Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History
Stephen Jay Gould
Language: English
Pages: 544
ISBN: 039330857X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Provocative and delightfully discursive essays on natural history. . . . Gould is the Stan Musial of essay writing. He can work himself into a corkscrew of ideas and improbable allusions paragraph after paragraph and then, uncoiling, hit it with such power that his fans know they are experiencing the game of essay writing at its best."--John Noble Wilford, New York Times Book Review
in the tadpole stage, into water (see article by K. Busse, 1970). In this context, Rheobatrachus is less an oddity than a fulfillment. Stomachs provide the only other large internal pouch with an egress of sufficient size. Some lineage of frogs was bound to exploit this possibility. But stomachs present a special problem not faced by vocal sacs or novel pouches of special construction舒and we now encounter the key dilemma that will bring us back to mimicry in butterflies and the evolutionary
that establishes fortuitous initial resemblance to models in some cases. 舠It is necessary to suppose,舡 Darwin wrote, that ancestral mimics 舠accidently resembled a member of another and protected group in a sufficient degree to afford some slight protection, this having given the basis for the subsequent acquisition of the most perfect resemblance.舡 Ancestral mimics happened to resemble a model in some slight manner舒and the evolutionary process could begin. The eggs of Rheobatrachus happened to
animal taxonomy as 舠a study of personified thought.舡 Even Agassiz was not so explicit in specifying the attributes of his God. When the winds of inevitability blew strongly enough, and when Shaler舗s own position became secure in the late 1860s, he finally embraced evolution, but ever so gently, and in a manner that would cause minimal offense to Agassiz and to any Brahmin member of the old Boston order. After Agassiz舗s death, Shaler continued to espouse a version of evolution with maximal
phyla, and for potential reconstructions of human languages even closer to the original tongue, follow the genetic connections so faithfully. Nostratic would link Groups II and III. The even more heterodox connection of Nostratic with Amerindian tongues would include Group IV as well. Note that Groups II to IV form a coherent limb of the human family tree. The Tower of Babel may emerge as a strikingly accurate metaphor. We probably did once speak the same language, and we did diversify into
chanciness). So Walcott bides his time for a year in considerable anxiety. But he is a good geologist and knows how to find his quarry (literally in this case). He returns the next summer and finally locates the Burgess Shale by hard work and geological skill. He starts with the dislodged block and traces it patiently upslope until he finds the mother lode. Schuchert doesn舗t mention a time, but most versions state that Walcott spent a week or more trying to locate the source. Walcott舗s son