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Gould's final essay collection is based on his remarkable series for Natural History magazine – exactly 300 consecutive essays, with never a month missed, published from 1974 to 2001. Both an intellectually thrilling journey into the nature of scientific discovery and the most personal book he ever published.
Preface
I. Pausing in Continuity
1. I Have Landed
II. Disciplinary Connections: Scientific Slouching Across a Misconceived Divide
2. No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts: The Lepidoptery of Vladimir Nabokov
3. Jim Bowie’s Letter and Bill Buckner’s Legs
4. The True Embodiment of Everything That’s Excellent
5. Art Meets Science in The Heart of the Andes: Church Paints, Humboldt Dies, Darwin Writes, and Nature Blinks in the Fateful Year of 1859
III. Darwinian Prequels and Fallout
6. The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx’s Funeral: Resolving Evolution’s Oddest Coupling
7. The Pre-Adamite in a Nutshell
8. Freud’s Evolutionary Fantasy
IV. Essays in the Paleontology of Ideas
9. The Jew and the Jewstone
10. When Fossils Were Young
11. Syphilis and the Shepherd of Atlantis
V. Casting the Die: Six Evolutionary Epitomes
Defending Evolution
12. Darwin and the Munchkins of Kansas
13. Darwin’s More Stately Mansion
14. A Darwin for All Reasons
Evolution and Human Nature
15. When Less Is Truly More
16. Darwin’s Cultural Degree
17. The Without and Within of Smart Mice
VI. The Meaning and Drawing of Evolution
Defining and Beginning
18. What Does the Dreaded “E” Word Mean Anyway?
19. The First Day of the Rest of Our Life
20. The Narthex of San Marco and the Pangenetic Paradigm
Parsing and Proceeding
21. Linnaeus’s Luck?
22. Abscheulich! (Atrocious)
23. Tales of a Feathered Tail
VII. Natural Worth
24. An Evolutionary Perspective on the Concept of Native Plants
25. Age-Old Fallacies of Thinking and Stinking
26. The Geometer of Race
27. The Great Physiologist of Heidelberg
VIII. Triumph and Tragedy on the Exact Centennial of I Have Landed, September 11, 2001
Introductory Statement
28. The Good People of Halifax
29. Apple Brown Betty
30. The Woolworth Building
31. September 11, ’01
Illustration Credits
Index
Stephen Jay Gould was Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology at Harvard University. His books include Ever Since Darwin, Wonderful Life, Questioning the Millennium, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, The Lying Stones of Marrakech and, most recently, Rocks of Ages.
"These essays have entranced millions, from company presidents to penitentiary inmates, with the wonders of evolution [...] One of the joys of reading about good science is the chance not only to observe how scientific theory works, but also to participate in the workings of the mind behind the works. In Gould's I Have Landed [...] the reader will find such joy in abundance."
– Tim Flannery, The New York Review of Books
