Systematic Biology Advance Access originally published online on October 7, 2009
Systematic Biology 2009 58(6):657-658; doi:10.1093/sysbio/syp070
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© The Author(s) 2009. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Society of Systematic Biologists. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Stephen Jay Gould: Reflections on His View of Life
Section for Parasitology (SWEPAR), Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 751 89 Uppsala, Sweden
E-mail: David.Morrison@bvf.slu.se
Stephen Jay Gould: Reflections on His View of Life.—Warren D. Allmon, Patricia Kelley, and Robert Ross, editors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiii+400 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-537320-2. $US34.95 £18.99 (hardback).
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
It is problematic to review a book like this because it basically consists of a dozen chapters in which various people try to explain the writings of somebody else. As Terry Jones once noted about deciding to be a comedian after studying English literature at Oxford University: "I don't want to spend my life writing words about words that somebody else wrote ... I'd rather actually write the original words." So, I'm taking a bit of a risk in writing a review of this book because I am adding a third layer of words to the words written by somebody else about the original words.
Moreover, Stephen Jay Gould is not necessarily flavor-of-the-month among systematists. On the one hand, he is well known for supporting cladistic methodology as a tool for reconstructing the past. However, he was also an evolutionary biologist in the traditional sense and was thus a staunch