The Flamingo's Smile
Reflections in Natural History

This book is 30 years old and still highly readable. It's about biology, more specifically about Darwinian evolution and the history of science. Quite good and gripping writing explaining what is still pretty much the current state of our knowledge. Gould has a fondness for rehabilitating scientists......more

There is a lot more than meets the eye to this esoteric collection of paleontology/biology articles. Whilst working through some of the strangest topics, for example (i) the special variation among Caribbean sea snails and (ii) why pre-Cambrian worms aren't actually worms, I was surreptitiously bein......more

I read Flamingo's Smile – and many of Stephen Jay Gould's other collections of essays when they were first first published in Natural History 35 or so years ago. I was dismayed when he died, as his descriptions of science and the scientific process were so erudite, engaged, and engaging that I could......more

The greatest modern voice for the neo-Darwinian synthesis. He and a colleague, whose name I forget, re-purposed Kipling's term "just-so stories" to describe evolutionarily plausible but unprovable explanations for things. An amazing critical thinker, Gould realized that if you didn't establish some......more

This is volume 4 of the collected essays by the late Stephen Jay Gould. As before, it is the usual mixture of some rather esoteric ones that go a bit over my head and subjects I find more interesting. I had to skip the article on baseball however, being from the UK and unable to drum up any interest......more