Search -
Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History
Eight Little Piggies Reflections in Natural History Author:Stephen Jay Gould Among 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 th... more »e 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.
A reflective prologue --
1. The scale of extinction (1. Unenchanted evening ; 2. The golden rule: a proper scale for our environmental crisis ; 3. Losing a limpet) --
2. Odd bits of vertebrate anatomy (4. Eight little piggies ; 5. Bent out of shape ; 6. An earful of jaw ; 7. Full of hot air) --
3. Vox populi (Evolving times --
8. Men of the Thirty-Third Division: an essay in integrity ; 9. [Charles] Darwin and [William] Paley meet the invisible hand ; 10. More light on leaves --
Time in [Isaac] Newton's century --
14. On rereading Edmund Halley ; 12. Fall in the house of [Bishop James] Ussher --
4. Musings (Clouds of memory --
13. Muller Bros. Moving & Storage ; 14. [Eugene] Shoemaker and Morning Star --
Authenticity --
15. In touch with [Charles Doolittle] Walcott ; 16. Counters and cable cars) --
5. Human nature (17. [Wolfgang Amadeus] Mozart and modularity ; 18. The moral state of Tahiti --
and of [Charles] Darwin ; 19. Ten thousand acts of kindness) --
6. Grand patterns of evolution (Two steps toward a general theory of life's complexity --
21. The wheel of fortune and the wedge of progress --
22. Tires to sandals --
New discoveries in the earliest history of multicellular life --
23. Defending the heretical and the superfluous ; 24. The reversal of Hallucigenia) --
7. Revising and extending Darwin (25. What the immaculate pigeon teaches the burdened mind ; 26. The great seal principle ; 27. A dog's life in [Francis] Galton's polyhedron ; 28. Betting on chance --
and no fair peeking) --
8. Reversals : fragments of a book not written (Shields of expectation --
and actuality ; 30. A tale of three pictures ; 31. A foot soldier for evolution [Francis Galton]« less