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 with themes familiar to Gould's writing: evolution and its teaching, science biography, probability, and iconoclasm.
Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
---|---|
Publisher | Harmony Books |
Publication date | April 11, 2000 |
Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
Pages | 384 |
ISBN | 0-609-60142-3 |
OCLC | 59557303 |
508 21 | |
LC Class | QH45.5 .G74 2000 |
Preceded by | Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms |
Followed by | I Have Landed |
Reviews
- Book review - by Christine Kenneally, The New York Times
- A Gouldian Valediction, Almost - by Henry Gee, Nature
- Essay Summaries - by Lawrence N. Goeller
- Book review - by Jim Walker
gollark: For purposes only, you understand.
gollark: There are lots of *imaginable* and *claimed* gods, so I'm saying "gods".
gollark: So basically, the "god must exist because the universe is complex" thing ignores the fact that it... isn't really... and that gods would be pretty complex too, and does not answer any questions usefully because it just pushes off the question of why things exist to why *god* exists.
gollark: To randomly interject very late, I don't agree with your reasoning here. As far as physicists can tell, while pretty complex and hard for humans to understand, relative to some other things the universe runs on simple rules - you can probably describe the way it works in maybe a book's worth of material assuming quite a lot of mathematical background. Which is less than you might need for, say, a particularly complex modern computer system. You know what else is quite complex? Gods. They are generally portrayed as acting fairly similarly to humans (humans like modelling other things as basically-humans and writing human-centric stories), and even apart from that are clearly meant to be intelligent agents of some kind. Both of those are complicated - the human genome is something like 6GB, a good deal of which probably codes for brain things. As for other intelligent things, despite having tons of data once trained, modern machine learning things are admittedly not very complex to *describe*, but nobody knows what an architecture for general intelligence would look like.
gollark: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/348702212110680064/896356765267025940/FB_IMG_1633757163544.jpg
External links
- Book excerpt - Random House Press
- Profile Page (with introduction) - Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive
- Video interview about the book - Charlie Rose
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