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Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship.
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Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish.
#BLIND CLOCKMAKER FULL#
A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens.
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Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A superb exposition of Darwinian theory, but one that misses its aim of laying to rest the perennial doubts about how, exactly, our world came to be.Ī Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
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Dawkins' argument, brilliantly rendered, is that of the zoologist only, dealing solely with physical form nowhere does the author tackle the mind, a phenomenon perhaps not quite so easily attributed to randomness, and nowhere does he convincingly demonstrate that random evolution is the only viable explanation. But in stating that ".all mammals-humans, whales, duck-billed platypuses, and the rest-are exactly equally close to fish, since all mammals are linked to fish via the same common ancestor," he unwittingly exposes his defense's Achilles' heel: humans are reading this book, not platypuses. He argues particularly against the punctuated equilibrium theories so popular among today's evolutionists. Through computer calculations, a lucid discussion of the nature of chance, and an insistence on a new sense of time scale, Dawkins makes his case for nature's complexity as the inevitable result of an untold number of minute, random mutations interacting over an almost unimaginable length of time. Troubled by the persistent resistance to orthodox Darwinism from creationists, revisionist scientists, and the general public, Dawkins sets out to show how Darwin provided "the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence." He begins by identifying three sources for the resistance: a misunderstanding of evolution's randomness a misperception of the enormous time span within which evolution has worked and humanity's propensity to presume conscious design behind every complex object (hence the title). A zoologist/author ( The Selfish Gene) defends Darwin with passion and elegance, but fails to wholly persuade.