Charles Dexter WardCritiques

Human evolution is not an evolution of progress and greater and greater perfection. The evolutionary tree is not a linear inevitable trajectory, but rather a tangled bush of fits and starts and dead ends and loss and happenstance. Nothing in it demands that we be special as a species.

Eine kurz(weilig)e Geschichte der Lebens auf der Erde.
Auch für Laien gut zu lesen und zu verstehen. Sogar wenn man wie ich gar keine Kenntnisse von Physik und Chemie hat versteht man zumindest die Zusammenhänge.

Timely Take-Aways for Life-Long Learning

Several new works of nonfiction explore the long history of planet Earth including the relatively recent impact of humans and other animals. Each provides a unique perspective and context for investigation.

....
A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth
Henry Gee, Nov 2021, St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan
Themes: Natural history, Life science, Evolution

A (VERY) SHORT HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH provides a quick overview of how life evolved on Earth in a dozen short chapters. The first seven chapters explore early life, to dinosaurs leaving five chapters for mammals, primates and human evolution.
Take-aways: This primer on evolution would be of particular interest to science students and teachers seeking an engaging work of nonfiction for leisure reading.

I did learn about evolution and the fossil record and blah blah. So I guess the book did its job; I'm glad I read it. Only the language was weirdly inaccessible considering Gee is a journalist. He sounds like an academic trying to write for the pleebs but not quite getting it. A lot of his sentences are long and weirdly constructed. I had to read a whole bunch of sentences a few times over to try and figure out what he was trying to say. His humour took away from his message, for me. The book could have ended about halfway though. I liked the beginning, about our incredibly sparse fossil record and why phrases like "the missing link" need to be removed from our journalistic lexicon. But then he goes on for a while about how we can't make assumptions about how we evolved certain traits like standing erect but then continues on about how we may have evolved certain traits like standing erect. I liked the bit too where he talked about all the ways that humans are similar to other animals - our evolution wasn't strange or better, just different - but that could have been cut down a whole lot.

If you already like his writing, read it. If you want to learn some about how humans aren't at the top of the evolutionary ladder, read it. But you can probably put it down after the first few chapters.

It's a curious witty book. Really peculiar, but I liked it really much

Henry Gee provides a clearly written, popular science book that puts evolution in general, and human evolution in particular, in perspective. The book also provides the reader with an understanding of science in general, and specifically the spotty nature of the fossil record and what information can and cannot be gleaned from it. I found the occassional dry humour entertaining. This is a book for the interested lay person, packed with relevant and important information, but not stuffed with excessive details or even indepth commentary. The Accidental Species is a book that provides food for thought and encourages (or provokes, as the case may be) discussion.

We still speak of the majority of animals as "invertebrates", although we've long known that those creatures don't have anything in particular in common beyond not being vertebrates - in a sense, it would make as much sense to divide the animal kingdom into spiders and non-spiders.

Still, vertebrates are a remarkable group of animals for many reasons beyond the fact that they count our own species among their number, and their many distinctive traits - which along with the backbone itself include such less obvious things like the adaptive immune system - must somehow have arisen from invertebrate ancestors that lacked them. The task Gee has set himself is to sketch how that may have happened, helped by the substantial advances in molecular biology and the spectacular fossil finds of recent decades.

I found the book rather delightful. It quickly surveys the closest relatives of vertebrates and the most basal vertebrates as well as various relevant fossils, and tries to "cross the bridge" across the chasm between invertebrate and vertebrate by determining the order of acquisition of the essential vertebrate traits. At about 300 pages it necessarily skims over a lot, but plentiful further reading is suggested for the reader who wants to dive deeper into the palaeontology of armoured jawless fish or whatever.

Let it be noted that I did not know what I was getting into.

I got this book because it was described as an introduction to cladistics -- that is, the scientific (mathematical!) discipline of classifying living things (or other things, like manuscripts) into stemmata (family trees) based on shared traits. This is a very hot new scientific field, and I wanted to learn how it is done.

