Reviews for The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History

The average rating for The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-03-25 00:00:00 Rodney Bennett This book is 30 years old and still highly readable. It's about biology, more specifically about Darwinian evolution and the history of science. Quite good and gripping writing explaining what is still pretty much the current state of our knowledge. Gould has a fondness for rehabilitating scientists who were wrong for interesting reasons. In this volume those figures include: Edward Tyson (who sought to place chimpanzees next to humans as the next link in the great chain of being theory), the Rev. William Buckland (who misinterpreted evidence of past glaciation as proof of The Flood), Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (who straddled the epigenicist/preformationist embryology debate of the 18th century), and the father of taxonomy himself, Carolus Linnaeus (whose work was also skewed by the false great chain of being theory). Gould is always careful to point out that no science is without its limiting cultural or social preconceptions. Scientific knowledge, moreover, is conditional, never fixed, and changes with our ever modifying understanding of it. He writes:Good arguments don't provide nearly as much insight into human thought, for we can simply say that we have seen nature aright and have properly pursued the humble task of mapping things accurately and objectively. But bad arguments must be defended in the face of nature's opposition, a task that takes some doing. The analysis of this "doing" often provides us with insight into the ideology or thought processes of an age, if not into the modes of human reasoning itself. (p. 284) Also see my reviews for Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack, Bully for Brontosaurus, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, and Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-05 00:00:00 Akira Guo There is a lot more than meets the eye to this esoteric collection of paleontology/biology articles. Whilst working through some of the strangest topics, for example (i) the special variation among Caribbean sea snails and (ii) why pre-Cambrian worms aren't actually worms, I was surreptitiously being taught the intricacies of the scientific method. These articles are lessons in critical thinking concepts such as - open-mindedness, acknowledging errors (including your own), recognizing false assumptions and poorly reasoned conclusions, pursuing truth over ego and differentiating between evidence and speculation. Using real world examples this book is a kind of training manual in critical thinking.