Description: Gould's subject is nothing less than geology's signal contribution to human thought--the discovery of "deep time", a history so ancient that we can best comprehend it as metaphor.
Brief description: Stephen Jay Gould was Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University and Vincent Astor Visiting Professor of Biology at New York University. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, he received innumerable honors and awards and wrote many books, including Ontogeny and Phylogeny and Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (both from Harvard).
Review Quotes: This new work arises from Gould's delivery of the first series of Harvard-Jerusalem lectures presented at Hebrew University in April 1985. It is a highly individualistic document (Gould admits it to be 'a quest for personal understanding') and sometimes discursive (the book opens within the works of Sigmund Freud and closes outside the south front of the Cathedral of our Lady of Chartres), but it is always highly readable... Vastly entertaining and stimulating... Gould's subject here is geological time; he is concerned with aspects of the discovery of what John McPhee has appropriately termed 'deep time'... Underlying the entire book, however, lurks yet another and still deeper theme which should commend the work to a readership far wider than historians of ideas and of science. Gould both explicitly and implicitly demonstrates that science is a creation of human minds which are ever feeling the influence of pressures far removed from those natural phenomena that are laid out before the scientist's gaze.--Gordon L. Herries Davies "Nature"