I must say I am quite impressed by the uncovering through reading The Structure of Evolutionary Theory of the way that Darwin has treated historical and fossil research. In a sense Darwin uses a technique very similar to the way that Astronomers use in order to uncover the history and evolution of stars. Since the lifetime of a star is incredibly larger than the time scale of a human life astronomers use ’snapshots’ of stars that are currently available, which they know that have the same age (globular clusters), and draw their differences in evolution depending on their mass and luminocity thus plotting the famous Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

Darwin understands the massive gaps in historical evidence and fossils and uses the present state of organisms around various parts of the world in order to plot a snapshot of evolution, as an aid in the Evolutionary theory argument.

The abstraction involved in this is rather amazing.

(page 106)

I have decided to start this blog as an aid to reading Stephen J. Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory in a similar fashion to the way I had used http://againsttheday.wordpress.com to assist me in reading Thomas Pynchon’s against the day. I am not a biologist and I always felt that I had a massive gap in my knowledge of evolutionary theory. My choice of Stephen J. Gould’s book was done based on both the status of Stephen J. Gould as an evolutionary biologist (paleontologist) and on the fact that The Structure of Evolutionary theory has gathered a rather large amount of historical facts in building the ‘one book argument’ that comes in the context of evolutionary theory. I do though realize the fact that the book is a proponent of the punctuated equilibria theory which by no means is the standard in the biology paradigm.

Thoughts, ideas and misconceptions in this blog are entirely my own and reflect my own projections as I tackle this difficult task of reading this 1500 page book. I do not claim by any means to be an expert – in anything – but I hope to have this record of my readings as a future reference for anything that I may need to check in the future.

Unfortunately I am already in page 100 as I start this blog so I will not comment on the first 100 pages. fortunately though, a large part of these pages is a summary of all future chapters which I hope to cover in this blog.

The journey begins… Single up all lines.