Stephen Jay Gould

Are Dinosaurs Dumb? No!

The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould

June 10, 2025 by esmemoria Leave a Comment

I am, as several other essays emphasize, an advocate of the position that science is not an objective, truth-directed machine, but a quintessentially human activity, affected by passions, hopes, and cultural biases. I read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man a few months ago, and mentioned to my brother that while I enjoyed it, for some reason I thought it was going to be a collection of science essays on a variety of topics. My brother promptly sent me Gould’s The Panda’s Thumb: More […]

An Argument Against Immutability and Scientific Racism

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

April 18, 2025 by esmemoria Leave a Comment

Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man is an in-depth analysis and refutation of biological determinism–what Gould calls “a theory of limits” and is a “general proposition [that] holds that society follows nature, and that social rank reflects innate worth.” In the discussion of intelligence, biological determinism and the hereditarian theory of IQ has led to classist and racist beliefs that there is such a thing as an inherited, immutable intelligence factor, and that no environmental changes or study can affect it. The idea propagated […]

Mixed Grill

Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

Who will Pay Reparations on my Soul? by Jesse McCarthy

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff

Dreamland by Sam Quinones

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Necronomicon by HP Lovecraft

Black Flags, Blue Waters by Eric Jay Dolin

The Iliad by Homer

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Whores for Gloria by William T Vollmann

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Celebration by Harry Crews

A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah

October 18, 2021 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

Stony the Road – 5/5 Stars Yet another book that presented answers to questions in part, but mostly added to my reading list, this slight book by Henry Louis Gates Jr. was written to support a documentary and to provide additional resources, analysis, and insight into the post-Civil War Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods in the US. For a more robust understanding of the Reconstruction era, Gates points us to WEB Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, which was one of the first extensive histories […]

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