The Panda's Thumb (book)

The Panda's Thumb (book)

Infobox Book
name = The Panda's Thumb
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption =
author = Stephen Jay Gould
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
subject = Science
genre = Non-fiction
publisher = W. W. Norton & Company
release_date = 1980
english_release_date =
media_type =
pages =
isbn = ISBN 0-393-01380-4
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"The Panda's Thumb" is the second volume of collected essays by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The essays were culled from his monthly column "The View of Life" in "Natural History" magazine, to which Gould contributed for 27 years. The book deals, in typically discursive fashion, with themes familiar to Gould's writing: evolution and its teaching, science biography, probabilities and common sense.

The [http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_panda's-thumb.html title essay] discusses the paradox that poor design is a better argument for evolution than good design, as illustrated by the anatomy of the panda's "thumb"—which is not a thumb at all—but an extension of the radial sesamoid. Topics addressed in other essays include the female brain, the Piltdown Man hoax, Down Syndrome, and the relationship between dinosaurs and birds.

Reviews

* [http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/09/home/gould-panda.html Books of the Times] - by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "The New York Times"
* [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=7134 Back to Evolution] - by P. B. Medawar, "The New York Review of Books"

External links

* [http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/backlist/030819.htm W.W. Norton promotional page]


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