Stephen Gould - Leonardos Mountain of Clams (pdf)

In this essay collection, Stephen Jay Gould examines the puzzles and paradoxes great and small that build nature's and humanity's diversity and order.

He formulates a humanistic natural history, one that considers how humans have learned to study and understand nature, rather than a history of nature itself. And through short biographies, Gould depicts how scholars grapple with problems of science and philosophy and illuminates the interaction of the outer world with the unique human ability to struggle to understand the whys and wherefores of existence