Eight Little Piggies is the sixth volume of collected essays

Essay

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

 by the Harvard

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 paleontologist

Paleontology

Paleontology "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought") is the study of prehistoric life. It includes the study of fossils to determine organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...

 Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation....

. The essays were selected from his monthly column "The View of Life" in Natural History

Natural History (magazine)

Natural History is an American natural history magazine. The stated mission of the magazine is to promote public understanding and appreciation of nature and science.- History :...

magazine, to which Gould contributed for 27 years. The book deals, in typically discursive fashion, with themes familiar to Gould's writing: evolution and its teaching, science biography, probabilities and common sense.

The title essay, "Eight Little Piggies", explores concepts such as archetypes and polydactyly

Polydactyly

Polydactyly or polydactylism , also known as hyperdactyly, is a congenital physical anomaly in humans, dogs, and cats having supernumerary fingers or toes....

 via the anatomy of early tetrapods. Other essays discuss themes such as the scale of extinction, vertebrate anatomy, grand patterns of evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

, and human nature

Human nature

Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend to have naturally....

.

Contents

• A Reflective Prologue
  
  1. The Scale of Extinction
     
     1. Unenchanted Evening
        
     2. The Golden Rule: A Proper Scale for Our Environmental Crisis
        
     3. Losing a Limpet
     
     
  2. Odd Bits of Vertebrate Anatomy
     
     4. Eight Little Piggies
        
     5. Bent Out of Shape
        
     6. An Earful of Jaw
        
     7. Full of Hot Air
     
     
  3. Vox Populi
     
     Evolving Visions
     
     8. Men of the Thirty-Third Division: An Essay on Integrity
        
     9. Darwin and Paley meet the Invisible Hand
        
     10. More Light on Leaves
         
     
     Time in Newton's Century
     
     11. On Rereading Edmund Halley
         
     12. Fall in the House of Ussher
         
     
     
  4. Musings
     
     Clouds of Memory
     
     13. Muller Bros. Moving and Storage
         
     14. Shoemaker and Morning Star
         
     
     Authenticity
     
     15. In Touch with Walcott
         
     16. Counters and Cable Cars
     
     
  5. Human Nature
     
     17. Mozart and Modularity
         
     18. The Moral State of Tahiti—and of Darwin
         
     19. Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness
         
     20. The Declining Empire of Apes
     
     
  6. Grand Patterns of Evolution
     
     Two Steps Towards a General Theory of Life's Complexity
     
     21. The Wheel of Fortune and the Wedge of Progress
         
     22. Tires to Sandals
         
     
     New Discoveries in the Earliest History of Multicellular Life
     
     23. Defending the Heretical and the Superfluous
         
     24. The Reversal of Hallucigenia
     
     
  7. Revising and Extending Darwin
     
     25. What the Immaculate Pigeon Teaches the Burdened Mind
         
     26. The Great Seal Principle
         
     27. A Dog's Life in Galton's Polyhedron
         
     28. Betting on Chance—And No Fair Peeking
     
     
  8. Reversals-Fragments of a Book not Written
     
     29. Shields of Expectation—And Actuality
         
     30. A Tale of Three Pictures
         
     31. A Foot Soldier for Evolution

Bibliography

Index

From Publishers Weekly

Reviews

• The Snail Wars - by Derek Bickerton, The New York Times
  The New York Times
  The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
  
  
• Book review - by Howard A. Doughty, College Quarterly
• Book review - John Farrell, National Review
  National Review
  National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
  
  
• Book review - Edward Kay, Eye Weekly

External links

• W. W. Norton promotional page
• Google Books - contains book excerpts and jacket description
• Link to Questia's "Eight Little Piggies" online

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