Creation and Evolution: Myth or Reality

New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. First Edition. Hardcover. Near fine/Very good. The paleontologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History explains evolutionary theory for a non-scientific audience.

199 pages. First edition (first printing). A near fine copy in a very good dust jacket with a couple of tears to the top edge.

This is a scientific association copy of the first rank. Newell inscribed this book to his most famous graduate student, Stephen Jay Gould: "To Steve Gould my very best wishes and gratitude for showing the way! Norman D. Newell 1/25/83." Newell was Gould's dissertation advisor at Columbia University and was closely affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History, for whose magazine Steven Jay Gould wrote most of the essays that were collected in his books. The inscription likely refers to Gould's decades-long efforts to explain evolution and its concepts to a general audience, through his books and lectures.

In one of Gould's best books for a non-scientific audience, Wonderful Life (dedicated, by the way, to Norman Newell), Gould writes, "I was Norman Newell's student, and everything that I ever do, as long as I live, will be read as his legacy" (chapter III, Act 3, "Mentors and Students").