The richness of life : the essential Stephen Jay Gould / Stephen Jay Gould ; edited by Paul McGarr and Steven Rose ; with an introduction by Steven Rose ; and a foreword by Oliver Sacks.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [636]-640) and index.

Pt. I. Autobiography : I have landed -- The median isn't the message -- The streak of streaks -- Seventh inning stretch : baseball, father, and me -- Trouble in our own house : a brief legal survey from Scopes to Scalia -- Of two minds and one nature. Pt. II. Biographies : Thomas Burnet's battleground of time -- The lying stones of Marrakech -- The stinkstones of Oeningen -- The Razumovsky duet -- The power of narrative -- Not necessarily a wing -- Worm for a century, and all seasons -- The Darwinian gentleman at Marx's funeral : resolving evolution's oddest coupling -- The Piltdown conspiracy. Pt. III. Evolutionary theory : The evolution of life on earth -- Challenges to neo-Darwinism and their meaning for a revised view of human consciousness -- The structure of evolutionary theory : revising the three central features of Darwinian logic -- The episodic nature of evolutionary change -- Betting on chance - and no fair peeking -- The power of the modal bacter, or why the tail can't wag the dog -- The great dying -- The validation of continental drift -- Phyletic size decrease in Hershey bars. Pt. IV. Size, form, and shape : Opus 100 -- Size and shape -- How the zebra gets its stripes -- Size and scaling in human evolution. Pt. V. Stages and sequences : The ladder and the cone : iconographies of progress -- Up against a wall. Pt. VI. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology : Pervasive influence -- The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm : a critique of the adaptationist program -- More things in heaven and earth -- Posture maketh the man -- Freud's evolutionary fantasy. Pt. VII. Racism, scientific and otherwise : Measuring heads : Paul Broca and the heyday of craniology -- The most unkindest cut of all -- A tale of two work sites -- Carrie Buck's daughter -- Just in the middle. Pt. VIII. Religion : Non-overlapping Magisteria -- The diet of worms and the defenestration of Prague -- Darwin and the Munchkins of Kansas -- Hooking Leviathan by its past.