Harvard University Press Blog

Fall Reading List

Fall is the perfect time to settle in with a good book for our Executive Editor for Science, Janice Audet. Here she suggests some recent and forthcoming books she finds informative and fascinating.

The fall season shepherds in the beginning of a new school season, a time to begin or resume routines and learn new things. The fall season can also be a time to take stock, become introspective, and prepare for the indoor time ahead. For me it often means I tuck into a corner of the couch with a blanket, a cup of tea, and a book. Whatever the fall season means for you, we have a group of compelling science titles to meet your interest. These books guide us through the natural world, human behavior and the mind, and, if you just need a mental escape, an exploration of space. Open up one of these books and find a new connection with the world.

As the days grow shorter and the sunlight wanes, deciduous plants begin preparations for winter. As I’ve learned from Beronda Montgomery’s forthcoming book, Lessons from Plants, dropping leaves in autumn is a seasonal, energy-saving behavior. To prepare for winter days with less sunlight, plants reduce chlorophyll production for a quieter metabolic state. When the temperature drops and the amount of sunlight declines, the plant’s green pigments recede and other pigment colors emerge. The leaves transform into a fiery display of red and gold before drifting to the ground. The changing colors of the leaves is but one example of plants’ incredible ability to sense their environment. There is so much we can learn from plants on how to engage with our environments and adjust our behaviors accordingly. Just as plants thrive after a period of dormancy, we can also be more resilient if we take time to rest.

Without leaves and stems, humans are left to use our five senses to make sense of the world. One of the most crucial tools is as plain as the nose on our face: our sense of smell. But what does the nose tell the mind? How do we recognize certain scents? In other words, how does your mind know that you smell apple, not pumpkin, pie? If you pause and sniff, you’ll notice that everything around you has a smell. The room has the lingering scent of the last meal you ate, your sneakers have an aroma, and your clothes may smell like laundry detergent or something less pleasant! And to that point, why is smell often thought of as a highly subjective sensation, especially in comparison with vision? The same scent can cause a completely opposite reaction and opinion in two different people. In Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind, A. S. Barwich explores what the nose knows and asks us to reconsider our individual and collective ideas about the sense of smell. Consider, Barwich explains, that we don’t perceive smells in cognitive isolation. Our nose and our minds respond to contextual cues, as well as physiological and affective states. Would the aroma of garlic be as pleasing at 7 a.m. when you are drinking your coffee, as it would be at 6 p.m. when your stomach is rumbling with hunger for dinner? There is great complexity that underlies how people experience smells, and A. S. Barwich is an excellent guide for us to better understand our perceptions and consider our assumptions.

Our senses also play an important role in our detection of fear. Our ability to smell, see, and hear signs of danger has been carefully honed over time. It all began about 550 million years ago with the evolution of specialized nervous systems in worms. A cocktail of neurochemicals that selectively modulate and coordinate activity led to the worms taking control of responses to life threatening experiences. Whether it’s slithering away or balling up to hide, animals and humans have developed complex behaviors to survive. Dan Blumstein’s The Nature of Fear: Survival Lessons from the Wild shows us how we can learn how to better respond to fearful situations. For example, animal alarm calls offer early warnings about a predator—a cat is coming close. But if those calls become screams, the high-fidelity distortion escalates the warning. Screams may not necessarily be louder in volume, but they sound ‘noisier,’ with rapid amplitude and frequency fluctuations. This is the sound of fear. Through experimental research, Blumstein has found that such nonlinearities, like noise, tap into the human emotion of fear as well. Upon hearing this kind of sound, humans’ eyes widen rapidly and often the heartbeat increases. Horror films and haunted houses have used nonlinear, noisy sounds for years to frighten audiences, and in recent decades, political advertisements have also found them effective when attempting to discredit an opponent. Our biology heeds this noise and then signals the need to make a decision: fight or take flight.

Should we need to flee, we are fortunate that navigation skills are also deeply embedded in our biology. In prehistoric times we learned how to find our way over large distances, to the farthest regions of the planet, and this occurred through recognition of landmarks or from a memory associated with an experience. As Michael Bond writes in From Here to There, “the experience of a place can never be explained in coordinates or in terms of the firing patterns of your spatial neurons; you only really know where you are if you can tell a story about that place or remember how you found your way there.” While lately my navigation has been mostly limited to my local neighborhoods and bike trails, I’ve noticed how freeing it has been to leave the GPS or map apps behind. The spatial representations I carry in mind of these new neighborhoods and trails—the mental maps—are filled with turns in the road, houses with yellow exteriors, and soccer fields. I’ve found some comfort in Bond’s discussion: by navigating without technology’s assistance, I am bolstering my skills and cognitive health. As Bond states, “There is still a world out there to explore, and we need to find a way through it.”