From that standpoint, you can forget it. No mathematics here. No doubt the vast majority of readers will cheer. But it's also a problem, because author Gee never even says how cladistics works.

Let's give an analogy. To plan the path of a satellite into orbit, you need Newton's Laws and calculus. But you don't have to know calculus to know how Newton's Laws work. You just need to know that pushing makes things move, and the more you push, the more they move, and by using calculus, you can add up all the pushes over a long period of time to figure out the total movement. So you can explain the idea of orbital mechanics without doing calculus. It won't tell you enough to launch a satellite, but it will give you the idea.

Gee never does that. He just handwaves at cladistics and presents it as the alternative to the alleged older version of evolution that sees evolution as a path of continuous progress.

But that's a black-and-white choice with a vengeance. Most people who really studied evolution know that it isn't a form of progress; it's merely a form of change -- of adapting more closely to the environment. Monarch butterflies, for instance, only lay their eggs on milkweed. Is that more "advanced" than a form of butterfly that can lay its eggs on several kinds of plants? Of course not; it's merely more specialized -- and if milkweed dies out, so will monarchs. Often evolution makes a creature less fit for every environment except the one it lives in.

Gee's obsession that evolution is not progress leads him down some rabbit holes -- he argues that, because we weren't around to see how (e.g.) triceratops used its legs and horns, we cannot know how it used the legs and horns, and because we cannot know, we can't even hypothesize. It's true, we can't know. But we can still potentially learn a lot -- "if a horn does this for creatures now, couldn't it have done so in the past, and if it did so in the past, might we not find some traces in creatures alive today?" All those things Gee says we don't know can still be a fertile field for useful experiments.

And Gee is self-contradictory. He argues, for instance, that we can't really be sure which ancient hominid fossils belong to which species. Absolutely true, and fossil-hunters have a dreadful tendency, whenever they find a new fossil, to try to make it into a new species so that they get credit for it. But Gee then starts making arguments about various genus of ancient hominids, such as genuses Homo and Australopithecus and Paranthropus -- and then goes on to use the genus difference as a basis for discussions about behavior (doing exactly what he said above that you couldn't do about a fossil!). I'm not entitled to an opinion, but personally, I've never believed Paranthropus is distinct from Australopithecus, and since Homo is almost certainly descended from Australopithecus, I can't see why that distinction should be drawn, either. Gee would, in fact, very possibly agree with me -- but he can't then use the genus distinction to argue about behavior! He can't have it both ways!

This is a book about an important subject (cladistics) that makes an important point (that evolution is not progressive), but it is so all-or-nothing that I fear it loses almost its entire point.

couldn't past the first couple of pages and the book is science fiction, I don't like sci-fi

Re-read this series after Christmas 2013 and got a lot more out of it second time around. So re-rated to 5 stars.

Re-read this series after Christmas 2013 and got a lot more out of it second time around. So re-rated to 5 stars.

Good series. Interesting premise re various intelligent primate species co-existing on the Earth, but only becoming apparent due to a near apocalypse. Flipping backwards and forwards in time broke the continuity of each thread a little, but understandably was necessary. Interesting climax and conclusion to a series with a grand scope.

Re-read this series after Christmas 2013 and got a lot more out of it second time around. So re-rated to 5 stars.

This collection could have probably been trimmed down a bit. Even though all the stories are relatively short, I'd recommend just reading a few at time, or they all begin to blur and lose their individuality, so to speak.½

The first paragraph of the introduction states “one thing must be clear from the start: this is a work of fiction.” The author proceeds to explain that they have used the latest paleontological findings as jumping-off points for speculation. The book includes a brief, yet detailed, introduction to the field of paleontology. The book presents 56 dinosaurs divided into four chapters – one for each period (Triassic, Jurassic, early and mid-cretaceous, and late cretaceous period). The author includes a one page instruction on how to use the field guide, and emphasizes again that this book is a work of fiction. The book has a useful glossary and an index. Each particular dinosaur page has a number of small black-and-white sketches and vividly dramatic, brilliantly colored paintings as well. Each page has the name of the dinosaur, a description, the size of the dinosaurs, a section of distinguished features, and a section regarding habit and habitats. A great book, but I am not sure I would catalog as non-fiction.

