The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

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Title The Panda's Thumb
Author Stephen Jay Gould
Country United States
Language English
Subject(s) Science
Genre(s) Non-fiction
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
Released 1980
ISBN ISBN 0-393-01380-4

The Panda's Thumb is the second 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 discusses the paradox that poor design is a better argument for evolution than good design, as illustrated by the anatomy of the panda's "thumb"—which is not a thumb at all—but an extension of the radial sesamoid. Topics addressed in other essays include the female brain, the Piltdown Man hoax, Down's Syndrome, and the relationship between dinosaurs and birds.

Contents

[edit] Contents

  • Prologue
    1. PERFECTION AND IMPERFECTION: A TRILOGY ON THE PANDA'S THUMB
      1. The Panda's Thumb
      2. Senseless Signs of History
      3. Double Trouble
    2. DARWINIANA
      1. Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace
      2. Darwin's Middle Road
      3. Death before Birth, or a Mite's Nunc Dimittis
      4. Shades of Lamarck
      5. Caring Groups and Selfish Genes
    3. HUMAN EVOLUTION
      1. A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse
      2. Piltdown revisited
      3. Our Greatest Evolutionary Step
      4. Human Babies as Embryos
      5. In the Midst of Life...
    4. SCIENCE AND POLITITICS OF HUMAN DIFFERENCES
      1. Wide Hats and Narrow Minds
      2. Women's brains
      3. Dr. Down's Syndrome
      4. Flaws in a Victorian Veil
    5. THE PACE OF CHANGE
      1. The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change
      2. Return of the Hopeful Monster
      3. The Great Scablands Debate
      4. A Quahog Is a Quahog
    6. EARLY LIFFE
      1. An Early Start
      2. Crazy Old Randolph Kirkpatrick
      3. Bathybius and Eozoon
      4. Might We Fit Inside a Sponge's Cell
    7. THEY WERE DESPISED AND REJECTED
      1. Were Dinosaurs Dumb
      2. The Telltale Wishbone
      3. Nature's Odd Couples
      4. Sticking up for Marsupials
    8. SIZE AND TIME
      1. Our Alloted Lifetimes
      2. Natural Attraction: Bacteria, The Bird and The Bees
      3. Time's Vastness
  • Bibliography
  • Index

[edit] Blurbs

“ Stephen Jay Gould is a serious and gifted interpreter of biological theory, of the history of ideas and of the cultural context of scientific discovery. . . . The Panda's Thumb is fresh and mind-stretching. Above all, it is exultant. So should its readers be.. „

—H. Jack Geiger, New York Times Book Review
“ It is a wonder what Mr. Gould can do with the most unlikely phenomena: a tiny organism's use of the earth's magnetic field as a guide to food and comfort, for instance, or the panda's thumb—which isn't one. . . . Science writing at its best. „

—The New Yorker.
“ Gould is a natural writer; he has something to say and the inclination and skill with which to say it. „

—P. B. Medawar, The New York Review of Books.

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[edit] External links

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