But, if you’re feeling like you want to leave the world behind, I recommend a witty and compelling look at space travel, Christopher Wanjek’s Spacefarers. Most plans for space settlements look good in your imagination, on paper, or in an animated video. But what would it really take to live beyond Earth? On the Moon we would need to solve the problems of no breathable air, no atmospheric pressure, and no protective atmosphere, but it is relatively close to Earth and, as we’ve found, suitable for encampment. The red planet, Mars, is the most earthlike planet in the solar system and has the only other surface suitable for human settlement with our current technologies. But Mars also has no breathable air, little atmospheric pressure, and it would take anywhere from six to nine months to get there. Venus is nearly identical to Earth in air pressure and gravity if one stays above the Venusian clouds, but we may not want to subsist in balloon-lofted cities for the rest of our lives. How about Mercury then? There is unlimited solar energy which could provide for “green” living, but life would need to be subterranean since there are wild temperature fluctuations and a lack of breathable air or atmospheric pressure. Wanjek explores the moons of planets, orbital habitats or islands in the sky, searching among our solar system’s frontier for livable space. While settlements may be currently out of our reach, Wanjek gives us something to marvel at, aspire to, and dream about in the meantime.

Regardless of what this season means for you or where you are this fall, physically and mentally, I wish you rest, resilience, and travels into the far reaches of your mind. The universe is at our fingertips…and between the covers of a book.

(SPOILER ALERT) You Are Not An Ape!

Why did human evolution diverge from that of our closest primate relatives? What can studying apes tell us about early human social structures? What actually makes us different? In the richly illustrated and referenced Apes and Human Evolution, University of Chicago Professor of Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology Russell Tuttle synthesizes virtually all we know about such questions to produce an authoritative history of the evolution of us. Below, Tuttle outlines some of the major topics addressed in the book, which he’ll be presenting at Chicago’s Seminary Co-Op Bookstore on March 20th.

-----

In Apes and Human Evolution, I argue that since the 19th-century evolution revolution, theories of human evolution have been biased by folk beliefs about the meaning of individual, sexual and group differences in appearance and customs and by world events, like warfare, and personal experiences of theorists. As apes became subjects of detailed study their behavior served variously to reinforce or refute notions of close similarity between them and us.

Over the past 45 years scientists who trained in programs devoid of anthropology have developed models that emphasize increasingly close affinity between African apes and humans. Some of them claim that chimpanzees are actually people (Homo troglodytes and Homo paniscus) or that people are somewhat more cultured chimpanzees (Pan sapiens). Such claims, abetted by popular books and other media, exemplify poor evolutionary anthropology and are offensive toward the very communities and heads of state to whom we must appeal for scientifically informed preservation of apes and their habitats.

Although the old argument about which nonhuman primates are closer to humans has settled on the apes, many puzzles remain regarding the extent to which we can draw on them as models for specific aspects of our variable genomes, morphology and behavior. Rare major and many minor fossil discoveries underpin phylogenic models of primate evolution over a span of geologic time greater than sixty-five million years, but small samples of fragmentary specimens and very patchy spatiotemporal representation usually limit their informational value. Our Linnaean family, the Hominidae, contained a notable number and variety of species that is difficult to organize into phylogenic lineages, only one of which terminated in modern Homo sapiens.

Where Language Comes From

Where did language come from? The question’s not as old as you may think, and the answer’s not as clear. There are all sorts of theories as to how and why humans developed language and the cognitive capacities that enable its use, and thus far there’s been little to recommend any one postulate over the others. The publication of More than Nature Needs, though, represents a breakthrough that author Derek Bickerton details below.

-----

This year is the ninetieth anniversary of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), the country’s largest association of professional linguists. The event was, naturally, celebrated at the Society’s annual meeting on January 2-5 in Minneapolis with a commemorative symposium. Two issues were significantly absent: how language evolved, and where (if anywhere!) linguistics was going.

