Been a while since I read SJG but he did not disappoint. One of his later essay collections not too long before he died. The man pulled scattered topics together well but he can lose you in the detail sometimes. We forget he was a bit of a celebrity in the 1990's even making it onto the Simpsons. ( )

Paperback ( )

The fifth collection of Gould's essays, and the first I bought as a hardback: a very weighty tome printed on heavy paper. I found some of the contents a bit heavy going too, sadly.

I won't attempt to dissect the essays within, but a lot use historical misunderstandings or obsessions to illustrate points about the scientific method. Some of the more interesting included one on the tragedy of Antoine Lavoisier, executed during the French Revolution, or the author's new appreciation of Kropotkin and the basis for Russian philosophers and scientists rejecting what they saw as the 'nature red in tooth and claw' basis of Darwinism. They instead envisaged mutual aid as an evolutionary mechanism, an idea developed from the sparsely-populated Russian landscape as opposed to the teeming-with-life tropical environments in which Darwin and others developed their theories. One essay on the apocryphal tale of the discovery of the Burgess Shale and how it is not supported by the discoverer's own notebooks was already covered in detail in the author's "Wonderful Life" so I felt was treading old ground.

The title essay refers to the naming mechanism for organisms, which had changed in basis over the centuries since things began to be placed into taxonomies in the 18th century and had recently demanded, due to prior usage, that Apatosaurus be used instead of the more well-known Brontosaurus. This decision may have been reversed now to allow use of either. One on the development of wings did not seem aware that many dinosaurs developed feathers for warmth, which allowed those to be adapted to other usages, but it seems such discoveries came later than the book's early 1990s publication.
An article on Blogspot - https://ajungleoftales.blogspot.com/2023/01/re-read-review-bully-for-brontosauru... - provides a breakdown of the essays and how more recent discoveries have impacted individual ones.

I skipped most of the article on baseball, a subject which as a UK resident goes over my head. I found some of the others a bit turgid but did battle on to the end which winds up with a couple of astronomical articles about the flypast of Voyager 2: an event which was happening when these were written. I found those to be some of the more interesting articles. So on balance I would award this collection 3 stars. ( )

Volume fifth in Gould's series of essays from Natural History. In some ways what I enjoy most about these tend to be his occasional postscripts where he revisits the essays. But there are some excellent pieces in this one, perhaps even more than in some of the earlier volumes. ( )

A collection of essays by the indomitable Stephen Jay Gould, an intellectual romp through natural history that at once amuses and educates. As with all Gould's books, there are some essays that miss the mark, but overall, this is one of his better. ( )