The Panda's Thumb (1980) 'There is grandeur in this view of life,' wrote Charles Darwin in the last line of, 'with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.' That view of life was his theory of biological evolution, and the grandeur of it is grandly apparent in the writings of, whose brilliant first collection of essays,, earned him a place in the pantheon of natural history essayists. Canon A640 Service Manual. Now, Gould again delights and in instructs us, deepening and extending his examination of evolution, a centerpiece of modern science. Were dinosaurs really?

Why, after all, are roughly the same number of men and women born into the world? What led the famous Dr. Down to his theory of mongolism, and its racist residue?

READING #1 ON CONTRIVANCES: The Panda’s Thumb Excerpted from “The Panda’s Thumb” out of The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould, W.W Norton & Company, New York, 1980.

How does mirror our own? What do the and the sea turtle's perilous migration tell us about imperfections that prove the evolutionary rule? Why does our century's most spectacular hoax——go well beyond mere whodunit? What terrible beauty connects all mammals, from hamsters to humans? And how can a mere 1/50,000 of a second per year—the deceleration of earth's rotation—have a profound effect upon history? These questions of life lie on a continuum between timeless science and singular history and touch us all. Never have their sweet and bitter mysteries been explained with such wit, beauty, and elegance.

In addition to the widely acclaimed Ever Since Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould is the author of, and of the column, ',' in Natural History, winner of the 1980 National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism. A frequent and popular speaker on the sciences, he teaches geology, biology, and the history of science at Harvard University, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On the of his classic book,, E.B.

Wilson inscribed a motto from Pliny, the great natural historian who died in his boots when he sailed across the Bay of Naples to study the eruption of Mt. Epson Sx235w Wifi Setup Windows 7. Vesuvius in A.D. He suffocated in the same vapors that choked the citizens of Pompeii. Pliny wrote: Natura nus quam magis est tota quam in minimis—'Nature is to be found in her entirety nowhere more than in her smallest creatures.' Wilson, of course, commandeered Pliny's statement to celebrate the microscopic building blocks of life, minute structures unknown perforce to the great Roman. Pliny was thinking about organisms. Pliny's statement captures the essence of what fascinates me about natural history.