Stephen Jay Gould

Few would question that humankind is the crowning achievement of evolution - that history yields progress over time from the primitive and simple to the more advanced and complex - or that identifying an existing trend can be helpful in making important life decisions. We have always identified trends as bad or good. But Stephen Jay Gould argues that this mode of interpretation is a bias that needs correcting. In Full House, Gould presents the truth...

For more than twenty-five years, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a column called "The View of Life" for Natural History magazine. More than twenty entries from that column comprise this collection, which includes such essays as "Boyle's Law and Darwin's Details," "Brotherhood by Inversion (or, As the Worm Turns)," "Darwin's American Soulmate," "The Diet of Worms and Defenestration of Prague," "The Dodo in the Caucus Race," "Reversing Established...