Granted, few linguists seemed even aware of language evolution until 1990, when Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom’s seminal paper Natural Language and Natural Selection and my book Language and Species were published. But since then, dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the topic have appeared. However, a substantial majority of them still come from writers in other disciplines, and perhaps that’s the problem. Thinking how language could have evolved entails dealing with data from several other sciences, and from its birth linguistics, balanced uneasily between science and humanities, has always been a somewhat cloistered discipline.

The Linguistic Society of Paris got things off to a bad start in 1866 by banning discussions of language origins from its proceedings. Since then, things have been worsened by the way schools and universities teach linguistics. In America a large majority of linguistics courses are limited to graduate students. Consequently while most college-educated persons have had significant exposure to physics or biology, linguistics remains terra incognita to all but a few. To the layman, a linguist means merely someone proficient in several languages; people at cocktail parties have no notion that to ask a linguist “How many languages do you speak?” is like asking a garage mechanic “How many cars do you own?”

For devotees of the Delphic injunction “Know thyself” (to be read, of course, as “Know what it means to be human” rather than “Know what it means to be Fred or Freda Smith”), these facts are tragic. A large part—maybe even the most crucial part—of being human is having language. Without it, how could we have science or religion, laws or codes of morality? Yet most books and articles on human evolution hardly mention language. Similarly, most books and articles on the evolution of language make no attempt to integrate it in the story of human evolution. As a result, we know more about the origins of the solar system or even the cosmos than we do about how we got language and all our other cognitive capacities. There are theories around, of course. But for most issues in science, there’s one theory that most people accept—the Nebular Hypothesis for the solar system, the Big Bang for the cosmos. For human language and cognition, theories are legion, and they’re all over the map, and it’s hard to see what would make any one of them preferable to others.

On the Organic Law of Change

This year marks the centennial of the passing of Alfred Russel Wallace, who at the time of his death in 1913 was the most famous naturalist in the world. We’re quite pleased to be publishing a beautifully produced facsimile edition of Wallace’s “Species Notebook” of 1855-1859, a never-before-published document that helps to reestablish Wallace as Darwin’s equal among the pioneers of evolution. In the brief excerpt below, James T. Costa gives a hint of why he undertook the project of annotating Wallace’s notebook; and below that, watch a lovely little paper-puppet animation of Wallace’s life and work.

-----

Wallace’s Species Notebook was well named: it is a window into Wallace’s early evolutionary thinking, encompassing the period in which his fertile mind was churning out paper after insightful paper as he searched for clues to the origin of species. The period of the notebook is, notably, punctuated by the publication of two watershed papers in the history of the field—Wallace’s Sarawak Law paper (1855) and Ternate essay (1858)—among others. In its notes, sketches, and narratives we see Wallace the philosopher and Wallace the collector: the arguments for his planned book on transmutation are found side by side with specimen label designs; his discussions of the nature of species and varieties, the meaning of fossils, struggle in nature, or the branching history of life all share space with notes on the cost of rice, lists of books to read, a proposed remedy for the proliferation of taxonomic synonyms, and a practical scheme for a library of natural history. Then there are the myriad collection notes, from the hunting of orangutans and birds of paradise to his catches of curious beetles and beautiful butterflies.

Wallace is decidedly underappreciated relative to his illustrious colleague Charles Darwin, all but unknown outside of scholarly circles and even little known within, and this despite his being not only the co-discoverer of one of humanity’s greatest insights into the workings of nature—evolution by natural selection—but also the founder of the modern discipline of zoogeography. He made fundamental contributions in evolutionary biology, biogeography, ornithology, and entomology, and weighed in on a host of social issues of his day in a continuous stream of scientific papers, essays, interviews, and books. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to appreciate that history, in some respects, has not been just to Wallace.

That his gifts and contributions are not more widely appreciated today is our loss, for Wallace’s story is nothing short of epic, his achievements all the more poignant for their realization against all odds. Wallace’s unique blend of pluck, perseverance, and creativity were combined with the temperament of a philosopher, the sense of wonder of a child, and more than a dash of genius. This centennial year marking the naturalist’s death in 1913 offers an opportunity for both celebration and reflection on the man and his accomplishments, and there is so much to celebrate and reflect upon. In this regard Wallace’s Species Notebook is an unparalleled lens through which the scope of his early evolutionary thought is seen to advantage, in the context of life in the field where the ideas were conceived. It is in the spirit of enabling the reader to accompany Wallace on his journeys both physical and intellectual that my annotations are offered.

