Eight Little Piggies

Part 1 The scale of extinction: unenchanted evening; the golden rule - a proper scale for our environmental crisis; losing a limpet. Part 2 Odd bits of vertebrate anatomy: eight little piggies; bent out of shape; an earful of jaw; full of hot air. Part 3 Vox populi: evolving visions - men of the thirty-third division - an essay on integrity, Darwin and Paley meet the invisible hand, more light on leaves; time in Newton's century - on rereading Edmund Halley, fall in the house of Ussher. Part 4 Musings: clouds of memory - Muller bros. moving and storage, shoemaker and morning star; authenticity - in touch with Walcott, counters and cable cars. Part 5 Human nature: Mozart and modularity; the moral state of Tahiti - and of Darwin; ten thousand acts of kindness; the declining empire of apes. Part 6 Grand patterns of evolution: two steps towards a general theory of life's complexity - the wheel of fortune and the wedge of progress, tires to sandals; new discoveries in the earliest history of multicellular life - defending the heretical and the superfluous, the reversal of "Hallucigenia". Part 7 Revising and extending Darwin: what the immaculate pigeon teaches the burdened mind; the great seal principle; a dog's life in Galton's polyhedron; betting on chance - and no fair peeking. Part 8 Reversals - fragments of a book not written: shields of expectation - and actuality; a tale of three pictures; a foot soldier for evolution.