New Releases by Stephen Jay Gould

Provides information on developments in evolutionary theory, discussing such topics as the Cambrian population explosion, Velikovsky''s theories, and others.

A noted paleontologist provides the text for this photographic study of eight different collections--from a collection of human artifacts belonging to Peter the Great to Agassy''s fish collection--exploring what collections say about collectors.

Il y a plus de 500 millions d''années, d''étranges créatures peuplaient les mers: Opabinia avec ses cinq yeux et sa trompe frontale, Anomalocaris, redoutable prédateur à mâchoire circulaire, Hallucigenia dont l''anatomie justifie amplement le nom. Cette faune, fossilisée dans le Schiste de Burgess, est si extraordinaire qu''il a fallu près d''un siècle pour en reconnaître l''originalité, C''est l''histoire de cette révolution scientifique que nous conte ici Stephen Jay Gould, comme une véritable enquête policière. Elle conduit à une profonde remise en cause de nos conceptions traditionnelles. Il nous faut désormais regarder l''évolution comme un ensemble d''événements à la fois parfaitement logiques et susceptibles d''être rigoureusement expliqués en rétrospective, mais absolument impossibles à prédire et non reproductibles. Le maître mot de l''histoire, celle de la vie comme celle de l''homme, est donc bien celui de contingence. Comme dans le merveilleux film de Frank Capra avec James Stewart, "La vie est belle", par son unicité et son imprévisibilité même.

This stunning volume features forty-nine of Church''s most significant paintings and investigates the artistic, scientific, and philosophical influences behind his greatest creations. Published with the National Gallery of Art.

Explains why the diversity of the Burgess Shale is important in understanding our past and evolution.

Rarely has a scholar attained such popular acclaim merely by doing what he does best and enjoys most. But such is Stephen Jay Gould’s command of paleontology and evolutionary theory, and his gift for brilliant explication, that he has brought dust and dead bones to life, and developed an immense following for the seeming arcana of this field. In Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle his subject is nothing less than geology’s signal contribution to human thought—the discovery of “deep time,” the vastness of earth’s history, a history so ancient that we can comprehend it only as metaphor. He follows a single thread through three documents that mark the transition in our thinking from thousands to billions of years: Thomas Burnet’s four-volume Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680–1690), James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795), and Charles Lyell’s three-volume Principles of Geology (1830–1833). Gould’s major theme is the role of metaphor in the formulation and testing of scientific theories—in this case the insight provided by the oldest traditional dichotomy of Judeo-Christian thought: the directionality of time’s arrow or the immanence of time’s cycle. Gould follows these metaphors through these three great documents and shows how their influence, more than the empirical observation of rocks in the field, provoked the supposed discovery of deep time by Hutton and Lyell. Gould breaks through the traditional “cardboard” history of geological textbooks (the progressive march to truth inspired by more and better observations) by showing that Burnet, the villain of conventional accounts, was a rationalist (not a theologically driven miracle-monger) whose rich reconstruction of earth history emphasized the need for both time’s arrow (narrative history) and time’s cycle (immanent laws), while Hutton and Lyell, our traditional heroes, denied the richness of history by their exclusive focus upon time’s arrow.

Il s''agit du quatrième volume où l''auteur réunit des essais publiés à l''origine sous la forme d''une chronique mensuelle dans ##Natural history magazine##. Encore une fois, il reste fidèle à son thème préféré autour duquel s''articulent tous les essais: la théorie de l''évolution. Une vulgarisation de première valeur.

"Cerion has been described by its leading student W.J. Clench as ''the most difficult genus of pulmonate mollusks to classify.'' No other pulmonate genus shows greater diversity of form; moreover, almost all these divergent morphologies hybridize at their areas of geographic contact. The result is a taxonomic morass that has effectively debarred fruitful biological work on these fascinating snails. The taxonomy of New Providence Island is the most elaborate for the entire genus; more than 90 species of Cerion have been designated, and the distribution of existing names makes no geographic or ecological sense. We use morphometric and genetic techniques to conclude that the living Cerion of New Providence reduce to two semispecies, C. glans (the ribby morphotype) and C gubernatorium (the mottled morphotype). Traces of an extinct C. agassizi line (a prominent taxon of fossil dunes) survive as introgressions into C. gubernatorium populations of southeastern New Providence. These two groups form the basis of Cerion faunas throughout the northern Bahamas; their separation and recognition provide a key to resolving Cerion''s taxonomy both here and elsewhere. Ribby and mottled morphotypes are recurrently evolved ''developmental packages, '' not homologous taxa from place to place -- thereby illustrating the importance of developmental channeling in parallel evolution. We base our taxonomic decision upon a conciliance among many independent criteria. Geographic distribution: parental morphotypes occupy their expected positions, with narrow hybrid zones at predicted points of transition. Morphology of parental populations: differences between ribby and mottled are not simple consequences of one minor alteration in growth, but summed results of several independent covariance sets. Morphotypes differ consistently in amounts of variation and patterns of covariance. Hybrid populations: we find both enhanced variation and patterns of covariance based on developmental disturbance never before detected in parental populations of Cerion. Genetics: samples grouped by frequencies of electromorphs yield the same clusters of ribby and mottled populations specified by morphology. Morphotypes can be distinguished by allele frequencies, while hybrid populations contain rare alleles found in neither parental taxon. The genetic hybrid zone is wider than the morphological zone and asymmetric about it. An appendix allocates all previously named taxa, and resolves the status of 19 designated fossil taxa, plus a new species (Cerion clenchi), into three successive faunas, marking waves of migration correlated with rise and fall of Pleistocene seas"--Page 391

A startling, stunning, entertaining vision of the animal world past and present, with insights into its implications for us today. 69 full-color photographs and 4 black and white.

Un recueil d''essais embrassant des phénomènes très divers, mais articulés autour de la théorie de l''évolution. Huit parties: Perfection et imperfection: trilogie sur le pouce du panda - Darwin & Cie - L''évolution humaine - Science et politique des différences humaines - Le rythme du changement - Les débuts de la vie - Humiliés et offensés - Taille et temps. L''auteur enseigne la géologie, la biologie et l''histoire des sciences à Harvard.

When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. And yet the idea of innate limits - of biology as destiny - dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this edition Dr. Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve, Further, he has added five essays, in a separate section at the end, on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the claim of this book to be, as Leo J. Kamin of Princeton University has said, "a major contribution toward deflating pseudobiological ''explanations'' of our present social woes".