http://lampbane.livejournal.com/505533.html

"With about 100 stories to go through, it's a great way to try out different authors and ideas. It's really a tasting menu of science fiction. The short format is great for exposing you to as many authors as possible, and it also allows them to dabble in ideas that might not warrant a novel or aren't quite fully developed yet.

The short format is also why it took me so long to read. I originally thought it would be a breeze to read through, since the stories were so short. But because there's so little space, each story is incredibly dense. They have express an entire world within two pages, so a lot of things can't be fully explained and have to be puzzled out from the little context that is there. Sometimes a world doesn't start to make sense until the very end of a story, which means I end up going back and rereading it to pull it together as a whole."

Stephen Jay Gould, this author is not. (To which he would likely say, "Duh," but then he does not seem to understand the purpose of figurative language.) It does seem like he tries to be, at least in this book (the only one of his I've read as of this writing), but he fails.

His main argument is that the fossil record is too sparsely distributed through too much time to support narrative interpretations, and therefore narrative histories of evolution & adaptation should be replaced by diagrams of similarity.

In making this argument he makes several good points: e.g., current narrative interpretations often make far too much use, unjustifiably, of the myth of progress; and adaptation, while indisputably an important factor in evolution, is too random and too temporally fine-grained for actual historical instances of it to be traced through the fragmentary fossil record.

In support of all of this he gives several examples, each getting its own chapter, such as the evolution of non-fish vertebrates from fish, the evolution of birds from reptiles, and the evolution of humans from apes. In doing so he critiques the particular form taken by the myth of progress in each case.

But he takes far too many pages to do all of these things. The text is repetitive, within and between chapters. It reads slightly polemically. It seemed to me that in a couple of places he would employ a form of argument that he had critiqued earlier in the book. Theoretically, he seems to have a bit too much faith in the explanatory power of parsimony. I found his conceptualization of Deep Time to be simplistic -- he didn't discuss when the conceptualization of the past should shift from historical "ordinary time" to Deep Time, and it seems to me that the nearer one draws to the present, the more supportive the past becomes of historical narrative. Because of this, I found his arguments about the recent paleontological past to be less convincing than those about the more distant past. (For example, he critiqued the myth of bipedalism as the driving force in human evolution, in the same way that he'd critiqued the myth of flight as the driving force in bird evolution. But the former is based on skeletal structure, whereas the latter was based on the presence of feathers. These two things are not equivalent in my mind: a feather is not like a bone, let alone an entire limb or limb-complex. And, structurally and energetically, bipedalism is a shitty mode of locomotion, so I find it really, really hard to conceive of the humanlike pelvis and legs having epiphenomenal origins.)

The biggest problem, though, is what it would mean for paleontology if this guy got his way with respect to its public presentation. He wrote on one page that paleontology already has enough trouble justifying its existence to the budget-meisters. OK, so he thinks that would change if all paleontology produced was a bunch of diagrams? Cladistic relationships, as a work product, are f'ing BORING to most non-specialists (remember Al Gore's and the cranky old 1996 third-party candidate's charts & graphs? Yeah, I thought not).

This is because there's a well-established sociological difference between specialists and the general public that Gee seems to have ignored completely. People like stories. They're the non-specialist way of making complex, unfamiliar information meaningful. So stories aren't really testable hypotheses; big deal. Narratives actually can be critiqued (literarily, wouldn't you know), and they can even change. It's just that these things happen very slowly. So really, it isn't that cladistics is more correct in the long term than narrative, so much as that it allows for greater efficiency in incorporating new information into the paleontological consensus. And this is one context in which efficiency matters far less to the public bean-counters than do interesting stories.

