Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History - Softcover

Stephen Jay Gould

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099507447 ISBN 13: 9780099507444

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2007

Synopsis

The title is a pun, and as always with Gould, the joke has a point that illustrates the largest pattern of life's history. For millennia the animals that populated the earth had four toes on each foot, or six. If evolution had taken a tiny shift - if our ancestors had inherited a couple of genes in a different form - our canonical number, based on our fingers and toes, might be eight instead of ten. This is just one of the oddities of history that Gould deploys in this wonderfully readable book.

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen Jay Gould was the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of geology at Harvard and the curator for invertebrate palaeontology in the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He died in May 2002.

Review:

"Miraculously good" * The Times * "Remarkable... Gould takes his readers on tough-minded rambles across the visible surface of things... extraordinary" * Guardian * "Gould has a talent for making the scientific, and particularly the revolutionary, interesting and striking" * Sunday Times * "A lovely mixture of bizarre facts, nice arguments, clever insights into the workings of evolution and a quality of writing that can make your skin prickle... Gould has given us a feast" * Nature * "Rather than serving up his science cold, Gould invariably puts a spin on it, taking his readers down the innumerable byways of history, literature and personal anecdote along the route to his theoretical conclusions" * Independent on Sunday *

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0099507447
• ISBN 13: 9780099507444
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480