I have devoured the first three volumes of Gould’s essays (Ever Since Darwin, The Panda’s Thumb and Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes), and I can totally recommend them. There’s a wonderful consistency there, even though he sometimes repeats himself (what can be read in one volume can be presented in another one but in a slightly different form and with some addition) but it still fosters a kind of evolutionary biological mindset that would benefit the entirety of our society. I think it’s still relevant to read them.

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Agreed, I find that calling books “essential” or “complete” is more a marketing move by big trade publishers such as the Dorling Kindersleys of this world, rather than an indication of how thorough such books are.

After reviewing Macroevolutionaries some time ago I have made it my mission to slowly collect the original hardback run of the ten collections of his essays. They are classics indeed, and I have shamefully read too few of them.

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When it comes to people’s misguided sense of goal-directedness of evolution by the way, I really have a feeling that reading S. J. Gould’s old essays would do them a lot of good. That kind of intelligent popular science literature (I mean his Natural History essays) can really easily explain a lot to complete laymen. Gould was constantly stressing that evolution has no goal, and no purpose.

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