MTU Cork Library Catalogue

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Eight little piggies : reflections in natural history / Stephen Jay Gould.

By: Gould, Stephen Jay.
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookPublisher: London : Penguin, 1993Description: 479 p. : ill. ; 20 cm. + pbk.ISBN: 0140179941.Subject(s): Natural history -- Philosophy -- Popular works | Science -- Philosophy -- Popular works | Evolution (Biology) -- Popular worksDDC classification: 575.001
Contents:
The scale of extinction: Unenchanted evening -- The golden rule: a proper scale for our environmental crisis -- Losing a limpet -- Odd bits of vertebrate anatomy: Eight little piggies -- Bent out of shape -- An earful of jaw -- Full of hot air -- 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 -- Musings: Clouds of memory: Muller Bros. moving and storage -- Shoemaker and morning star -- Authenticity: In touch with Walcott -- Counters and cable cars -- Human nature: Mozart and modularity -- The moral state of Tahiti - and of Darwin -- Ten thousand acts of kindness -- The declining empire of apes -- 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 -- 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 -- Reversals - fragments of a book not written: Shields of expectation - and actuality -- A tale of three pictures -- A foot soldier for evolution.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
General Lending MTU Bishopstown Library Lending 575.001 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 00015082
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This collection of essays ranges from history to the latest theories in biology, from controversies over palaeontology to the origins of language. The title is a pun and as always with Gould, the joke has a point that illustrates the largest pattern of life's history. For millennia, the animals that populated the Earth had four toes on each foot, or six. If evolution had taken a tiny shift - if man's ancestors had inherited a couple of genes in a different form - our canonical number, based on man's fingers and toes, might be eight instead of ten. Stephen Jay Gould has also written Wonderful Life, Bully for Brontosaurus and Finders Keepers.

Bibliography: p. 457-465. - Includes index.

The scale of extinction: Unenchanted evening -- The golden rule: a proper scale for our environmental crisis -- Losing a limpet -- Odd bits of vertebrate anatomy: Eight little piggies -- Bent out of shape -- An earful of jaw -- Full of hot air -- 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 -- Musings: Clouds of memory: Muller Bros. moving and storage -- Shoemaker and morning star -- Authenticity: In touch with Walcott -- Counters and cable cars -- Human nature: Mozart and modularity -- The moral state of Tahiti - and of Darwin -- Ten thousand acts of kindness -- The declining empire of apes -- 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 -- 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 -- Reversals - fragments of a book not written: Shields of expectation - and actuality -- A tale of three pictures -- A foot soldier for evolution.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Born in New York City in 1941, Stephen Jay Gould received his B.A. from Antioch College in New York in 1963 and a Ph.D. in paleontology from Columbia University in 1967. Gould spent most of his career as a professor at Harvard University and curator of invertebrate paleontology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His research was mainly in the evolution and speciation of land snails.

Gould was a leading proponent of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. This theory holds that few evolutionary changes occur among organisms over long periods of time, and then a brief period of rapid changes occurs before another long, stable period of equilibrium sets in. Gould also made significant contributions to the field of evolutionary developmental biology, most notably in his work, Ontogeny and Phylogeny.

An outspoken advocate of the scientific outlook, Gould had been a vigorous defender of evolution against its creation-science opponents in popular magazines focusing on science. He wrote a column for Natural History and has produced a remarkable series of books that display the excitement of science for the layperson. Among his many awards and honors, Gould won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His titles include; Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory and Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin.

Stephen Jay Gould died on May 20, 2002, following his second bout with cancer. (Bowker Author Biography)

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