The Missing Links

In this landmark book, the UN-commissioned Gender Working Group outlines its policy proposals for national science and technology programs. Its goal is to ensure that women and men have equal access to and benefit equally from science and technology. The proposals are supported by essays written by distinguished scholars and experts.

When a group of middle-class buddies obsessed with golf set up a bet to see who can finagle their way onto the nearby private course, their friendship is tested in ways they had never expected in this humorous novel from Rick Reilly, one of America’s most popular sportswriters. Missing Links is the story of four middle class buddies who live outside of Boston and for years have been 1) utterly obsessed with golf and 2) a regular foursome at Ponkaquoque Municipal Course and Deli, not so fondly known as Ponky, the single worst golf course in America. Just adjacent to these municipal links lies the Mayflower Country Club, the most exclusive private course in all of Boston and a major needle in their collective sides. Frustrated by the Mayflower's finely manicured greens and snooty members, three of Ponky's finest and most courageous—Two Down, Dannie, and Stick—set up a bet: $1,000.00 apiece, and the first man to somehow finagle his way on to the Mayflower course takes all. Lying, cheating, and forgery are encouraged, to put it mildly, and with the constant heckling and rare aid of Chunkin' Charlie, Hoover, and Bluto--a few more of Ponky's elite--the games begin. One of the three will eventually play the Mayflower's course, but their friendships--and everything else--will change as various truths unravel and the old Ponky starts looking like the home they never should have left.

We look for missing links in the sciences and humanities, but the essential missing link - metaphor - is always in front of us. In Missing Link, Jeffery Donaldson unites literary criticism and evolutionary and cognitive science to show how metaphor has been with us since the beginning of time as a seed in the nature of things. With examples from centuries of poets, critics, philosophers, and scientists, he details how metaphor is a chemistry, an exchange of energies forming and dissolving, and an openness in the spaces between things. He considers the ways in which DNA learns how to liken things that have been, how mutation makes errors and then tries them on, and how evolution is hypothesis - nature's way of "thinking more." The mind is a matrix of relations: neural synapses cascade into ever-changing pathways and patterns. Metaphor is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It is the unbroken thread between matter and spirit. Whether offering analysis of a turn of phrase or chemical reaction, Missing Link presents a vision of literature that is also a vision of the cosmos, and vice versa. It enters the debate between evolution and religion, and challenges scientists, literary theorists, and religious advocates to rethink the relations between their disciplines.

This book introduces newcomers to the field of evolutionary science with an accessible discussion of basic scientific practices, rock and fossil dating techniques and schools of classification.

Written with candor and the wisdom of experience, this account tells of struggles with substance--and with self--and of strength both in and out of the ring for the wrestler known as The Missing Link.