Journal Entry 1 by monado from Toronto, Ontario Canada on Wednesday, September 17, 2003

33 fascinating essays about evolutionary principles and examples. Contents:

* Prologue
Chapter 1. Darwinia
1. Darwin's delay
2. Darwin's Sea Change, or Five Years at the Captain's Table
3. Darwin's Dilemma: The Odyssey of Evolution
4. Darwin's Untimely Burial

Chapter 2. Human Evolution
5. A Matter of Degree
6. Bushes and Ladders in Human Evolution
7. The Child as Man's Real Father
8. Human Babies as Embryos

Chapter 3. Odd Organisms and Evolutionary Exemplars
9. The Misnamed, Mistreated and Misunderstood Irish Elk
10. Organic Wisdom, or Why Should a Fly Eat Its Mother from Inside
11. Of Bamboos, Cicadas and the Economy of Adam Smith
12. The Problem of Perfection, or How can a Clam Mount a Fish on Its Rear End?

Chapter 4. Patterns and Punctuations in the History of Life
13. The Pentagon of Life
14. An Unsung Single-Celled Hero
15. Is the Cambrian Explosion a Sigmoid Fraud?
16. The Great Dying

Chapter 5. Theories of the Earth
17. The Reverend Thomas' Dirty Little Planet
18. Uniformity and Catastrophe
19. Velikovsky in Collision
20. The Validation of Continental Drift

Chapter 6. Size and Shape, from Churches to Brains to Planets
21. Size and Shape
22. Sizing Up Human Intelligence
23. History of the Vertebrate Brain
24. Planetary Sizes and Surfaces

Chapter 7. Science in Society - A Historical View
25. On Heroes and Fools in Science
26. Posture Maketh the Man
27. Racism and Recapitulation
28. The Criminal as Nature's Mistake, or the Ape in Some of Us

Chapter 8. The Science and Politics of Human Nature
29. Why We Should Not Name Human Races - A Biological View
30. The Nonscience of Human Nature
31. Racist Arguments and IQ
32. Biological Potentiality vs. Biological Determinism
33. So Cleverly Kind an Animal

* Epilogue
* Bibliography
* Index


Books by Stephen Jay Gould:
- Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
- An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas
- Leonardo's Mountain of Clams & the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History
- The Mismeasure of Man
- Bully for Brontosaurus
- Ever Since Darwin
- The Panda's Thumb
- The Flamingo's Smile
- Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes
- Eight Little Piggies
- Dinosaur in a Haystack
- I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History

Books by Lewis Thomas:
- The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
- The Medusa and the Snail More Notes of a Biology Watcher
- The Fragile Species
- The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher
- Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

Books by Annie Dillard:
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

For more about the speed of evolution, see my review of The Beak of the Finch.