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Wayne and Clarissa are a young London couple whose immediate families are about to meet for the first time. Trying to create harmony between the parents is hard enough, but in this case there are eight parents, step-parents, and partners to cope with. Wayne comes from a working class background and Clarissa, an upper-middle class one. They are deeply in love but tensions arising from the forthcoming gathering have created a rift, and it’s touch and go whether their relationship is strong enough to survive the event. With more than just an engagement on the line, can these two families come together – or will their differences rip them all apart?
The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve. When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. And yet the idea of innate limits—of biology as destiny—dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this edition Dr. Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he has added five essays on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the book's claim to be, as Leo J. Kamin of Princeton University has said, "a major contribution toward deflating pseudo-biological 'explanations' of our present social woes."
Stephen J. Gould’s greatest contribution to science is a revised version of the theory of evolution which offers today a useful framework for understanding progress in many evolutionary fields. His intuitions about the conjunction of evolution and development, the role of ecological factors in speciation, the multi-level interpretation of the units of selection, and the interplay between functional pressures and constraints all represent fruitful lines of experimental research. His opposition to the progressive representations of evolution, the gene-centered view of natural history, or the adaptationist “just-so stories” has also left its mark on current biology. In May 2012, at the Is...
The world’s most revered and eloquent interpreter of evolutionary ideas offers here a work of explanatory force unprecedented in our time—a landmark publication, both for its historical sweep and for its scientific vision. With characteristic attention to detail, Stephen Jay Gould first describes the content and discusses the history and origins of the three core commitments of classical Darwinism: that natural selection works on organisms, not genes or species; that it is almost exclusively the mechanism of adaptive evolutionary change; and that these changes are incremental, not drastic. Next, he examines the three critiques that currently challenge this classic Darwinian edifice: that...
One man in need of an overhaul. Two women determined to drag him there. Neville Watkin's life is so rubbish surely things can't get any worse. Yes they can, because his wife leaves him, he loses his job, has a car crash and ends up in hospital. Feisty Laura, the other party in the car crash, befriends him and sets out to turn his life upside down. For reasons he struggles to understand, Caroline, her equally feisty mother, seems to like him. Rather a lot. All in all things are looking up, but is Neville courageous enough to seize these new opportunities?
There aren't many scientists famous enough in their lifetime to be canonized by the US Congress as one of America's 'living legends'. It is still more unlikely that the title should have been conferred on a man regarded by many in the US as a notorious ra
Examines scientific theories pertaining to the measurement of earth's history.
Centring on the discovery in the Burgess Shale of 530 million year old fossils unique in age, preservation and diversity, this book challenges perceptions about man's place in the history of life.
Already an international bestseller, this completely revised edition updates the story of science's most bitter argument.