Bully for Brontosaurus - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Bully for Brontosaurus is the fifth volume of collected essay

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...

s 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 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 culled 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, and probabilities.

The title essay, "Bully for Brontosaurus", discusses the theory and history of taxonomy by examining the debate over whether Brontosaurus
Apatosaurus
Apatosaurus , also known by the popular but scientifically deprecated synonym Brontosaurus, is a genus of sauropod dinosaur that lived from about 154 to 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period . It was one of the largest land animals that ever existed, with an average length of and a...

should be labelled Apatosaurus
Apatosaurus
Apatosaurus , also known by the popular but scientifically deprecated synonym Brontosaurus, is a genus of sauropod dinosaur that lived from about 154 to 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period . It was one of the largest land animals that ever existed, with an average length of and a...

. In "Justice Scalia's Misunderstanding", Gould dissects and decisively rejects Antonin Scalia

Antonin Scalia

Antonin Gregory Scalia is an American jurist who serves as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. As the longest-serving justice on the Court, Scalia is the Senior Associate Justice...

's dissent in the United States Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard
Edwards v. Aguillard
Edwards v. Aguillard, was a legal case about the teaching of creationism that was heard by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1987. The Court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring that creation science be taught in public schools, along with evolution, was unconstitutional because the law...

that overturned the last creationist statute in the country. Gould claimed his favourite essay to be "In a Jumbled Drawer" which discusses the debate between Nathaniel Shaler

Nathaniel Shaler

Nathaniel Southgate Shaler was an American paleontologist and geologist who wrote extensively on the theological and scientific implications of the theory of evolution.-Biography:...

and William James

William James

William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...

over whether the improbability of our having evolved necessitates divine intervention (Gould, like James, argues no); the essay includes a letter from former President Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter

James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...

as a postscript, which discusses the issue.

The essay "Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples" dealt with the issue of adaptive arguments. It derives from some work by Elisabeth Lloyd

Elisabeth Lloyd

Elisabeth Anne Lloyd is a philosopher of biology. She currently holds the Arnold and Maxine Tanis Chair of History and Philosophy of Science and is also Professor of Biology, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, Affiliated Faculty Scholar at the Kinsey Institute for Research in...

, whose subsequent 2005 book was dedicated to Gould (and her parents), and uses the case of the female orgasm to expand on the subject of adaptiveness in both depth and breadth.

Prologue 11
1. HISTORY IN EVOLUTION
  1. George Canning 's Left Buttock and the Origin of Species 21
  2. Grimm 's Greatest Tale 32
  3. The Creation Myths of Cooperstown 42
  4. The Panda's Thumb of Technology 59
2. DINOMANIA
  1. Bully for Brontosaurus 79
  2. The Dinosaur Rip-off 94
3. ADAPTATION
  1. Of Kiwi Eggs and the Liberty Bell 109
  2. Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples 124
  3. Not Necessarily a Wing 139
4. FADS AND FALLACIES
  1. The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone 155
  2. Life's Little Joke 168
  3. The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs 182
5. ART AND SCIENCE
  1. Madame Jeanette 201
  2. Red Wings in the Sunset 209
  3. Petrus Camper 's Angle 229
  4. Literary Bias on the Slippery Slope 241
6. DOWN UNDER
  1. Glow, Big Glowworm 255
  2. To Be a Platypus 269
  3. Bligh's Bounty 281
  4. Here Goes Nothing 294
7. INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY
  
  Biologists
  1. In a Jumbled Drawer 309
  2. Kropotkin Was No Crackpot 325
  3. Fleeming Jenkin Revisited 340
  Physical Scientists
  1. The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier 354
  2. The Godfather of Disaster 367
8. EVOLUTION AND CREATION
  
  The World of T. H. Huxley
  1. Knight Takes Bishop? 385
  2. Genesis and Geology 402
  Scopes to Scalia
  1. William Jennings Bryan 's Last Campaign 416
  2. An Essay on a Pig Roast 432
  3. Scalia 's Misunderstanding 448
9. NUMBERS AND PROBABILITY
  1. The Streak of Streaks 463
  2. The Median Isn't the Message 473
  3. The Ant and the Plant 479
10. PLANETS AS PERSONS
  1. The Face of Miranda 489
  2. The Horn of Triton 499

Bibliography 513

Index 525

Reviews

Taking a Chance on Evolution — by John Maynard Smith
John Maynard Smith
John Maynard Smith,His surname was Maynard Smith, not Smith, nor was it hyphenated. F.R.S. was a British theoretical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J.B.S....

, NYRB
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
The Stan Musial of Essay Writing — by John Noble Wilford, 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 — Danny Yee

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