The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould
by Stephen Jay Gould
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stephen Jay GouldForeword: Oliver Sacks
Contributor: Steven Rose
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-05-17
ISBN: 0393064980
Number of pages: 672
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780393064988
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould
Book Review: The Richness of Gould
Summary: 4 Stars
Gould's collection of essays cleverly envelopes science, history and baseball with insight, wit and irony. It's very difficult to get bored despite the clearly technical subject matter. There is a triumvirate of themes running through the book:
1. There's no directional bias in evolution. In other words, there is no grand plan to creation and everything has happened by chance.
2. Evolution is a happenstance of small gradual changes over millennia of millennia punctuated by relatively rapid changes in what Gould calls punctuated equilibria.
3. Not every evolutionary mutation is an adaptation for some future use but can be a chance change that gets co-opted to some use, what Gould calls exaptation. An example would be the ever growing hominid brain that over 2 million years gets co-opted for reading and writing which could never have been guessed at at the start.
[And in defence of his ideas (especially no. 3 above) Gould picks bones with Richard Dawkins.]
Gould asks the reader to challenge accepted scientific explanations as these are usually presented and defended tenaciously by vested interests whether or not the dogma is true for as Gould explains, science is "rooted in creative interpretation" sometimes leading to "prejudice" as in the science of eugenics.
You will not agree with everything Gould writes but you will firstly be fired up and secondly find that he is a clever dick.
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