Well said, Professor Gould! No, really, very well said indeed. Almost perfect, really. No need to repeat it, I got the idea the first time and . . . well now you’ve gone and said it again in a slightly different way, which makes me wonder if you think I’m some sort of dimwit who needs you to draw...
Mr. Gould was a Harvard professor and since the early 70's has been writing essayson natural history, evolution, paleontology (study of prehistoric life). His essays were bundledand published into books. Dinosaur in a haystack was probably his most notable.I've liked his works as he's very access...
This is a book of essays originally published by Gould in Natural History magazine, during the time that he was its editor (one of several such books, in fact). As such, it is an effort on his part to appeal to an educated popular audience with snippets of information about current research, part...
This book is 30 years old and still highly readable. It's about biology, more specifically about Darwinian evolution and the history of science. Quite good and gripping writing explaining what is still pretty much the current state of our knowledge. Gould has a fondness for rehabilitating scienti...
Stephen Jay Gould was adept at reviewing scientific missteps and errors and building telling lessons from them. His essays are highly discursive, often taking twists and turns through little known bits of history and popular culture, as a means of explicating complex concepts. He was a brilliant ...
There's been a revolution in evolution. A number of them, in fact. If you've been keeping a vision of the perfection of life forms through a crude survival-of-the-fittest paradigm in the back of your intellectual closet, it's time to toss that out for a new model. The revolution examined in Wo...
I started reading this book based a friend's recommendation after a discussion about science and politics. Going into it, I understood it to be two things: An argument against the use of science to "prove" preconceived notions, in particular about the supposedly innate cognitive abilities of dif...
Gould seems to relegate religion to issues of morality, and argues they need to accept scientific claims that miracles don't and cannot happen and that they violate NOMA (non overlapping magisteria) by seeking to get creationism taught in schools. But NOMA cuts both ways though, scientist (which ...
I started reading Natural History magazine several years ago, because I loved the essays of Stephen Jay Gould that appeared in each monthly issue; each essay had something to do with evolution (with Charles Darwin’s name invoked regularly), and were quite entertaining reading, along with being ed...
Published in 2000, this collection of essays from Natural History Magazine is subtitled Penultimate Reflections in Natural History because the "millennial issue" of January 2001 was to carry the 300th in an unbroken series of Gould's monthly columns since 1973, which would be the last. His "Prefa...
Una delle raccolte di saggi che preferisco del compianto Stephen Jay Gould. L'argomento è l'evoluzione, e la storia della scienza. Tra i pezzi fondamentali ci sono i tre articoli relativi a Teilhard e alla truffa di Piltdown, in cui Gould espone la sua tesi sulla probabile colpevolezza del giovan...
Why Not in Wonderland?Once again, I have taken up a book of Stephen Jay Gould's essays. There is no doubt that he was one of the best essayists of our times, writing with humor, intelligence and feeling, But there is one theme that comes up far too often in his later essays to be ignored. This th...
A brief Gould book about the millenium. In structure, similar to other compilations of his previously published articles. Gould's focus is on the millenium itself--not the psychology or sociology of our reactions to the millenium, but specfic calendrical, astronomical, and historical questions a...