#7: The Richness of Life--The Essential Stephen Jay Gould I have a long list of authors that Ive been meaning to read. Now that I have an obligation to chew through 50 books this year, I thought it would be an ideal time to move a few of these authors from the want to read to the have read list. Stephen Jay Gould has been on the want to list for a while now, so I checked out this book from the library and got to it. A VERY difficult slog in many cases. Essential is different than Collected in that there is a burden on the editor to include representative work that may be critical to understanding the author but beyond the reach of anyone but experts. Theres a good sample of his work in Natural History magazine, and Scientific American, and chapters from many of his more accesible books. Among my favorite selections, a long discussion about the evolutionary development of the Hershey bar, an accounting of the tragic impact of craniology (the desperate attempt to prove the inferiority of certain races based on brain size), an assessment of the artistic skill in cave art, and a brief and heartbreaking summary of Beck v. Bell, the supreme court case that justified forced sterilization (the decision which featured Oliver Wendell Holmess despicable quote Three generations of imbeciles is enough). So, plenty to keep a curious non-expert like me engaged. And then, in the middle of all this, passages like the following, from Goulds capstone work the Structure of Evolutionary Theory: The classical and most familiary category of internal channeling (the first, or empirical, citation of constraint as a positive theme) resides in prefered directions for evolutionary change supplied by inherited allometries and their phylogenetic potentiation by heterochrony. Yes, I recognized the above passage as being in the English language. The conjunctions are familiar as are several other words. Plenty of good material for the paleontologists and geologists in the room. Glad i read it, and feel a little more educated about the subjects, but will be choosing something a little less demanding for my next book.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 18:40:20 +0000
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