 

Robert Bellah, 1927-2013

The eminent American sociologist of religion Robert Bellah has passed away at 86. He was an influential figure in the field and beyond for fifty years, with a career highlighted by his two classic essays of the mid-1960s—“Religious Evolution” and “Civil Religion in America”—his immensely successful co-authored Habits of the Heart in 1985, and 2011’s Religion in Human Evolution, a work widely considered his magnum opus. We had the great good fortune of working with Bellah on Religion in Human Evolution, and this year selected it as one of the hundred significant titles with which to mark our centennial.

Upon publication of Religion in Human Evolution, Bellah sat for a long interview with The Atlantic, explaining the book and his hopes for it. The work itself, he noted, was “a plea for rooting ourselves in an understanding of the deep past,” the one thing that could save us from the perils of the present:

I think our cultural change has sped up to the point where it really is surpassing our evolutionary capacities for dealing with it. We need to be aware of where we came from, because that tells us who we are. And there are things that don’t change, there are things we need to hold on to. We think, criticize, reapply, but we can’t imagine that the latest technological development is going to solve everything. We need to understand the past out of which we came and in particular the great Axial traditions which are still alive to us. Good philosophers read Plato not as historical texts of the past but as words that speak to them and have something to say to them. Aristotle’s ethics are taken seriously as one of the great alternatives to philosophical ethics today. So these Axial figures are still around and may help us. We certainly need help, as we don’t seem to be doing very well.

Bellah also had an in-depth conversation about the book with Nathan Schneider of The Immanent Frame, which has hosted a series of rich considerations of Religion in Human Evolution since its publication.

In the coming days and weeks much will be said about the extraordinary career of Robert Bellah. Work your way through some of the discussion of this final great book for a sense of the last extraordinary things Bellah worked to say to us.

To Throw Is Human

In a much-discussed paper published in this week’s Nature, a team of scientists unveiled the findings of their study of the human throwing motion. The study’s authors, a group that includes Daniel Lieberman, author of The Evolution of the Human Head, sought to uncover how it is that humans are so much better at throwing than other animals. Adult chimpanzees, for example, are much stronger than humans but their tosses top out around 20 mph. Young humans can easily exceed that rate, and some major league pitchers are routinely clocked at over 100 mph.

By making 3-D recordings of athletes, Lieberman et al were able to break down the throwing motion in a way that’d never been done before. Analysis of that footage revealed the crucial part played by the human shoulder, the ligaments and tendons of which are able to store elastic energy as an arm is cocked in preparation to throw and then release it in the arm’s ensuing forward motion.

From NPR’s coverage of the study:

Human shoulders are broader than our primate cousins’, and our shoulder blades are located along the flat of the upper back, explains Daniel Lieberman, a physical anthropologist at Harvard University and a co-author of the study. The shoulder blades of chimps on the other hand, are positioned more along the side of the body, he says. “If your shoulders are more vertically oriented—like in a chimpanzee—then the muscles can’t generate that much power.”

“Our earliest ancestors also had chimp-like shoulders,” Lieberman says. But evidence from two fossils suggests that may have changed with Homo erectus, a species that lived about 2 million years ago. The fossils Lieberman and his colleagues examined had shoulders resembling a modern day human’s.

Homo erectus shared two more features with humans that Lieberman and his team think crucial to the ability to throw with power: a slender, flexible waist, which allows us to twist the torso in relation to our hips and legs, and a twist in the shape of the humerus, the bone that connects the shoulder to the elbow. These features “evolved bit by bit,” Lieberman says, “but they appear all in a package in Homo erectus.”

He and his team think the ability to throw also gave this ancestral species an evolutionary advantage. “We don’t have fangs. We don’t have claws and massive paws,” Lieberman notes. Without such built-in weapons, the ability to hurl objects with force and precision must have allowed Homo erectus to become a more efficient hunter.

Lieberman’s The Evolution of the Human Head is one of the 100 significant works we’ve chosen to highlight as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of HUP. Over at our centennial site, where we’ve been posting excerpts from these 100 titles, you can read a section of Lieberman’s book that really makes clear how this new study of human throwing ability fits with his work on the head and on running.

