Product Description

There aren't many scientists famous enough in their lifetime to be canonized by the US Congress as one of America's 'living legends'. It is still more unlikely that the title should have been conferred on a man regarded by many in the US as a notorious radical and sometime Marxist - controversial throughout his life as a theorist and polemicist even amongst colleagues in his own chosen fields of palaeontology and evolutionary theory. Yet few would have grudged this accolade to Stephen Jay Gould, whose writings on history - both of the natural world and of the study of that natural world - had made him a household name by the time of his death in 2002. And not just in the Anglophone world, for his books and articles have been widely translated and read in their hundreds of thousands in every society in which debate about evolution and the human condition are the stuff of intellectual life. Gould's written legacy is prodigious - the unbroken series of 300 essays published in "Natural History" magazine, a clutch of books culminating in the monumental 1400 page "Structure of Evolutionary Theory", appearing just months before his death, and of course his academic papers. A committed Darwinian and robust critic of creationist myths, he nevertheless made major revisions to orthodox Darwinian theory, from his concept of punctuated equilibrium to his insistence on the importance of chance in the history of life on earth. And in addition, his trenchant attacks on scientific racism and the pretensions of sociobiology still resonate, nearly three decades after they were first written. In the "Stephen Jay Gould Reader", Steven Rose and Paul McGarr have selected from across the full range of Gould's writing, including some of the most famous of his essays and extracts from his major books. An introduction by Steven Rose sets both the essays, and Gould's life, in context.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64666 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 656 pages

Guardian
'Gould wrote with such delight'

Independent: Science Books. Rev by Jon Turney
"a brilliant selection...Gould's essays are great ways to start
you thinking or begin a conversation"

From the Publisher
A dazzling and generous selection of the best and most representative writing by one of the best loved scientists and science writers

Customer Reviews

The Richness of Gould
Gould's collection of essays cleverly envelopes science, history and baseball with insight, wit and irony. It's very difficult to get bored despite the clearly technical subject matter. There is a triumvirate of themes running through the book:

1. There's no directional bias in evolution. In other words, there is no grand plan to creation and everything has happened by chance.
2. Evolution is a happenstance of small gradual changes over millennia of millennia punctuated by relatively rapid changes in what Gould calls punctuated equilibria.
3. Not every evolutionary mutation is an adaptation for some future use but can be a chance change that gets co-opted to some use, what Gould calls exaptation. An example would be the ever growing hominid brain that over 2 million years gets co-opted for reading and writing which could never have been guessed at at the start.

[And in defence of his ideas (especially no. 3 above) Gould picks bones with Richard Dawkins.]

Gould asks the reader to challenge accepted scientific explanations as these are usually presented and defended tenaciously by vested interests whether or not the dogma is true for as Gould explains, science is "rooted in creative interpretation" sometimes leading to "prejudice" as in the science of eugenics.

You will not agree with everything Gould writes but you will firstly be fired up and secondly find that he is a clever dick.