Eight Little Piggies

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Title Eight Little Piggies
Author Stephen Jay Gould
Genre(s) Non-fiction, Science
Publisher W. W. Norton & Co.
Released 1993
Pages 479
ISBN ISBN 0-393-03416-X
Preceded by Bully for Brontosaurus
Followed by Dinosaur in a Haystack

Eight Little Piggies (1993) is the sixth volume of collected essays by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The essays were culled from his monthly column "The View of Life" in Natural History magazine, to which Gould contributed for 27 years. The book deals, in typically discursive fashion, with themes familiar to Gould's writing: evolution and its teaching, science biography, probabilities and common sense.

The title essay, "Eight Little Piggies", explores concepts such as archetypes and polydactyly via the anatomy of early tetrapods. Other essays discuss themes such as the scale of extinction, vertebrate anatomy, grand patterns of evolution, and human nature.

Contents

[edit] Contents

  • 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
      1. Eight Little Piggies
      2. Bent Out of Shape
      3. An Earful of Jaw
      4. Full of Hot Air
    3. Vox Populi
      Evolving Visions
      1. Men of the Thirty-Third Division: An Essay on Integrity
      2. Darwin and Paley meet the Invisible Hand
      3. More Light on Leaves

      Time in Newton's Century

      1. On Rereading Edmund Halley
      2. Fall in the House of Ussher
    4. Musings
      Clouds of Memory
      1. Muller Bros. Moving and Storage
      2. Shoemaker and Morning Star

      Authenticity

      1. In Touch with Walcott
      2. Counters and Cable Cars
    5. Human Nature
      1. Mozart and Modularity
      2. The Moral State of Tahiti—and of Darwin
      3. Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness
      4. The Declining Empire of Apes
    6. Grand Patterns of Evolution
      Two Steps Towards a General Theory of Life's Complexity
      1. The Wheel of Fortune and the Wedge of Progress
      2. Tires to Sandals

      New Discoveries in the Earliest History of Multicellular Life

      1. Defending the Heretical and the Superfluous
      2. The Reversal of Hallucigenia
    7. Revising and Extending Darwin
      1. What the Immaculate Pigeon Teaches the Burdened Mind
      2. The Great Seal Principle
      3. A Dog's Life in Galton's Polyhedron
      4. Betting on Chance—And No Fair Peeking
    8. Reversals-Fragments of a Book not Written
      1. Shields of Expectation—And Actuality
      2. A Tale of Three Pictures
      3. A Foot Soldier for Eevolution
  • Bibliography
  • Index

[edit] From Publishers Weekly

“ In his latest collection of essays originally published in Natural History magazine, paleontologist Gould examines diverse and diverting topics. The title piece refers to toes, and we learn that five is not necessarily the optimum number. Gould re-examines the work of astronomer Edmund Halley and 16th-century Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who pinpointed the moment of creation (Oct. 23, 4004 B.C.); Gould finds an "invisible hand" connecting William Paley, Charles Darwin and Adam Smith. His recollection of an incident in his childhood leads to a discussion of selective memory. Other topics are the extinction of land snails on Moorea, development of the tiny bones of the ear, romanticism about the past and Gould's own ecological "Golden Rule" for our planet. He writes about the threatened red squirrel of Arizona and the "evolution" of old tires into sandals. This collection, easily equal to The Panda's Thumb and Bully for Brontosaurus , will not disappoint Gould's fans. „

[edit] Reviews

[edit] External links

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