An excellent collection for lovers of good science fiction stories - who also have a very short attention span. The stories, originally published in the prestigious science *fact* journal Nature, never covered more than one page in the journal, and rarely more than two in this volume. Without exception, each contribution is engrossing, thought-provoking, and great fun.

The thing about Henry Gee is that he is a real scientist – not a populizer, not a science journalist - and he loves J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. This book is a delight (for all Tolkien fans) both for its insights into Tolkien and the “origins” of Middle Earth, as well as for the scientific explanations.

Gee takes a many of features of Middle Earth - its denizens, its topography and its “technology” – and attempts explanations of the science possibly underlying them. In doing, so he is both faithful to the science that he represents and respectful of Tolkien’s conception of Middle Earth. When he cannot explain something – as with the “one ring” – he neither dismisses it as fantasy nor attempts a fictional way out; he simply admits that we do not yet know enough. In this way, he expounds on how Orcs came into being, the problem of the wings of the Balrogs, the acute sight and longevity of the Elves, how Frodo’s Mithril undershirt might have saved him from the troll’s spear, and many other Middle Earth topics.

In one memorable chapter, he identifies the theme of loss or diminution that pervades the Rings trilogy – loss of powers, reduction of peoples, lost skills – and relates this to both Tolkien’s personal and professional life, as a scholar of the “ancient, lost tongues of the north..his need for restitution was so great that he was driven.. to create new, lost languages.. and.. to invent a culture and mythology to go with them.”

Like all students of Middle Earth, Gee knows in his heart that, somewhere, somewhen , it really existed. This knowledge must be the motivation for his final chapter, in which he takes to task those who, like Richard Dawkins, “know” things so absolutely, that they simply cannot bear anyone else having different views of the world and of reality. How refreshing to hear another scientist try to knock that arrogant professor of “the public understanding of science” off his bully pulpit. It is surely no coincidence that the highlighted “blurb” on the rear of this book is a quote from Simon Conway Morris, professor of evolutionary paleobiology at Cambrige University. Conway Morris – less of a populizer than Dawkins and more of a real researcher – admiringly refers to how Henry Gee “..explores how the marvellous remains marvellous, but not fantastic.. “.

From now on, I will want to know every scientist’s Middle Earth credentials before taking them seriously.

This seems to have been put together from a collection of essays. As a result, the key ideas are approached several times, but never definitively. One of the key notions in the book is cladistics - but I was never able to find out what it was!

I read this on the strength of the author's book Jacob's Ladder, but it's nothing close to that great book.

The subject matter is supposedly cladistics, but while it does discuss that, it does so poorly. It's another of these books written to further one side of an obscure feud, a feud that's vitally important to paleontologists and of little interest to everyone else.
As such it's preachy and repetitive without being especially convincing.½

This book was a pleasant surprise.

I thought I was getting a description of the state of the art of genome science in 2004.
What I actually got was a history of how we reached this state of the art in 2004; but a much better written and much more engaging history than those I've read previously. In particular the author is very sympathetic as to why biologists in times past held the theories they did, explaining just what it was that these scientists thought it was they were explaining, and the constraints of the explanatory model into which they were trying to fit.

Thoroughly recommended.

A series of interconnected essays giving possible real-world scientific explanations for some of the phenomena in Middle Earth. Also an exploration of how the science of Tolkien's own time might have influenced the world he created. Not to be taken entirely seriously I think, but neither is it to be scoffed at. A good read, and certainly a different perspective to the great man's work.

Come possono combinarsi tre miliardi di frammenti di DNA e dare origine ad un essere umano? Dopo vent'anni dall'inizio del Progetto Genoma Umano, L'autore ci conduce verso le nuove frontiere della ricerca: scoprire i meccanismi che regolano l'interazione tra i singoli geni e rendono possibile lo sviluppo dell'organismo vivente.

Earth science,Geology,Biology,Evolution

science, TBR