Product Description

The title is a pun, and as always with Gould, the joke has a point that illustrates the largest pattern of life's history. For millennia the animals that populated the earth had four toes on each foot, or six. If evolution had taken a tiny shift - if our ancestors had inherited a couple of genes in a different form - our canonical number, based on our fingers and toes, might be eight instead of ten. This is just one of the oddities of history that Gould deploys in this wonderfully readable book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124911 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Independent
`Witty, paradoxical, polymathic, Gould is a wonderfully lively
advocate for evolution'

About the Author
Stephen Jay Gould was the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of geology at Harvard and the curator for invertebrate palaeontology in the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He died in May 2002.

Customer Reviews

Very intelligible scientific essays
Gould is excellent at taking a scientific curiosity , analysing it and explaining it in non-patronising layman's language. A good book to browse or to read right through, and thought provoking too.