Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin

Description

'Reading Gould is not merely a pleasure but an education and a chronicle of the times' - Observer In his characteristically iconoclastic and original way, Stephen Jay Gould argues that progress and increasing complexity are not inevitable features of the evolution of life on Earth. Further, if we wish to see grandeur in life, we must discard our selfish and anthropocentric view of evolution and learn to see it as Darwin did, as the random but unfathomably rich source of 'endless forms most beautiful and wonderful'. Any rational view of nature tells us that we are a simple branch on an immense bush; and that life on Earth is remarkable not for where it is leading, but for the fullness and constancy of its variety, ingenuity and diversity.

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology at Harvard University and the curator for invertebrate palaeontology in the University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He is the author of over twenty books, and received the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the MacArthur Fellowship. He died in May 2002.

A hard, even ruthless, completion of Darwinism which is, nevertheless, exhilarating and allows for future argument -- Melvyn Bragg * The Times * Gould only enriches the texture of his writing with each successive phase-He would not be the great science writer that he is if he were not also a great humanist -- Marek Kohn * New Statesman & Society * Gould's depth and humanity fit him for Montaigne's mantle more plausibly that anyone else currently writing... Lucid, exciting, accessible -- John Carey * Sunday Times *