Attribution
Stephen Jay GouldPublication Details
Book1st edHarmony Books2000Availability
LOCATION CALL # STATUS (UPPER LEVEL) QH45.5 .G74 2000 AVAILABLE New Feature: Text this to your cellphone
View record in LOLA catalogDescription
Part II discusses the greatest conjunction of a time, a subject, and an assemblage of amazing people in the history of natural history: the late-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth century in France, when a group that included some of the most exceptional intellects of the millennium–Georges Buffon, Antoine Lavoisier, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck–invented the scientific study of natural history in an age of revolution. Part V, on scientific subjects with more obvious and explicit social consequences (and often unacknowledged social origins as well), also uses biography, but in a different way, to link past stories with present realities–to convey the lesson that claims for objectivity based on pure discovery often replay episodes buried in history, and prove that our modern certainties flounder within the same complexities of social context and mental blockage. (automatically summarized from Amazon.com)Subject
Notes
- "In his ninth collection of essays, scientist Stephen Jay Gould once again offers his unmistakable perspective on natural history and the people who have tried to make sense of it. In twenty-three essays, Gould presents the richness and fascination of the various lives that have fueled the enterprise of science and opened our eyes to a world of unexpected wonders."–BOOK JACKET
Contents
- I. Episodes in the Birth of Paleontology: The Nature of Fossils and the History of the Earth. 1. The Lying Stones of Marrakech. 2. The Sharp-Eyed Lynx, Outfoxed by Nature. 3. How the Vulva Stone Became a Brachiopod
- II. Present at the Creation: How France’s Three Finest Scientists Established Natural History in an Age of Revolution. 4. Inventing Natural History in Style. 5. The Proof of Lavoisier’s Plates. 6. A Tree Grows in Paris: Lamarck’s Division of Worms and Revision of Nature
- III. Darwin’s Century - and Ours: Lessons from Britain’s Four Greatest Victorian Naturalists. 7. Lyell’s Pillars of Wisdom. 8. A Sly Dullard Named Darwin: Recognizing the Multiple Facets of Genius. 9. An Awful Terrible Dinosaurian Irony. 10. Second-Guessing the Future
- IV. Six Little Pieces on the Meaning and Location of Excellence. 11. Drink Deep, or Taste Not the Pierian Spring. 12. Requiem Eternal. 13. More Power to Him. 14. Bright Star Among Billions. 15. The Glory of His Time and Ours. 16. This Was a Man
- V. Science in Society. 17. A Tale of Two Work Sites. 18. The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W. 19. Dolly’s Fashion and Louis’s Passion. 20. Above All, Do No Harm
- VI. Evolution at All Scales. 21. Of Embryos and Ancestors. 22. The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant. 23. Room of One’s Own
ISBN
- 0609601423
LCCN
Open Library ID
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