Eight Little Piggies

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.

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 book deploys this, which is one of the oddities of history.No one illuminates the wonderful workings of the natural world as perceptively and enjoyably as Stephen Jay Gould. In this volume of reflections on biology, history and culture, Gould addresses the burning issues of ecological crisis and contemporary species extinctions as well as giving us fascinating insights into evolution - such as the fact that the first land vertebrates had up to eight toes on each foot, and that the ichthyosaur had a very significant kink in its tail.