Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural HistoryAmong scientists who write, no one illuminates as well as Stephen Jay Gould doesthe wonderful workings of the natural world. Now in a new volume of collected essays--his sixth since Ever Since Darwin--Gould speaks of the importance of unbroken connections within our own lives and to our ancestralgenerations. Along with way, he opens to us the mysteries of fish tails, frog calls, and other matters, and shows once and for all why we must take notice when a seemingly insignificant creature is threatened, like the land snail Partula from Moorea, whose extinction he movingly relates. |
Contents
A Reflective Prologue | 11 |
THE SCALE OF EXTINCTION | 21 |
Unenchanted Evening | 23 |
A The Golden Rule A Proper Scale for Our Environmental Crisis | 41 |
Losing a Limpet | 52 |
ODD BITS IF VERTEBRATE ANATOMY | 61 |
Eight Little Piggies | 63 |
Bent Out of Shape | 79 |
Counters and Cable Cars | 238 |
HUMAN NATURE | 247 |
Mozart and Modularity | 249 |
The Moral State of Tahitiand of Darwin | 262 |
Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness | 275 |
The Declining Empire of Apes | 284 |
GRAND PATTERNS OF EVOLUTION | 297 |
Two Steps towards a General Theory of Lifes Complexity | 299 |
An Earful of Jaw | 95 |
Full of Hot Air | 109 |
VOX POPULI | 121 |
Evolving Visions | 123 |
Men of the ThirtyThird Division An Essay on Integrity | 124 |
Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand | 138 |
More Light on Leaves | 153 |
Time in Newtons Century | 167 |
On Rereading Edmund Halley | 168 |
Fall in the House of Ussher | 181 |
MUSINGS | 195 |
Clouds of Memory | 197 |
Muller Bros Moving Storage | 198 |
Shoemaker and Morning Star | 206 |
Authenticity | 219 |
In Touch with Walcott | 220 |
The Wheel of Fortune and the Wedge of Progress | 300 |
Tires to Sandals | 313 |
New Discoveries in the Earliest History of Multicellular Life | 325 |
Defending the Heretical and the Superfluous | 326 |
The Reversal of Hallucigenia | 342 |
REVISING AND EXTENDING DARWIN | 353 |
What the Immaculate Pigeon Teaches the Burdened Mind | 355 |
The Great Seal Principle | 371 |
A Dogs Life in Galtons Polyhedron | 382 |
Betting on Chance and No Fair Peeking | 396 |
REVERSALS FRAGMENTS OF A BOOK NOT WRITTEN | 407 |
Shields of Expectation and Actuality | 409 |
A Tale of Three Pictures | 427 |
A Foot Soldier for Evolution | 439 |
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Common terms and phrases
Acanthostega adaptation Agassiz anatomy ancestors animals apes archetype argued argument arthropod Barrington basic biological birds bones brain breeds Burgess Shale called Cambrian Cenozoic Cephalaspis complex Crampton creatures cultural Darwin Darwinian digits discovery diversity dogs Dubois Dubois's earth entire essay evolution evolutionary evolved example fishes fossil function genetic genus geological Goethe Halkieria Halley Halley's Hallucigenia human ichthyosaur Ichthyostega intellectual Lamarck later life's lineage living Lottia mammalian mammals mass extinction maximal ment metaphor Microdictyon million modern Moorea multicellular Museum Natural History natural selection never ocean onychophorans organisms original orthogenetic ostracoderms paleontologists Paley Partula pattern pigeons predictable principle progress represent scientific scientists sclerites sense sequence shell snails species specimens stapes Stensiö story structure success swim bladder T. H. Clark Tahiti tail tailbend tetrapods theme theory tion trigonian Ussher variation vertebrates Walcott wedge Whitman wrote Zostera