For those of you who haven't seen the light yet, Stephen Jay Gould is a palaeontologist who writes about anything to do with natural history (and pretty much anything that comes into his head). The overriding theme of his work is the importance of contingency over necessity, of history over law, and how work on evolution places too much stress on the tools and methods of the hard sciences and not enough on those of history. But fundamental issues in the philosophy of evolution are just his most prominent subjects. Topics covered in this volume include biography, the creationism debate, unusual Australasian fauna, the use of statistics (baseball streaks), planetary surfaces, and lots more!
For Gould fans this will be a must read; for newcomers it's probably the best place to start. Go out and buy a copy now.
April 1992
- External links:
-
- buy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
- Related reviews:
-
- books by Stephen Jay Gould
- books about evolution
- more popular science