Bully for Brontosaurus

Science and nature

First published: 1991
Print length: 540 pagesNorton, 1991

Description

Stephen Jay Gould gathers essays from his Natural History column to examine how evolutionary ideas are named, taught, disputed, and misunderstood. The title piece uses the argument over Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus to explore taxonomy and the history embedded in scientific names. Elsewhere, Gould challenges Antonin Scalia’s reasoning in a case involving creationist legislation, considers whether humanity’s improbable evolution implies divine intervention, and tests adaptive explanations through the example of the female orgasm. Scientific biography and probability supply further routes into the same concern: how evidence becomes explanation. Moving from fossils and courtrooms to human anatomy, the collection turns focused controversies into broader reflections on evolution, historical contingency, and the habits of responsible scientific thought.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Descriptive · Essayistic · Witty

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Cerebral · Earnest · Warm · Wistful

Structure

Anthology

Focus

Argument · Ideas · Information

Emotional intensity

2 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

Knowledge and truthMoralityNature and environmentReligion and faith

About Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, historian of science, and an unusually widely read popular science writer. He spent most of his career teaching at Harvard and working at the American Museum of Natural History. His major scientific contribution, developed with Niles Eldredge, was punctuated equilibrium, a theory describing evolutionary history as long intervals of relative stability interrupted by comparatively rapid episodes of speciation. Gould’s writing joined scientific argument to historical inquiry. In essay collections such as Ever Since Darwin and The Panda’s Thumb, he used biological oddities, disputed interpretations, and episodes from the history of science to show how evolutionary explanations are made and how appealing errors endure. Wonderful Life treats the Burgess Shale fossils as evidence against a simple narrative of inevitable progress, while The Mismeasure of Man examines how measurements of intelligence can turn complex variation into misleading hierarchies. Across this work, Gould repeatedly resisted tidy accounts of progress, perfect adaptation, and biological destiny, emphasizing contingency, inherited constraints, and the human judgments involved in science.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Norton
Language: English
ISBN: 9780393029611

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