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Life's grandeur : the spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin / Stephen Jay Gould.

By: Gould, Stephen Jay.
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookPublisher: London : Vintage, 1997Description: xx, 244 p. : ill ; 20 cm. + pbk.ISBN: 0099893606.Subject(s): Evolution (Biology) | Natural history | Excellence | NatureDDC classification: 576.8
Contents:
Part One: How shall we read and spot a trend?: Huxley's chessboard -- Darwin amidst the spin doctors -- Different parsings, different images of trends -- Part Two: Death and horses: two cases for the primacy of variation: Case one: a personal story -- Case two: life's little joke -- Part Three: The model batter: extinction of 0.400 hitting and the improvement of baseball: Stating the problem -- Conventional explanations -- A plausibility argument for general improvement -- 0.400 hitting dies as the right tail shrinks -- Why the death of 0.400 hitting records improvement of play -- A philosophical conclusion -- Part Four: The modal bacter: Why progress does not rule the history of life: The bare bones of natural selection -- A preliminary example at smallest scale with some generalities on the evolution of body size -- The power of the modal bacter, or why the tail can't wag the dog -- An epilog on human culture.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In his characteristically iconoclastic and original way, Stephen Jay Gould argues that progress and increasing complexity are not inevitable features of the evolution of life on Earth. Further, if we wish to see grandeur in life, we must discard our selfish and anthropocentric view of evolution and learn to see it as Darwin did, as the random but unfathomably rich source of 'endless forms most beautiful and wonderful'. Any rational view of nature tells us that we are a simple branch on an immense bush; and that life on Earth is remarkable not for where it is leading, but for the fullness and constancy of its variety, ingenuity and diversity.

Bibliography: (pages 231-237) and index.

Part One: How shall we read and spot a trend?: Huxley's chessboard -- Darwin amidst the spin doctors -- Different parsings, different images of trends -- Part Two: Death and horses: two cases for the primacy of variation: Case one: a personal story -- Case two: life's little joke -- Part Three: The model batter: extinction of 0.400 hitting and the improvement of baseball: Stating the problem -- Conventional explanations -- A plausibility argument for general improvement -- 0.400 hitting dies as the right tail shrinks -- Why the death of 0.400 hitting records improvement of play -- A philosophical conclusion -- Part Four: The modal bacter: Why progress does not rule the history of life: The bare bones of natural selection -- A preliminary example at smallest scale with some generalities on the evolution of body size -- The power of the modal bacter, or why the tail can't wag the dog -- An epilog on human culture.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology at Harvard University and the curator for invertebrate palaeontology in the University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He is the author of over twenty books, and received the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the MacArthur Fellowship. He died in May 2002.