Bully for Brontosaurus (Stephen Jay Gould)

Books

Millions of Years On, Still Evolving

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

In his new book, “My Beloved Brontosaurus,” Brian Switek catches up on what has become of the dinosaurs you thought you knew from grade school.

這本書是近20年前對作者的全集的敬禮
買來還未讀  幸運的是  沒封進箱子
如今在台中發現Wikipedia 已有它的詞條
2013年春節上YouTube 去聽他幾個訪談

Bully for Brontosaurus

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bully for Brontosaurus
Author(s)	Stephen Jay Gould
Genre(s)	Non-fiction, Science
Publisher	W. W. Norton & Co.
Publication date	1991
Pages	540
ISBN	978-0-393-02961-1
OCLC Number	45338941
Preceded by	The Flamingo's Smile
Followed by	Eight Little Piggies

Bully for Brontosaurus (1991) is the fifth 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, and probabilities.

Brontosaurus restoration by Charles R. Knight which was used for the cover

The title essay, "Bully for Brontosaurus", discusses the theory and history of taxonomy by examining the debate over whether Brontosaurus should be labelled Apatosaurus. In "Justice Scalia's Misunderstanding", Gould dissects and decisively rejects Antonin Scalia's dissent in the United States Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard that overturned the last creationist statute in the country. Gould claimed his favourite essay to be "In a Jumbled Drawer" which discusses the debate between Nathaniel Shaler and William James over whether the improbability of our having evolved necessitates divine intervention (Gould, like James, argues no); the essay includes a letter from former President Jimmy Carter as a postscript, which discusses the issue.

The essay "Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples" dealt with the issue of adaptive arguments. It derives from some work by Elisabeth Lloyd, whose subsequent 2005 book^[1] was dedicated to Gould (and her parents), and uses the case of the female orgasm to expand on the subject of adaptiveness in both depth and breadth.

Contents [hide] 1 Table of Contents 2 Notes and references 3 External links 3.1 Reviews

[edit] Table of Contents

• Prologue 11
  1. HISTORY IN EVOLUTION
     1. George Canning 's Left Buttock and the Origin of Species 21
     2. Grimm 's Greatest Tale 32
     3. The Creation Myths of Cooperstown 42
     4. The Panda's Thumb of Technology 59
  2. DINOMANIA
     5. Bully for Brontosaurus 79
     6. The Dinosaur Rip-off 94
  3. ADAPTATION
     7. Of Kiwi Eggs and the Liberty Bell 109
     8. Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples 124
     9. Not Necessarily a Wing 139
  4. FADS AND FALLACIES
     10. The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone 155
     11. Life's Little Joke 168
     12. The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs 182
  5. ART AND SCIENCE
     13. Madame Jeanette 201
     14. Red Wings in the Sunset 209
     15. Petrus Camper 's Angle 229
     16. Literary Bias on the Slippery Slope 241
  6. DOWN UNDER
     17. Glow, Big Glowworm 255
     18. To Be a Platypus 269
     19. Bligh's Bounty 281
     20. Here Goes Nothing 294
  7. INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY
     Biologists
     21. In a Jumbled Drawer 309
     22. Kropotkin Was No Crackpot 325
     23. Fleeming Jenkin Revisited 340
     Physical Scientists
     
     24. The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier 354
     25. The Godfather of Disaster 367
  8. EVOLUTION AND CREATION
     The World of T. H. Huxley
     26. Knight Takes Bishop? 385
     27. Genesis and Geology 402
     Scopes to Scalia
     
     28. William Jennings Bryan 's Last Campaign 416
     29. An Essay on a Pig Roast 432
     30. Scalia 's Misunderstanding 448
  9. NUMBERS AND PROBABILITY
     31. The Streak of Streaks 463
     32. The Median Isn't the Message 473
     33. The Ant and the Plant 479
  10. PLANETS AS PERSONS
      34. The Face of Miranda 489
      35. The Horn of Triton 499

• Bibliography 513
• Index 525

[edit] Notes and references

1. ^ Lloyd, E.A. (2005). The Case of The Female Orgasm: Bias in the science of evolution. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press

[edit] External links

[edit] Reviews

• Taking a Chance on Evolution — by John Maynard Smith, NYRB
• The Stan Musial of Essay Writing — by John Noble Wilford, The New York Times
• Book review — Danny Yee

史蒂芬·傑伊·古爾德（Stephen Jay Gould，1941年9月10日－2002年5月20日）是一名美國古生物學家、演化生物學家與科學史學家。是一位科普作家，職業生涯中大多在哈佛大學擔任教職，以及在紐約的美國自然史博物館工作。
古爾德出生於紐約市皇后區，父親倫納德為法庭速記員，母親埃利諾是個藝術家。古爾德五歲時，他父親帶他到美國自然史博物館的恐龍廳參觀，這是他最早接觸到暴龍的時刻。
古爾德早期研究的對象是百慕達地區的蝸牛。1972年，他和紐約美國自然史博物館的尼爾斯·埃爾德里奇（Niles Eldredge）共同提出「間斷平衡」進化理論，由此享譽全球。「間斷平衡」 理論認為，生物的進化並不像達爾文所認為的那樣，是一個緩慢的漸變積累的過程；而是長期的穩定甚至不變與短暫的劇變交替的過程，從而解釋了化石在地層中為 什麼會有許多空缺之處。 古爾德是一位忠實的達爾文主義者，他認為達爾文理論的核心是自然選擇，而不是生存競爭或生物漸變論。從他的作品中可以看出，他非常推崇自然選擇在生物進化 中的作用，尤其難能可貴的是，他也承認，自然選擇不是唯一答案，而是最重要的答案。 古爾德的另一傑出貢獻並不是提出什麼理論，而是他寫出了大量的科普作品，令世人對古生物學產生興趣。沒有人關注的科學是沒有生命力的科學，古爾德的科普文 章給予了古生物學持續的生命動力。古爾德文筆流暢、學識淵博，不僅向讀者解釋自然現象，而且講述自然現象所引出的思考及其對人類社會的影響，他對科學的反 思相當深刻，對社會曲解科學理論進行了尖銳的批判。他的主要科普作品有《千禧年》、《自達爾文以來》、《熊貓的拇指》、《壯麗的生命》等。

[编辑] 外部連結

• The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive
• Excerpts from Gould Lectures at Stanford University
• Richard C. Lewontin sums up Gould's career in an obituary
• "Darwinian Fundamentalism" - Gould's response to Daniel Dennett and other critics
• "The Median Isn't the Message" - Gould confronts the statistics of cancer and finds hope 本書收入
• Online audio interview with Gould - Ann Online
• McLean v. Arkansas Creationism Trial - Plaintiff's transcript of Gould's testimony
• World of Genetics on Stephen Jay Gould - biographical information