Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.
Cargando... The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History (2000 original; edición 2001)por Stephen Jay Gould
Información de la obraLas piedras falaces de Marrakech : penúltimas reflexiones sobre historia natural por Stephen Jay Gould (2000)
Cargando...
Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Paperback ( ) Having finished this penultimate collection of Gould's essays, I realised I had inadvertently skipped a volume and should have read 'Dinosaur in a Haystack ' first. This was a slight relief after 'Eight Little Piggies ' which I found tedious as the essays were more readable and on more interesting topics. Most concern the history of science and how various theories on the development of life were abandoned, overtaken by events and new information though sometimes because the last holdouts against adoption of the newer theories died. A few veer off into short pieces on Mozart and baseball and I admit to skipping the latter and a long essay in the first half which I found totally tedious. One I enjoyed most was about Galileo - I hadn't known that he was one of a group of early scientific pioneers, though I was aware of his persecution by the Inquisition. But it was the death of the wealthy and powerful nobleman, leader of the group, struck down by a fever, that removed Galileo's protection from the Inquisition. Quite a few essays deal with the distortions of history whereby a 'heroic' version is preferred rather than the more low-key reality. At times, someone or something is popularly known about in a version completely opposite to what really happened. A case in point is the title essay, where a university professor was the victim of a hoax: contrary to the story published in many accounts over the centuries since, the hoax wasn't perpetrated by his students and he didn't die soon afterwards with his reputation in tatters. Gould unearthed the court papers from the professor's case against two of his colleagues who, fed up with his pomposity and his outmoded views, arranged for intricately carved stones to be planted where he would find them. They wanted him to make a fool of himself over the 'lying stones' but the joke went too far and their accomplice turned witness against them. It was they who were ruined, lost their posts and, in one case, died soon afterwards. He carried on at the university and lived for, I think, another fourteen years. One of Gould's heroes was Lavoisier and he returns again to him, this time Lavoisier's pioneering work in geology, cut short by his execution in revolutionary France. Altogether a much better read than the volume I read previously, although I did have to dip into it over an extended period and couldn't get on with all of it, so it's a respectable 3 stars from me. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
El exito obtenido por la Historia del tiempo, de Stephen Hawking, propicio la creacion, en 1991, de esta coleccion de divulgacion cientifica que fue dirigida durante largo tiempo por dos personas de formacion humanistica: de ahi ciertas contaminaciones al inicio de la coleccion. Sin embargo, cuando Jose Manuel Sanchez Ron se hizo cargo de ella, dio un aprobado a la gestion anterior. En esta coleccion, quiza la mas ambiciosa de todas las de divulgacion cientifica que se editan en espanol, se han publicado obras de Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, lan Stewart, Edward O. Wilson, Antonio Damasio, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Ilya Prigogine, John D. Barrow, Rita Levi Montalcini, Richard P. Feynman, Roger Penrose, Steven Weinberg, Rachel Carson, Francisco Garcia Olmedo, Francisco Yndurain o Jose Manuel Sanchez Ron. En este libro, Gould pasa revista a la paleontologia, muestra como Buffon, Lavoisier y Lamarck inventaron el estudio de la historia natural, senala algunos de los aspectos y los protagonistasdel &la" siglo de Darwin, describe las distintas expresiones de la evolucion a traves de las escalas de tamano y tiempo que se encuentran en la Naturaleza, o revisa algunas de las consecuencias sociales de la clencia. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)508Natural sciences and mathematics General Science Natural historyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
¿Eres tú?Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing. |