About this title: "His fourth volume of imaginative, witty essays...equals Gould's prize-winning The Panda's Thumb and The Mismeasure of Man".--Publisher's Weekly. Photographs.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Date Published: 1985
ISBN-13:9780393022285ISBN:0393022285
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Paper over boards. 476 p. Previous Owner's Inscription. read more
Description: Very Good. 0393022285 light shelf wear / edge wear cover / pages very good condition//"Buy with Confidence-Satisfaction Guaranteed! Customer Service Makes All the Difference. " read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"The greatest modern voice for the neo-Darwinian synthesis. He and a colleague, whose name I forget, re-purposed Kipling's term "just-so stories" to describe evolutionarily plausible but unprovable explanations for things. An amazing critical thinker, Gould realized that if you didn't establish some way of critiquing evolutionary explanations, they would become the equivalent of folk explanations, overpredicting to the point that they could never be disproven. Once evolutionary explanations became non-disprovable, it stops being a science and starts being a belief, like believing in god. So he spent a lifetime not just doing his own research but in popularizing disciplined neo-Darwinian critical thinking in this series of essays in Natural History magazine or Nature magazine, I forget. Most of my understanding of the neo-Darwinian synthesis comes from reading Gould."
"Most of Stephen Jay Gould's books are collections of his essays he wrote for years (until his untimely and unfortunate death in 2002) that appeared in "Natural History" magazine. "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History" is the fourth such collection.
Gould was a prominent paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and astute historian of science, who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard. His essays are a mix of science and history.
I'll take my lead from Dr. Gould. This book's curious title comes from the very first essay to appear. A flamingo's smile is almost as enigmatic as Da Vinci's Mona Lisa's. Why? In this essay, Gould explores the theme of form follows function and the question of just why do pink flamingos have upside-down smiles?
Gould writes: "In most birds (and mammals including us), the upper jaw fuses to the skull; chewing, biting, and shouting move the mobile lower jaw against this stable brace. If reversed feeding has converted the flamingo's upper jaw into a working lower jaw in size and shape, then we must predict that, contrary to all anatomical custom, this upper beak moves up and down against a rigid lower jaw. The flamingo, in short, should feed by raising and lowering its upper jaw."
Which, by the way, it does. Flamingos are filter feeders that feed with their heads upside down, submerged in water. So, for a practical purpose, in nature, the jaw that is actually on the bottom during feeding is the movable one. Most curious. Most curious, indeed."
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