Ever Since Darwin

This year's first contribution by the late Stephen Jay Gould is his first collection of essays (originally published in the American Museum of Natural History's magazine) called Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (Norton, 1992).

This collection was a bit of a mixed bag for me, in more ways than one. First, it is amazing how far-ranging Gould is: biology to politics to geology to astronomy and back again. Most of the essays held my interest and I picked up on a lot of things I'd like to explore further. However, every now and again you'd come across an essay that is in response to some trend of the day (usually a response to a book or article). Sometimes these essays worked (well, for me, I was familiar with the controversy surrounding Velikovsky, for example); other times, I had difficulty in following the train of thought.

The saddest thing about this collection (other than the fact that Gould is no longer with us) is that so many of the issues explored here keep coming back again and again. We're closer to the Dark Ages, at times, than we realize.

Contains: Prologue; Darwinia: Darwin's Delay; Darwin's Sea Change, or Five Years at the Captain's Table; Darwin's Dilemma: The Odyssey of Evolution; Darwin's Untimely Burial; Human Evolution: A Matter of Degree; Bushes and Ladders in Human Evolution; The Child as Man's Real Father; Human Babies as Embryos; Odd Organisms and Evolutionary Exemplars: The Misnamed, Mistreated, and Misunderstood Irish Elk; Organic Wisdom, or Why Should a Fly Eat Its Mother from Inside; Of Bamboos, Cicadas, and the Economy of Adam Smith; The Problem of Perfection, or How Can a Clam Mount a Fish on Its Rear End?; Patterns and Punctuations in the History of Life: The Pentagon of Life; An Unsung Single-Cell Hero; Is the Cambrian Explosion a Sigmoid Fraud?; The Great Dying; Theories of the Earth: The Reverend Thomas' Dirty Little Planet; Uniformity and Catastrophe; Velikovsky in Collision; The Validation of Continental Drift; Size and Shape, From Churches to Brains to Planets: Size and Shape; Sizing Up Human Intelligence; History of the Vertebrate Brain; Planetary Sizes and Surfaces; Science in Society—A Historical View: On Heroes and Fools in Science;Posture Maketh the Man; Racism and Recapitulation; The Criminal as Nature's Mistake, or the Ape in Some of Us; The Science and Politics of Human Nature: Part A—Race, Sex and Violence: Why We Should Not Name Human Races—A Biological View; The Nonscience of Human Nature; Racist Arguments and IQ; Part B—Sociobiology: Biological Potentiality vs. Biological Determinism; So Cleverly Kind an Animal; Epilogue.

This collection counts as 35 entries for the 2005 Short Story Project.