Bully for Brontosaurus
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| Bully for Brontosaurus | |
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| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
| Genre(s) | Non-fiction, Science |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Co. |
| Publication date | 1991 |
| Pages | 540 |
| ISBN | 0-09-989350-9 |
| OCLC Number | 45338941 |
| Preceded by | The Flamingo's Smile |
| Followed by | Eight Little Piggies |
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991) is the fifth volume of collected essays by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The essays were culled from his monthly column "The View of Life" in Natural History magazine, to which Gould contributed for 27 years. The book deals, in typically discursive fashion, with themes familiar to Gould's writing: evolution and its teaching, science biography, and probabilities.
The title essay, "Bully for Brontosaurus," discusses the theory and history of taxonomy by examining the debate over whether Brontosaurus should be labelled Apatosaurus. In "Justice Scalia's Misunderstanding," Gould dissects and decisively rejects Antonin Scalia's dissent in the United States Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard that overturned the last creationist statute in the country. Gould claimed his favourite essay to be "In a Jumbled Drawer" which discusses the debate between Nathaniel Shaler and William James over whether the improbability of our having evolved necessitates divine intervention (Gould, like James, argues no); the essay includes a letter from former President Jimmy Carter as a postscript, which discusses the issue.
The essay "Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples" dealt with the issue of adaptive arguments. It derives from some work by Elisabeth Lloyd, whose subsequent 2005 book[1] was dedicated to Gould (and her parents), and uses the case of the female orgasm to expand on the subject of adaptiveness in both depth and breadth.
Contents |
[edit] Table of Contents
- Prologue 11
- HISTORY IN EVOLUTION
- George Canning 's Left Buttock and the Origin of Species 21
- Grimm 's Greatest Tale 32
- The Creation Myths of Cooperstown 42
- The Panda's Thumb of Technology 59
- DINOMANIA
- ADAPTATION
- Of Kiwi Eggs and the Liberty Bell 109
- Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples 124
- Not Necessarily a Wing 139
- FADS AND FALLACIES
- The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone 155
- Life's Little Joke 168
- The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs 182
- ART AND SCIENCE
- Madame Jeanette 201
- Red Wings in the Sunset 209
- Petrus Camper 's Angle 229
- Literary Bias on the Slippery Slope 241
- DOWN UNDER
- Glow, Big Glowworm 255
- To Be a Platypus 269
- Bligh's Bounty 281
- Here Goes Nothing 294
- INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY
Biologists- In a Jumbled Drawer 309
- Kropotkin Was No Crackpot 325
- Fleeming Jenkin Revisited 340
Physical Scientists
- The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier 354
- The Godfather of Disaster 367
- EVOLUTION AND CREATION
The World of T. H. HuxleyScopes to Scalia
- William Jennings Bryan 's Last Campaign 416
- An Essay on a Pig Roast 432
- Scalia 's Misunderstanding 448
- NUMBERS AND PROBABILITY
- The Streak of Streaks 463
- The Median Isn't the Message 473
- The Ant and the Plant 479
- PLANETS AS PERSONS
- The Face of Miranda 489
- The Horn of Triton 499
- HISTORY IN EVOLUTION
- Bibliography 513
- Index 525
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ Lloyd, E.A. (2005). The Case of The Female Orgasm: Bias in the science of evolution. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
[edit] External links
[edit] Reviews
- Taking a Chance on Evolution — by John Maynard Smith, NYRB
- The Stan Musial of Essay Writing — by John Noble Wilford, The New York Times
- Book review — Danny Yee
