"Representative Trantis"  wrote
>
> There are two major heavyweights in writings on evolutionary Biology,
> Richard Dawkins and Stephen J Gould.
>
Popularisers. Don't confuse with heavyweights. There is nothing wrong with
writing for a popular audience, but by itself it is only a minor
contribution to science.
>
> I have read much from the former and am wanting to expand onto the latter.
> Can someone please give me a rough idea about his books and what the
> overall theme of each one is, and where would be good places to start,
what
> I'm likely to get out of each and so on.
>
Gould tends to mix non-controversial evolutionary science with his own
idiosyncratic take on things, which is heavily flavoured with politics. So
he needs to be read carefully. A good place to start might be "Wonderful
Life", about the cambrian fossils of the Burgess shale. This is one of his
least political books, though his interpreation of Hallucinogenia has been
heavily criticised (the flexible appendages are now thought to be legs, and
the straight "legs" spines, so the creature is not nearly as
exotic as Gould
thinks).
If you like baseball you could try "Life's Grandeur". This is one of the
more controversial books. Another is the "Spandrels of San Marco". This
latter has the advantage that Daniel Dennett, in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea"
published a rebuttal, and Gould also wrote a reply.

 Gould, "The Exaptive Excellence of Spandrels as a Term and Prototype,"
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 94: 10750-10755.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=23474

So you can follow all of the debate.
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