Consider the Cuttlefish

In the following excerpt from Concealing Coloration in Animals, new this month, Judy Diamond and Alan B. Bond describe the amazingly adaptive camouflage of the cuttlefish.

-----

Concealment is often at least as much an effect of pattern as of color. Animal coloration usually appears as distinctive markings like the narrow stripes on grassland birds and insects, the spots on jungle cats, the leaf-sized patches of muted color on animals of the forest floor, or the fine mottled speckles on sandpipers and bottom-dwelling fishes. Such patterns echo the texture of the environment, matching the animal’s surroundings in the size and shape of color patches, as well as in the particular hues and intensities of coloration. To envision how pattern contributes to concealment, think of a digital image of an animal against its background. The image is composed of pixels of specified colors, and adjacent pixels that are similar in color will appear to the eye as patches of varying size. How well the animal blends into its surroundings is a function of the match between the color of the patches in the background and those on the animal, but blending in is also affected by the relative sizes of the patches, regardless of their color. Animals process these two kinds of visual information, color and patch size, in separate parts of their nervous system, and the information is subsequently integrated to assess the degree of resemblance to the background.

How animals integrate the information about color and patch size is most impressively illustrated by cuttlefish. Cuttlefish, which are free-swimming relatives of octopus and squid, are masters at generating patterns to match their environment. They have large, complex, sensitive eyes and a sophisticated control system that allows them to rapidly modify the patterns they display. When they detect changes in their surroundings, they can change the arrangement of light and dark patches on their body accordingly. At the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in Massachusetts, Roger Hanlon studied how cuttlefish create their remarkable patterns. In one experiment, Hanlon and his colleagues placed cuttlefish in transparent aquaria on top of complex backgrounds, such as checkerboards, stripes, or spots. They photographed the cuttlefish to determine how well they matched the background patterns, and they timed how rapidly the animals could change from one pattern to another.

The change was immediate. Hanlon and his team found that cuttlefish use three major body pattern types for camouflage: uniform patterns on backgrounds with little or no contrast; mottled patterns on substrates with small, highly contrasting patches like small checkerboards; and disruptive patterns that break up their outline on substrates with high contrast and long, defined edges, like large checkerboards. In the lab, cuttlefish will camouflage on any substrate, natural or artificial, regardless of whether or not there is a predator in the tank.

In Loving Memory of Lonesome George

Upon learning of the death of Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, we invited comment from Craig Stanford, Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at USC and author of The Last Tortoise. His post is below.

-----

If Lonesome George had been human, his obituary would have read:

George passed away peacefully on June 24, 2012, at the age of approximately 100. He was born on Pinta Island around 1912 and lived there until 1971, when he moved to the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island, Ecuador. He served his country for decades as the greatest tourist attraction in the Galapagos Islands, and was visited by tens of thousands of tourists each year. He dies leaving no surviving descendants.

That last sentence is the one that matters. Jorge Solitario, or Lonesome George, was the last surviving member of his race, the subspecies of giant Galapagos tortoise known as Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni, the Pinta Island tortoise. The main islands of the Galapagos archipelago each have or had their own distinctive giant tortoise, molded by natural selection to be adapted to the terrain and the foods of its island. George’s subspecies inhabited a small northerly island that is fairly barren, rocky, and forbidding, but which once had a large tortoise population. The whaling ships of the 18th century made short work of the islands, collecting hundreds of thousands of the animals to be stored alive in the cargo hold and butchered as needed for fresh meat during their long voyages. We estimate the pre-whaling tortoise population of the entire Galapagos chain to have been 250,000-300,000 tortoises. Perhaps 15,000 live on the islands today; at least three islands have now lost their tortoises altogether.

In 1971, seventy years after the last tortoise on Pinta was thought to have died, a biologist visiting the island spotted Lonesome George ambling across the dry landscape. Not realizing the significance of the sighting, a year passed before another biologist learned that the Pinta race was not quite extinct. Expeditions were mounted to Pinta to search for George. A large tortoise on a small island might not seem a difficult target, but only through much luck was George found. He was transported to the Darwin Station by boat, and remained there for more than forty years. All subsequent attempts to find more Pinta Island tortoises failed. For years he shared his pen with two females from the slopes of Wolf Volcano in the northernmost part of Isabela Island. But George showed no interest in having sex with them. Later, he was paired with females of other, similar subspecies from the islands, and in recent years three clutches of eggs were produced that he had fathered. But none of the clutches hatched. George was likely infertile, either through age, or just very bad luck.

