Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

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Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, subtitled Essays in Natural History, is a collection of essays on evolution and the history of science by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, most of which originally appeared in Natural History. Published by Harmony Books: 1998 (ISBN 978-0-224-05043-2)

[edit] Contents

  • Introduction
  • Pieces of Eight: Confession of a Humanistic Naturalist
    1. ART AND SCIENCE
      1. The Upwardly Mobile Fossils of Leonardo's Living Earth
      2. The Great Western and the Fighting Temeraire
      3. Seeing Eye to Eye, Through a Glass Clearly
    2. BIOGRAPHIES IN EVOLUTION
      1. The Clam Stripped Bare by Her Naturalists, Even
      2. Darwin's American Soulmate: A Bird's-Eye View
      3. A Seahorse for All Races
      4. Mr. Sophia's Pony
    3. HUMAN PREHISTORY
      1. Up Against a Wall
      2. A Lesson from the Old Masters
      3. Our Unusual Unity
    4. OF HISTORY AND TOLERATION
      1. A Cerion for Christopher
      2. The Dodo in the Caucus Race
      3. The Diet of Worms and the Defenestration of Prague
    5. EVOLUTIONARY FACTS AND THEORIES
      1. Non-Overlapping Magisteria
      2. Boyle's Law and Darwin's Details
      3. The Tallest Tale
      4. Brotherhood by Inversion (or, As the Worm Turns)
    6. DIFFERENT PERCEPTIONS OF COMMON TRUTHS
      1. War of the Worldviews
      2. Triumph of the Root-Heads
      3. Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?
      4. Reversing Established Orders
  • Bibliography
  • Illustration Credits
  • Index

[edit] From Publishers Weekly

“ As in his previous collections of essays from Natural History magazine (Dinosaur in a Haystack, 1996, etc.), here again Gould artfully transports readers through the complex and enchanting realms of the natural world. This time, though, he peers less at nature than at scientists' attempts to understand and explain its wonders. Ranging far and wide through the history of science, Gould's sketches in "humanistic natural history" examine the "grand false starts in the history of natural science"?for he contends that nothing is as "informative and instructive as a truly juicy mistake." In an essay on the Russian paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky, for example, Gould applauds his subject's meticulously detailed observations on the fossils of horses and his consequent development of an evolutionary history of the horse as an animal of European descent. Yet, Gould points out, Kovalevsky was mistaken, for horses had evolved in America and migrated to Europe. Another famous "mistake" Gould explores is Emmanuel Mendes da Costas's taxonomy of earth and stones according to Linnaeus's taxonomy of organic life. As usual, Gould proceeds to his conclusions by indirection; he opens his essay on Mendes da Costa, for instance, by disclosing how Linnaeus compared the shape and function of a clam to female sexual anatomy. Gould's elegant prose transmits the excitement and wide-eyed wonder of a scientist who never ceases to be amazed and amused at what he finds. 30 b&w illustrations. „

[edit] Reviews

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