Word: fields
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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THINK BACK to elementary school and that time when your teacher loaded you and your classmates on a schoolbus for a field trip to the Museum of Natural History. You all gathered around some billion-year-old fossil or stood dwarfed beneath a terrifying representation of a brontosaurus, or marvelled at a taxidermist's conception of an extinct dodo bird perched in an artist's conception of its natural habitat while your teacher recited something about the Jurassic Period. And you trotted from exhibit to exhibit, awed and thrilled by them...
...Panda's Thumb. Stephen Gould combines a feeling of childlike wonderment with pedagogical earnestness and leads his readers on a fascinating and entertaining field trip through the largest natural history museum of them all--the world. Instead of exhibits, though, Gould presents us with a collection of essays that bring to life the subjects of natural history better than any reconstructed dinosaur of stuffed dodo...
...theme, as Gould notes in the prologue, is inherently fascinating; evolutionary theory holds a special appeal for the curious non-specialist. While the field is "sufficiently firm to provide satisfaction and confidence," it is also "fruitfully underdeveloped enough to provide a treasure trove of mysteries." As a science, it encompasses a huge range of approaches and styles from the most abstract to the most particular--"what, if anything, did Tyrannosaurus do with his puny front legs, anyway?" And most importantly, evolutionary theory affects all our lives by addressing where we came from and how we got here...
Despite his literary and historical allusions. Gould never comes across as a pedant. Rather, he seems to be a well-rounded scientist with a genuine desire to communicate scientific ideas as effectively as he can--and he succeeds. If Gould had led that elementary school field trip, We'd probably all be studying paleontology today...
Women's soccer vs. UMass, Soldiers Field...