The story of the Pinta Island tortoise does not quite end there. Recent genotyping of tortoises from around the Galapagos has turned up at least one tortoise, from Wolf Volcano on Isabela Island, that is fifty percent Pinta. It is likely the progeny of a Wolf tortoise and a Pinta tortoise that ended up on Isabela. Perhaps ocean currents carried it there, or more likely, he or his mother was dropped overboard by an inept crew of whalers. Only a tiny fraction of the tortoises of the islands have been genotyped, and there lies some faint hope that another male and female of the Pinta Island tortoises live still.

It is always sad and disturbing when humans drive a species into extinction. But extinction is rarely so clear-cut as with the tortoises of Pinta. One last surviving member lived on and on, reminding us of our past sins to his race and beckoning us to try one more time to save them. In the case of Lonesome George, it was too little, too late.

Lonesome George

Food and Memory

John S. Allen’s The Omnivorous Mind is an examination of the cultural and biological truths revealed by our evolving relationship with food. From the diets of our earliest ancestors, to cooking’s role in the evolution of the human brain, to the preoccupations of contemporary foodies, Allen’s take on how and what we eat is consistently revelatory. Below, Allen looks at the powerful role food plays in human memory. Also below, listen to a conversation with Allen on a recent episode of our podcast. 

-----

Not that long ago, at the counter of a gas station out in the country, something yellow and red caught my eye—it was a Bit-O-Honey candy bar wrapper. I had not had a Bit-O-Honey bar for nearly 40 years, having moved as a child from Bit-O-Honey’s midwest base to California. So I bought one. As I unwrapped and ate it, certain memories quickly came back to me: the difficulty of getting the inside wrapping paper off the sticky taffy, the little rectangles meant to be broken off one by one, the initial hard chewiness that always made me wonder if it was stale, and finally, the honeyed flavor of the taffy itself, offset by little bits of nut. The memories did not stop there, however: in an instant, I was transported back in time to the back seat of my parents’ car, looking out the window at the apparently endless rows of corn stalks that passed by for hour after hour as we drove down highways and interstates. I thought about AM radio and the backs of my parents’ heads. I finished my chunk of Bit-O-Honey, got in my car, and drove back to the present.

We all have our food memories, some good and some bad. The taste, smell, and texture of food can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back memories not just of eating food itself but also of place and setting. Food is an effective trigger of deeper memories of feelings and emotions, internal states of the mind and body. So my Bit-O-Honey experience is not all that unusual. Search for websites with the word candy combined with vintage, retro, or nostalgia, and it becomes readily apparent that many people use candy as a pathway to the past. But why should this be the case?

 

There are several reasons. First, evolution has seen to it that food in general may be a privileged target of memory in the brain. There is a part of the brain called the hippocampus (one in each hemisphere) that is critical for memory. The hippocampus is particularly important for forming long-term, declarative memories—those that can be consciously recalled and which contribute to the autobiographies that we all carry around in our heads. The hippocampus is also important for spatial memories, which may be its primary role for animals that do not possess language. The hippocampus has strong connections with parts of the brain that are important for emotion and for smell. This may explain why emotional memories can be so vivid or why certain smells trigger a sense of recall in us even before we consciously remember an event.

The Stephen Jay Gould Mosaic

We’ve just released new paperback editions of a collection of Stephen Jay Gould’s most fascinating and introspective essays, with cover designs that reflect the unity of science to which Gould devoted his life and writing. By themselves, each cover contains an element out of context, tough to understand on its own. Together, the covers form an image that makes sense.

Here they are, arranged in order at our warehouse, ready to ship:

And then here, on display at Reiter’s Books in DC:

The books in this collection are some of Gould’s finest, all displaying his typical erudition, warmth, and whimsy. They include Dinosaur in a Haystack, Full House, Questioning the Millennium, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and Diet of Worms, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, and I Have Landed.

So much of Gould’s work was dedicated to showing why a more accurate way of understanding our world is to look at a given subject within its own context, and not as the progress of an average value or single thing. These new covers, then, are intended to highlight the complexity of context, to demonstrate how much more we understand when we stop trying to look at things in isolation.

Our thanks to Sam Potts for the great design. And, if you all see a little room to grow in that mosaic, you’re not wrong. More to come!