Bully for Brontosaurus

Bully for Brontosaurus (1991) is the fifth 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, and probabilities.

The title essay, "Bully for Brontosaurus", discusses the theory and history of taxonomy by examining the debate over whether Brontosaurus should be labelled Apatosaurus. In "Justice Scalia's Misunderstanding", Gould dissects and decisively rejects Antonin Scalia's dissent in the United States Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard that overturned the last creationist statute in the country. Gould claimed his favourite essay to be "In a Jumbled Drawer" which discusses the debate between Nathaniel Shaler and William James over whether the improbability of our having evolved necessitates divine intervention (Gould, like James, argues no); the essay includes a letter from former President Jimmy Carter as a postscript, which discusses the issue.

The essay "Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples" dealt with the issue of adaptive arguments. It derives from some work by Elisabeth Lloyd, whose subsequent 2005 book^[1] was dedicated to Gould (and her parents), and uses the case of the female orgasm to expand on the subject of adaptiveness in both depth and breadth.

Table of Contents

• Prologue 11
  1. HISTORY IN EVOLUTION
     1. George Canning 's Left Buttock and the Origin of Species 21
     2. Grimm 's Greatest Tale 32
     3. The Creation Myths of Cooperstown 42
     4. The Panda's Thumb of Technology 59
  2. DINOMANIA
     5. Bully for Brontosaurus 79
     6. The Dinosaur Rip-off 94
  3. ADAPTATION
     7. Of Kiwi Eggs and the Liberty Bell 109
     8. Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples 124
     9. Not Necessarily a Wing 139
  4. FADS AND FALLACIES
     10. The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone 155
     11. Life's Little Joke 168
     12. The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs 182
  5. ART AND SCIENCE
     13. Madame Jeanette 201
     14. Red Wings in the Sunset 209
     15. Petrus Camper 's Angle 229
     16. Literary Bias on the Slippery Slope 241
  6. DOWN UNDER
     17. Glow, Big Glowworm 255
     18. To Be a Platypus 269
     19. Bligh's Bounty 281
     20. Here Goes Nothing 294
  7. INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY
     Biologists
     21. In a Jumbled Drawer 309
     22. Kropotkin Was No Crackpot 325
     23. Fleeming Jenkin Revisited 340

     Physical Scientists

     24. The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier 354
     25. The Godfather of Disaster 367
  8. EVOLUTION AND CREATION
     The World of T. H. Huxley
     26. Knight Takes Bishop? 385
     27. Genesis and Geology 402

     Scopes to Scalia

     28. William Jennings Bryan 's Last Campaign 416
     29. An Essay on a Pig Roast 432
     30. Scalia 's Misunderstanding 448
  9. NUMBERS AND PROBABILITY
     31. The Streak of Streaks 463
     32. The Median Isn't the Message 473
     33. The Ant and the Plant 479
  10. PLANETS AS PERSONS
      34. The Face of Miranda 489
      35. The Horn of Triton 499

• Bibliography 513
• Index 525

Notes and references

External links

Reviews

• Taking a Chance on Evolution — by John Maynard Smith, NYRB
• The Stan Musial of Essay Writing — by John Noble Wilford, The New York Times
• Book review — Danny Yee