Search Results

“... took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen JayGould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing ...”

“... that Dawkins is not much impressed with this sort of caution. Interestingly, he shares with Stephen JayGould, the other leading public representative of Darwinism in the English-speaking world today, the conviction that evolution matters, not just intellectually and philosophically, but personally and even ...”

“... multifarious products, and not in any general sense ‘better’ than even the lowliest bacterium. Stephen JayGould, in particular, has insisted that the anthropocentric Victorian perspective was fuelled more by theology than by sound biology. Like his pet theme, Spencer’s reputation, too, has been eclipsed. In the ...”

“... not occurred, the dinosaurs might still be here. Under the influence of palaeontologists such as Stephen JayGould, the notion of progressive evolution has given way to a more makeshift world view, in which circumstances play as great a part as natural selection in shaping the history of life. In this view, chance ...”

“... well about their subject? Apart from Professor Maynard Smith himself, there are only a handful. Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time, has remained in the best-seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic for months. Stephen JayGould, the American evolutionary ...”

“... over the place. It is supposed to characterise earthquakes, the ‘punctuated equilibrium’ that Stephen JayGould and Niles Eldridge claim for biological evolution, stock prices, neural activity, and the movement of cars on the M25. In 1987, along with Chao Tang and Kurt Wiesenfeld, Bak published a technical account ...”

“... to demonstrate the superiority of white European settlers. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Stephen JayGould showed not only that such theories were based on the disproved belief that cranial capacity predicts intelligence, but that the artificially shaped skulls of preserved ancient Peruvians had often been ...”

“... were easily built on to accommodate genes and mutations, recent work has been more challenging. Stephen JayGould and Richard Lewontin, for example, used the spandrels of St Mark’s in Venice, which exist as a necessary by-product of the process of mounting a dome on rounded arches, as a way of illustrating the ...”

“... and Bakalar’s evidence comes from impeccable professional sources. The Harvard biologist, Stephen JayGould, is a rare survivor from a generally lethal form of cancer. Chemotherapy induced in him ‘long periods of intense and uncontrollable nausea’ which only smoking joints alleviated. ...”

“... rejected by the modern synthesis. These quotations come from a recent paper in Palaeobiology by Stephen JayGould. What is the new theory? Is it indeed likely to replace the currently orthodox ‘neo-Darwinian’ view? Proponents of the new view make a minimum and a maximum claim. The minimum claim is an empirical ...”

“... the second of the remarkable triumvirate who inhabit the Museum (the third, in the basement, is Stephen JayGould). Lewontin claims that when the conflict between them was at its most intense, Wilson wouldn’t even get into the lift between the museum floors if he (Lewontin) was already inside (an idiosyncrasy ...”

“... in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of infinite enchantment and deception.’ Stephen JayGould chivalrously insists that in Nabokov’s lepidopteral heyday of the 1940s, ‘the modern Darwinian orthodoxy had not yet congealed [sic] ... a Nabokovian style of doubt remained quite common among ...”

“... inevitable link in the chain between apes and angels. Evolution is often seen as progression – Stephen JayGould has assembled a collection of advertisements in which the advanced state of some product or other is compared with humanity’s relentless progression from the apes, by way of a number of missing ...”

“... as well as thoughtful reviews of significant debates, such as the contested legacy of Darwin (Stephen JayGould v. sociobiology), the stake of revisionist histories of the 1960s and the role of race in the formulation of law. But at times one feels that LF cut a deal with its readers: if you listen to our stories ...”

“... were on average 14 per cent heavier than women’s. Broca’s data were elegantly picked apart by Stephen JayGould in The Mismeasure of Man. Most of the difference is accounted for by differences in height and build between men and women, and once corrected for these, the gross difference evaporates. After Broca’s ...”