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Evolutionary biologist and paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould has perfected the art of the essay in
this brilliant new collection. These thirty-four essays,
most originally published in Natural History magazine,
exemplify the keen insight with which Dr. Gould observes
the natural world and convey the infectious enthusiasm for
fossils and evolutionary theory that has made his books
award-winning, national best-sellers.
In his latest musings on evolution and other
natural phenomena, Gould reveals the uncanny interconnections
among distinctly human creations -- museums, literature,
music, politics, and culture -- encompassing a delightfully
wide range of topics, from giant fossils, fads, and fungus
to baseball, beeswax, and blaauwbocks, from a humanistic
look at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Erasmus Darwin's
poetry to the fallacies of eugenics and creationism and
the moral imperatives of thinking people to meet the ethical
challenges that pseudo-science presents.
Some of these elegant essays are detective
stories, each with a mystery at its center: Why were images
of snails printed backward in seventeeth-century treatises
on conchology? Why are schoolchildren falsely taught that
in the Middle Ages people thought the earth was flat? How
could an 1842 receipt documenting the purchase of beer and
sausage demonstrate the provenance of an extinct antelope?
Only Stephen Jay Gould could read the literal closeness
of two men printed on opposite sides of a banknote -- Carolus
Linnaeus and King Gustav III of Sweden -- as an invitation
to determine the basis for a symbolic interconnection, and
only he could explain it with such style and intellectual
virtuosity.
Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack embodies
"the marriage of alluring detail with instructive generality,"
the fascinating oddity in the natural world that can be
explained and used as a fulcrum to circle back to the great
themes of time, change, and history. Alternating between
awe and amusement, trenchancy and poignancy at the particulars
of human lives and nature's ways, Dinosaur in a Haystack
always carries its reader home to the centering idea of
evolution -- the most exciting natural truth that science
has ever discovered.
Stephen Jay Gould is the author of fourteen
books, including the New York Times bestsellersBully
for Brontosaurus and Wonderful Life. He is the
Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of
Geology at Harvard and the Curator for Invertebrate Paleontology
in the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He lives
in New York City and Boston.
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