddled (a) as to why they were relevant; and (b) why they took up entire chapters.

The reason I dwell on the superfluity of Gould's anecdotal preoccupation is because the chapters I enjoyed most were the chapters where he hardly used anecdotes at all. One chapter finds Gould offering a mighty persuasive case that the science wars are themselves a 'social construction.' He recounts that not many of his scientist friends are even aware that there ever was such a thing, while none of his humanities friends have ever held (anything close to) the views sardonically attributed to them. No historical anecdotes in this chapter, and the chapter was all the better for it.

The chapter that really earns its keep, however, is the last one which sees Gould taking E.O. Wilson politely to task for his view that conscilience is tantamount to scientific reductionism - that the science/humanities "divide" can be ameliorated only by scientifically explaining the humanities. Gould recognizes that Wilson's argument here is nothing but an overly-optimistic and exhorbitantly doubtful pipe-dream. Given such seemingly impenetrable scientific failures as: (a) the inability to explain consciousness in stricly neurological and non-subjective terms, and (b) the naturalistic fallacy, whereby a factual "is" doesn't per se translate to an ethical "ought," Gould concludes that at least on some level, the humanities and the sciences will always occupy seperate places in the human condition.

While this concluding chapter was only about 35 pages, it seems to contain virtually all of the main points in the book. That made and makes me wonder why, then, we were presented with so many maundering chapters on this and that historical anecdote to get to one chapter that succinctly makes and argues every promised point in the book!

That is why I gave the book 3, rather than my hoped for 5 stars. Buy the book, especially if you want a useful counterpoint to Wilson's "Conscilience." Also check out Mary Midgley's "Science and Poetry" for many of the same points argued more succinctly. ... Read more

Product Description
Three noted academics describe a new exhibit for the National Museum of American Art that uses the landscape photography of the eighties to show how visual artists have attempted to grapple with environmental issues. Simultaneous. ... Read more