The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould

W. W. Norton & Company, 2007 - Science - 654 pages

"Nature is so wondrously complex and varied that almost anything possible does happen....I rejoice in [its] multifariousness and leave the chimera of certainty to politicians and preachers."—from Ever Since Darwin

Upon his death in 2002, Stephen Jay Gould stood at the pinnacle among observers of the natural world, recognized by Congress as a "living legend." His prodigious legacy—sixteen best-selling and prize-winning books, dozens of scientific papers, an unbroken series of three hundred essays in Natural History—combined to make Gould the most widely read science writer of our time. This indispensable collection of forty-eight pieces from his brilliant oeuvre includes selections from classics such as Ever Since Darwin and The Mismeasure of Man, plus articles and speeches never before published in book form.

This volume, the last that will bear his name, spotlights his elegance, depth, and sheer pleasure in our world—a true celebration of an extraordinary mind.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Princesca - LibraryThing

I probably didn't understand it, but I have not found this collection of essays illuminating as I had expected. I didn't even find them interesting. Sorry about that :(

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - psiloiordinary - LibraryThing

A varied collection. Ranging form the short and punchy columns he published in Scientific American to extracts from his highly technical works. As I have previous remarked, I much prefer the former ...

Contents

• I Have Landed: 15
• The Median Isnt the Message: 26
• The Streak of Streaks: 32
• Baseball Father and Me: 41
• A Brief Legal Survey from Scopes to Scalia: 49
• Of Two Minds and One Nature: 59
• Biographies: 65
• Thomas Burnets Battleground of Time: 71
• The Lying Stones of Marrakech: 85
• The Stinkstones of Oeningen: 103
• The Razumovsky Duet: 114
• The Power of Narrative: 127
• Not Necessarily a Wing: 143
• Worm for a Century and All Seasons: 155
• Resolving Evolution Oddest Coupling: 166
• The Piltdown Conspiracy: 182
• Evolutionary Theory: 205
• The Evolution of Life on Earth: 209
• Challenges to NeoDarwinism and Their Meaning for a Revised View of Human Consciousness: 222
• Revising the Three Central Features of Darwinian Logic: 238
• The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change: 261
• Betting on Chanceand No Fair Peeking: 267
• The Power of the Modal Bacter or Why the Tail Cant Wag the Dog: 278
• The Great Dying: 286
• The Validation of Continental Drift: 290
• Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars: 297
• Size Form and Shape: 303
• Opus 100: 307
• Size and Shape: 319
• How the Zebra Gets Its Stripes: 324
• Size and Scaling in Human Evolution: 333
• Stages and Sequences: 359
• Iconographies of Progress: 362
• Up Against a Wall: 376
• Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology: 391
• Pervasive Influence: 395
• A Critique of the Adaptationist Program: 423
• More Things in Heaven and Earth: 444
• Posture Maketh the Man: 467
• Freuds Evolutionary Fantasy: 473
• Racism Scientific and Otherwise: 487
• Paul Broca and the Heyday of Craniology: 490
• The Most Unkindest Cut of All: 534
• A Tale of Two Work Sites: 546
• Carrie Bucks Daughter: 564
• Just in the Middle: 574
• Religion: 587
• Nonoverlapping Magisteria: 590
• The Diet of Worms and the Defenestration of Prague: 604
• Darwin and the Munchkins of Kansas: 616
• Hooking Leviathan by Its Past: 619
• Sources and Acknowledgments: 636
• Index: 641

About the author

Born in New York City in 1941, Stephen Jay Gould received his B.A. from Antioch College in New York in 1963 and a Ph.D. in paleontology from Columbia University in 1967. Gould spent most of his career as a professor at Harvard University and curator of invertebrate paleontology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His research was mainly in the evolution and speciation of land snails. Gould was a leading proponent of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. This theory holds that few evolutionary changes occur among organisms over long periods of time, and then a brief period of rapid changes occurs before another long, stable period of equilibrium sets in. Gould also made significant contributions to the field of evolutionary developmental biology, most notably in his work, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. An outspoken advocate of the scientific outlook, Gould had been a vigorous defender of evolution against its creation-science opponents in popular magazines focusing on science. He wrote a column for Natural History and has produced a remarkable series of books that display the excitement of science for the layperson. Among his many awards and honors, Gould won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His titles include; Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory and Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. Stephen Jay Gould died on May 20, 2002, following his second bout with cancer.

Steven Rose is Emeritus Professor of Life Sciences at the Open University. Long active in the politics of sciences, their joint books include Science and Society and Alas Poor Darwin.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould
• Author: Stephen Jay Gould
• Editors: Paul McGarr, Steven Peter Russell Rose
• Contributor: Steven Peter Russell Rose
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007
• ISBN: 0393064980, 9780393064988
• Length: 654 pages
• Subjects: Science / Life Sciences / Biology