Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Essays on Natural History

By: Stephen Gould

Narrated by: Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

For more than twenty-five years, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a column called “The View of Life” for Natural History magazine. More than twenty entries from that column comprise this collection, which includes such essays as “Boyle's Law and Darwin's Details,” “Brotherhood by Inversion (or, As the Worm Turns),” “Darwin's American Soulmate,” “The Diet of Worms and Defenestration of Prague,” “The Dodo in the Caucus Race,” “Reversing Established Orders,” “A Seahorse for All Races,” “The Upwardly Mobile Fossils of Leonardo's Living Earth,” and “Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?”

©1998 Stephen Jay Gould (P)1998 Phoenix Books, Inc.

An enjoyable read for select tastes...

If you could sum up Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms in three words, what would they be?

I'm a fan of SJ Gould and I like his work. This was a good reading of his work.

Thoughtful and entertaining

Written by the brilliant and entertaining Stephen Jay Gould, and narrated by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., it's hard to go wrong. This book delivers Gould's insightful commentaries on evolutionary biology, begining with a discussion of art, science, and the real reasons why Leonardo daVinci wrote extensively on marine fossils found in montane regions. An essay on the Diet of Worms leads into the defenestration (that is, "chucking out the window") of religious leaders, and on to why it's a pity that Columbus didn't drop a few snails in his pocket, that we might know with more certainty where he actually landed (and, incidentally, instigated the genocidal campaign that wiped out the friendly natives who greeted him). A look into the minds of sloths and vultures and the early naturalists who held them in contempt comes near the end, and the book concludes with an essay on science itself.