"It is fascinating to learn that, like a kind of giant Rashomon, a text can be read with perfect sense and coherence in so many uncorrelated, truly orthogonal, and sometimes even contradictory ways. . . . I learned a great deal from these approaches, and had enormous fun seeing how a product of my own could be analyzed for itself, quite apart from my conscious intent."—Stephen Jay Gould
"Understanding Scientific Prose does what no other book does: it analyzes in detail a scientific text by a scientist who is also a supremely skilled rhetor. Stephen Jay Gould is the equal, indeed the superior—in depth, breadth, and humanistic vision—of his nearest nineteenth-century counterpart, Thomas Henry Huxley. In bringing a good baker’s dozen of perspectives together, all concentrated on one document, the book is particularly valuable."—John A. Campbell, University of Washington
Product Description
Examining science as a rhetorical enterprise, this book seizes upon one scientific essay—"The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme"—and probes it from many angles. Written by prominent evolutionary theorists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin and first published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1979, the "Spandrels" article is both serious science and vivid prose.
The essays here do not comment on the scientific merit of Gould and Lewontin’s essay, but rather use it as an example to demonstrate and test new analytical approaches to scientific rhetoric. Applying methods inspired by Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ferdinand de Saussure, and others, the contributors employ a range of interpretive strategies: from postmodernist, intertextualist, feminist, structuralist, historicist, sociolinguistic, dramatist, and deconstructionist approaches to readings based on reader-response theory, protocol analysis, the sociology of science, and classical rhetorical theory.
Stephen Jay Gould submits his own retrospective in the final chapter, remarking on the genesis and reception of "Spandrels" and on the critical analyses of his work gathered here. The full text of "The Spandrels of San Marco" is reproduced as an appendix.
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