SOURCE: Osman, Tony. “The Evitability of Man.” Spectator 267, no. 8512 (31 August 1991): 24-5.

In the following review, Osman examines the parallels that Gould creates between his discussion of evolution and events in his personal life in Bully for Brontosaurus.

You can think of this collection of essays [Bully for Brontosaurus]—articles reprinted from the magazine Natural History—as a series of conversations with Gould. This is a privilege. He is a distinguished scientist—he was the joint author of a theory that showed how evolution must have occurred; but more to the point for these essays—conversations—he combines this with a broad education outside his own specialty. Gould sings in a choir, knows who Kropotkin was (a turn-of-the-century theorist of anarchism), and recognises that a QWERTY keyboard on a computer and appendicitis in humans are both evidence for, admittedly different, kinds of evolution. As well as talking to us...