TY - BOOK AU - Gould, Stephen Jay ; TI - The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History SN - 9780393300239 U1 - 575.0162 PY - 1980/// CY - New York PB - W.W.Norton & Company KW - Evolution -- History KW - Natural selection -- History. KW - Evolution N1 - Included Bibliography & Index; Prologue -- [Part] 1 : Perfection and imperfection : a trilogy on a panda's thumb -- The panda's thumb -- Senseless signs of history -- Double trouble -- [Part] 2 : Darwiniana -- Natural selection and the human brain : Darwin vs. Wallace -- Darwin's middle road -- Death before birth, or a mite's nunc dimittis -- Shades of Lamarck -- Caring groups and selfish genes -- [Part] 3 : Human evolution -- A biological homage to Mickey Mouse -- Piltdown revisited -- Our greatest evolutionary step -- In the midst of life -- [Part] 4 : Science and politics of human differences -- Wide hats and narrow minds -- Women's brains -- Dr. Down's syndrome -- Flaws in a Victorian veil -- [Part] 5 : The pace of change -- The episodic nature of evolutionary change -- Return of the hopeful monster -- The Great Scablands debate -- A quahog is a quahog -- [Part] 6 : Early life -- An early start -- Crazy old Randolph Kirkpatrick -- Bathybius and Eozoon -- Might we fit inside a sponge's cell -- [Part] 7 : They were despised and rejected -- Were dinosaurs dumb? -- The telltale wishbone -- Nature's odd couples -- Sticking up for marsupials -- [Part] 8 : Size and time -- Our allotted lifetimes -- Natural attraction : bacteria, the birds and the bees -- Time's vastness N2 - A collection of essays by reknown scientist Jay Stephen Gould drawn from his columns in Natural History. The essays deal with topics such as: evolutionary opportunism (nature is a tinkerer, making the most of what's available in the course of adapting to the environment); new information on Darwin and his contemporaries; racism and cultural relativism; the evolutionary pattern of sudden rapid change; the origin of birds or the warm-bloodedness of dinosaurs; and, Teilhard de Chardin as a co-conspirator in the Piltdown hoax. ER -