The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“There is grandeur in this view of life,” wrote Charles Darwin in the last line of The Origin of Species, “with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.”

In The Panda’s Thumb Stephen Jay Gould delights and instructs while deepening and extending his examination of evolution, a centerpiece of modern science. Were dinosaurs really dumber than lizards? Why are roughly the same number of men and women born? What do the panda’s magical “thumb” and the sea turtle’s perilous migration tell us about imperfections that prove the evolutionary rule?