Eight Little Piggies (1993) is the sixth 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, probabilities and common sense.
| File:Eightlittlepiggies.png | |
| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
|---|---|
| Genre | Non-fiction, Science |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Co. |
Publication date | 1993 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-393-03416-X Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
| Preceded by | Bully for Brontosaurus |
| Followed by | Dinosaur in a Haystack |
The title essay, Eight Little Piggies, explores concepts such as archetypes and polydactyly via the anatomy of early tetrapods. Other essays discuss themes such as the scale of extinction, vertebrate anatomy, grand patterns of evolution and human nature.
Contents
- A Reflective Prologue
- The Scale of Extinction
- Unenchanted Evening
- The Golden Rule: A Proper Scale for Our Environmental Crisis
- Losing a Limpet
- Odd Bits of Vertebrate Anatomy
- [http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_eight-piggies.html Eight Little Piggies
- Bent Out of Shape
- The True Embodiment of Everything That's Excellent
- Art Meets Science in The Heart of the Andes: Church Paints, Humboldt Dies, Darwin Writes, and Nature Blinks in the Fateful Year of 1859
- Darwinian Prequels and Fallout
- The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral: Resolving Evolution's Oldest Coupling
- The Pre-Adamite in a Nutshell
- Freud's Evolutionary Fantasy
- Essays in the Paleontology of Ideas
- The Jew and the Jewstone
- When Fossils Were Young
- Syphilis and the Shepherd of Atlantis
- Casting the die: Six Evolutionary Epitomes
Defending Evolution- Darwin and the Munchkins of Kansas
- Darwin's More Stately Mansion
- A Darwin for All Reasons
Evolution and Human Nature
- When Less Is Truly More
- Darwin's Cultural Degree
- The Without and Within of Smart Mice
- The Meaning of Drawing of Evolution
Defining and Beginning - Natural Worth
- An Evolutionary Perspective on the Concept of Native Plants
- Age-Old fallacies of Thinking and Stinking
- The Geometer of Race
- The Great Physiologist of Heidelberg
- Triumph and Tragedy on the Exact Centennial of I Have Landed, September 11, 2001
Introductory Statement
- The Good People of Halifax
- Apple Brown Betty
- The Woolworth Building
- September 11, '01
- The Scale of Extinction
- bent out of shape; an earful of jaw; full of hot air. Part 3 Vox populi
- evolving visions - men of the thirty-third division - an essay on integrity, Darwin and Paley meet the invisible hand, more light on leaves; time in Newton's century - on rereading Edmund Halley, fall in the house of Ussher. Part 4 Musings: clouds of memory - Muller bros. moving and storage, shoemaker and morning star; authenticity - in touch with Walcott, counters and cable cars. Part 5 Human nature: Mozart and modularity; the moral state of Tahiti - and of Darwin; ten thousand acts of kindness; the declining empire of apes. Part 6 Grand patterns of evolution: two steps towards a general theory of life's complexity - the wheel of fortune and the wedge of progress, tires to sandals; new discoveries in the earliest history of multicellular life - defending the heretical and the superfluous, the reversal of "Hallucigenia". Part 7 Revising and extending Darwin: what the immaculate pigeon teaches the burdened mind; the great seal principle; a dog's life in Galton's polyhedron; betting on chance - and no fair peeking. Part 8 Reversals - fragments of a book not written: shields of expectation - and actuality; a tale of three pictures; a foot soldier for evolution.
Reviews
- The Snail Wars - by Derek Bickerton, The New York Times