Dimensions
129 x 198 x 30mm
This is the sixth in the great series of essays that the world's best science writer has produced. They range over a vast field, from history to the latest theories in biology, from controversies over palaeontology to the origins of language.
The title is a pun, and as always with Gould the joke has a point that illustrates the largest pattern of life's history. For millennia the animals that populated the earth had four toes on each foot, or six. If evolution had taken a tiny shift - if our ancestors had inherited a couple of genes in a different form - our canonical number, based on our fingers and toes, might be eight instead of ten. This is just one of the oddities of history that Gould deploys in this wonderfully readable book.
