Eight Little Piggies. - book reviews

National Review, June 21, 1993 by John Farrell

Eight Little Piggies, by Stephen Jay Gould (Norton, 479 pp., $22.95)

STEPHEN JAY GOULD is the most articulate disciple of Charles Darwin writing today, and this is the latest book in a series collecting the Harvard paleontologist's essays from Natural History magazine--the title piece being a meditation on nature's preference for five digits on hands and feet throughout the animal kingdom, and a few of the interesting offshoots from earlier eras that were eventually dismissed from the pantheon of natural selection. The best thing about Gould, whether he's discussing snails in the South Pacific or Near Eastern mole rats, is his modesty; he never forgets the limits of his discipline. He does not try to stretch Darwinism to explain the inspiration of Mozart, or reduce the nature of human consciousness to a side effect of evolution. He simply delights in what he and his colleagues have uncovered over their travels, as will readers of this delightfully witty scientist.