The Lying Stones of Marrakech

The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2000) is the ninth volume of collected essays by the Harvard paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould. The essays were culled from his monthly column "The View of Life" in Natural History magazine, to which Gould contributed for 27 years. The book deals, in typically discursive fashion, with themes familiar to Gould's writing: evolution and its teaching, science biography, probabilities and common sense.

Contents

• Preface
  1. Episodes in the Birth of Paleontology
     The Nature of Fossils and the History of the Earth
     1. The Lying Stones of Marrakech
     2. The Sharp-Eyed Lynx, Outfoxed by Nature
     3. How the Vulva Stone Became a Brachiopod
  2. Present at the Creation
     How France's Three Finest Scientists Established Natural History in an Age of Revolution
     4. Inventing Natural History in Style
     5. The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates [1]
     6. A Tree Grows in Paris: Lamark's Division of Worms and Revision of Nature [2]
  3. Darwin's Century—And Ours
     Lessons from Britain's Four Greatest Victorian Naturalists
     7. Lyell's Pillars of Wisdom [3]
     8. A Sly Dullard Named Darwin: Recognizing the Multiple Facets of Genius
     9. An Awful Terrible dinosaurian Irony
     10. Second-Guessing the Future
  4. Six Little Pieces on the Meaning and Location of Excellence
     Substrate and Accomplishment
     
     11. Drink Deep, or Taste Not the Pierian Spring
     12. Requiem Eternal
     13. More Power to Him

     De Mortuis When Truly Bonum
     

     14. Bright Star Among Billions
     15. The Glory of His Time and Ours
     16. This Was a Man
  5. Science in Society
     17. A tale of two work sites
     18. The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W
     19. Dolly's Fashion and Louis's Passion
     20. Above All, Do No Harm
  6. Evolution at all Scales
     21. Of Embryos and Ancestors
     22. The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant
     23. Room of One's Own

• Illustration Credits
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews

• Book review - by Christine Kenneally, The New York Times
• Book review - by Jim Walker

External links

• Book excerpt - Random House Press
• Video interview about the book - Charlie Rose

v • d • e Books by Stephen Jay Gould Ontogeny and Phylogeny • Ever Since Darwin • The Panda's Thumb • The Mismeasure of Man • Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes • The Flamingo's Smile • Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle • An Urchin in the Storm • Wonderful Life • Bully for Brontosaurus • Eight Little Piggies • Dinosaur in a Haystack • Full House • Questioning the Millennium • Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms • Rocks of Ages • The Lying Stones of Marrakech • The Structure of Evolutionary Theory • I Have Landed • The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox