Table Of Contentee
Stephen Jay
Gould &
the richness of life
the essential Stephen Jay Gould
with an introduction by Steven Rose
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Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
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Mei nNESs OFAIFE
Stephen Jay Gould was the Alexander Agassiz
Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology
at Harvard and the Curator for Invertebrate
Palaeontology in the university’s Museum of
Comparative Zoology. He died in May 2002.
Steven Rose is Professor of Biology and Director
of the Brain and Behaviour Research Group at
the Open University, Visiting Professor in the
Department of Anatomy and Developmental
Biology at University College London, and,
jointly with sociologist Hilary Rose, Professor
of Physic (genetics and society) at Gresham
College, London.
Paul McGarr is a mathematics teacher and a
leading member of the Respect coalition in
Tower Hamlets, London.
ISLINGTON LIBRARIES
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3 0120 02620
ALSO BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD
Ontology and Phylogeny
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
The Mismeasure of Man
Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle
Life’s Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence From
Plato to Darwin
The Hedgehog, The Fox and The Magister’s Pox:
Mending the Gap Between Science
and the Humanities
Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the
Fullness of Life
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the
Nature of History
Ouestioning The Millennium: A Rationalists Guide
to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown
Collected Essays
Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History
The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in
Natural History
Hen’s Teeth and Horses Toes: Further Reflections
in Natural History
The Flamingo’s Smile
Dinosaur in a Haystack
Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet
of Worms
Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections
in Natural History
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong
Passion for Baseball
I Have Landed: Splashes and Reflections in
Natural History
An Urchin in the Storm
Bully for Brontosaurus
Eight Little Piggies
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
The Richness
of Life
The Essential Stephen Jay Gould
EDITED BY
Paul McGarr and Steven Rose
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Steven Rose
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
Published by Vintage 2007
8109
Copyright © Paul McGarr and Steven Rose 2006
Introduction copyright © Steven Rose 2006
Pages 630-4 constitute an extension of this copyright page
Stephen Jay Gould has asserted his right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author
of this work
Paul McGarr and Steven Rose have asserted their right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the
editors of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or
otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
Jonathan Cape
Vintage
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CONTENTS
List of Figures Vill
Note on the Text
Introduction
Part I: Autobiography LT
I Have Landed
The Median Isn’t the Message
The Streak of Streaks
Seventh Inning Stretch: Baseball, Father, and Me
Trouble in Our Own House: A Brief Legal Survey from
Scopes to Scalia
Of Two Minds and One Nature
Part II: Biographies
Thomas Burnet’s Battleground of Time
The Lying Stones of Marrakech
The Stinkstones of Oeningen 103
114
The Razumovsky Duet
L27
The Power of Narrative
Not Necessarily a Wing 143
Worm for a Century, and All Seasons 155
The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx’s Funeral: Resolving
Evolution’s Oddest Coupling 166
The Piltdown Conspiracy 182
Part If: Evolutionary Theory 205
The Evolution of Life on the Earth 209
Challenges to Neo-Darwinism and Their Meaning for a
Revised View of Human Consciousness 222
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: Revising the
Three Central Features of Darwinian Logic 238
The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change 261
Betting on Chance — and No Fair Peeking 267
The Power of the Modal Bacter, or Why the Tail Can’t
Wag the Dog 278
The Great Dying 286
The Validation of Continental Drift 290
Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars 297
Part IV: Size, Form and Shape 303
Opus 100 307
Size and Shape 319
How the Zebra Gets Its Stripes 324
Size and Scaling in Human Evolution 333
Part V: Stages and Sequences 353
The Ladder and the Cone: Iconographies of Progress 356
Up Against a Wall 370
Part VI: Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology 385
Ontogeny and Phylogeny
389
The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm:
A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme 417
More Things in Heaven and Earth 438
Posture Maketh the Man 461
Freud’s Evolutionary Fantasy 467
Part VII: Racism, Scientific and Otherwise
Measuring Heads: Paul Broca and the Heyday of Craniology
The Most Unkindest Cut of All
A Tale of Two Work Sites
Carrie Buck’s Daughter
Just in the Middle
Part VIII: Religion
Non-overlapping Magisteria
The Diet of Worms and the Defenestration of Prague
Darwin and the Munchkins of Kansas
Hooking Leviathan by Its Past
Sources and Acknowledgements
Index
LIST OF FIGURES
A right-skewed distribution. 29
I.
2s The frontispiece from the first edition of Thomas Burnet’s Telluris
theoria sacra, or Sacred Theory of the Earth. 70
. Life begins with a bacterial mode (adapted from illustrations by
David Starwood, from ‘The Evolution of Life on the Earth’ by
Stephen Jay Gould, Scientific American, October 1994. Copyright
© Scientific American 1994. All rights reserved). 281
. The frequency distribution for life’s complexity (adapted from illus-
trations by David Starwood, from ‘The Evolution of Life on the
Earth’ by Stephen Jay Gould, Scientific American, October 1994.
Copyright © Scientific American 1994. All rights reserved). 282
. Hershey Bars bite the dust: a quantitative assessment (graph after
L. Meszoly). 299
. “Transformed coordinates’ (reproduced from D’Arcy Wentworth
Thompson, On Growth and Form, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1917). 325
. Three hypothetical schemes for Pliocene and Pleistocene human
evolution. ; 336
. Scaling of endocranial volume in pongids and hominids. 341
. Progress in the evolution of the human brain as illustrated by Henry
Fairfield Osborn in 1915 (reprinted by permission of Charles
Scribner’s Sons, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company, from
