| Description |
422 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Contents |
pt. 1. Art and science -- ch. 1. Upwardly mobile fossils of Leonardo's living earth -- ch. 2. Great Western and the fighting Temeraire -- ch. 3. Seeing eye to eye, through a glass clearly -- pt. 2. Biographies in evolution -- ch. 4. Clam stripped bare by her naturalists, even -- ch. 5. Darwin's American soulmate: a bird's-eye view -- ch. 6. Seahorse for all races -- ch. 7. Mr. Sophia's pony -- pt. 3. Human prehistory -- ch. 8. Up against a wall -- ch. 9. Lesson from the old masters -- ch. 10. Our unusual unity -- pt. 11. History and toleration -- ch. 11. Cerion for Christopher -- ch. 12. Dodo in the caucus race -- ch. 13. Diet of Worms and defenestration of Prague -- pt. 5. Evolutionary facts and theories -- ch. 14. Non-overlapping magisteria -- ch. 15. Boyle's Law and Darwin's details -- ch. 16. Tallest tale -- ch. 17. Brotherhood by inversion (or, as the worm turns) -- pt. 6. Different perceptions of common truths -- ch. 18. War of the worldviews -- ch. 19. Triumph of the root-heads -- ch. 20. Can we truly know sloth and rapacity -- ch. 21. Reversing established orders |
| Summary |
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms is the newest collection of bestselling scientist Stephen Jay Gould's popular essays from Natural History magazine (the longest-running series of scientific essays in history). In this collection, Gould consciously and unconventionally formulates a humanistic natural history, a consideration of how humans have learned to study and understand nature, rather than a history of nature itself. With his customary brilliance, Gould examines the puzzles and paradoxes great and small that build nature's and humanity's diversity and order. In affecting short biographies, he depicts how scholars grapple with problems of science and philosophy as he illuminates the interaction of the outer world with the unique human ability to struggle to understand the whys and where-fores of existence |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 405-411) and index |
| Subject |
Evolution (Biology)
|
|
Natural history.
|
| LC no. |
98011500 |
| ISBN |
0609601415 |
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