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My favourite literary critique comes from the little girl in James Thurber’s The Darlings at the Top oj the Stairs: ‘This book tells me more about penguins than I wanted to know’. My daughter Clio, who learned the alphabet by typing words for the first draft of this book, has similar sentiments about the present work, and she suggests that my next effort ‘should be quite short, maybe four pages’. However, this is an epistemological work, in a very general sense. It deals not only with the ‘facts’ of evolutionary biology and its interpretive logic, but also considers intellectual progress and prejudice, soul-searching and gullibility, and heuristic induction and wishful thinking; which may be more about penguins than students accustomed to cut-and-dried assertions, and teachers who cut and dry, might want to know. Some of my penguins, progenitors of significant epistemological lines, have been detailed down to the last feather, including a number of birds that by conventional wisdom, ‘nobody takes seriously’. Some are sketches copied from other naturalists; others are phantoms that cry out for an incarnation denieci by a combination of accident and time constraints. Students in my courses in comparative physiology and the history and philosophy of biology have been the main sounding boards for my ideas. Richard Ring has always listened with polite interest when I have expatiated.
