Reviews for Environmental evolution

The average rating for Environmental evolution based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-25 00:00:00 Charles Alexander It's easy to think that we are the most ephemeral of creatures, our lifetimes but a blink in the overall scheme. One of the things I get from reading Gould is the knowledge that we are very ancient creatures. I am an ancient creature. On the cellular level "mitochondria and chloroplasts look uncannily like entire prokaryotic organisms (they have their own DNA and are the same size as bacteria). Almost surely, they began as symbionts within cells of other species and later became more highly integrated to form the eukaryotic cell (so that each cell in our body has the evolutionary status of a former colony.)" (p. 320) So, not only are we each a living record of hundreds of millions of years of ancestry, but the so-called "junk" DNA--the seemingly useless, nonfunctional copies upon copies of genes we possess--may actually permit the evolution of complexity. We are very ancient yet our species contains the mechanism for further evolution. In light of this, it becomes difficult for me to feel for very long any sense of dislocation from my time and place in the world. Such knowledge grounds one in a complex universe. "Life is continuous in the crucial sense that all creatures form a web of unbroken genealogical linkage." (p. 327) Here, too, is a reason I love reading. Highly recommended.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-20 00:00:00 Joseph Young Published in 1993, 'Eight Little Piggies' is Stephen Jay Gould's sixth book of collected essays. These essays, besides being full of fascinating natural science facts and history, discuss Gould's horror at the loss of animals around the world for the first time in a section, Part one: -The Scale of Extinction The rest of the book follows Gould's usual thematic stories about evolutionary theory and histories of life. -Odd Bits of Vertebrate Anatomy -Vox Populi -Musings -Human Nature -Grand Patterns of Evolution -Revising and Extending Darwin -Reversals -- Fragments of a Book Not Written All of these essays appeared in Natural History magazine. Gould writes about science with verve! He loves including a huge variety of related science factoids and history whether discussing the variety of shapes of dog skulls, fossil discoveries, the methodology of fourteenth-century proto-scientists who came up with creation dates such as October 23, 4004 bce as the date the earth was created, psychological blubbering over nostalgic pasts that never existed, wrong scientific conclusions which were nonetheless important to the discussion of evolution (including Darwin), probability and randomness, evolutionary Trees of Life, and sociobiology, among many interesting subjects. There is an Index and a Bibliography. I love these books.