Science Books Reviewed

Review: Rising from the Plains & Roadside Geology of Wyoming

2011-02-23T17:00:00.000-08:00

Title: Rising from the Plains

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Title: Roadside Geology of Wyoming, Revised 2nd Edition

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Last summer I had a chance to travel out west across Interstate 80, up Interstate 29 from Missouri to Nebraska, and then across through Nebraska, into Wyoming, and then down into Utah. The goal of the journey was to go to west-central Utah to hunt trilobites in Millard County, but on the way, I wanted to enjoy the scenery along the way. The two natural volumes to take with me, therefore, were John McPhee's phenomenal 1986 book, Rising from the Plains, and a volume from Mountain Press' Roadside Geology series, devoted to Wyoming, authored by David R. Lageson and Darwin R. Spearing.

These are two very different books, written with two differing goals in mind. The Roadside Geology series, from their inception in 1972, have been targeted at Americans who are curious about the landscape through which they drive on their summer holidays. The landforms described in these books are those directly visible from the roads, with broader discussion of the underlying geological features to help round out the picture.

Rising from the Plains is the third volume in John McPhee's series of books on American geology, which have appeared in a single volume under the title Annals of the Former World. Originally published in The New Yorker, where McPhee's writing has appeared for several decades, these books constitute a generally highly-regarded effort at melding popular writing and geology. In the first two volumes, Basin and Range (1981) and In Suspect Terrain (1983), McPhee had moved gradually eastward along Interstate 80, focusing on the work of a a single geologist, with occasional diversion to other locations around the world which aided him in telling his story. In Rising from the Plains, McPhee's focus is almost exclusively on the state of Wyoming, and on the life and character of David Love, a field geologist for the United States Geological Survey. Love, who was born in central Wyoming in 1913, was an eminent geologist, the sort of man who made the maps that other people used to understand the ground beneath their feet and the rocks around them.

The Roadside Geology books (about which I have briefly written elsewhere) are something of an iconic tool among amateur geologists and landform enthusiasts. When I was younger, my father used to read them voraciously, especially the volume concerning his personal favourite state, Arizona. From their early days until very recently, they appeared iconic not only because of their design - loud, brash, mainly primary colours on the covers, simple two-colour printed maps and diagrams within - but because they offered something which few other volumes did: a source of knowledge for the eternal question on family roadtrips: "what's that?"

Taking these two books in tandem, therefore, helps to flesh out not only the vistas seen from the car window, or when one pauses at a highway rest stop or in a road cut, but the characters behind our understanding of this landscape. One complements the other rather well, allowing the casual enthusiast or geology student not familiar with the Wyoming landscape to quickly understand some of the terrain through which they are travelling. For example, viewing the town of Rawlins from Interstate 80, as depicted in Roadside Geology of Wyoming, you quite literally pass through some two billion years worth of rock layers in a scant few miles, from 2.6 billion year old pre-Cambrian granites to the Cretaceous Niobrara shales (for more, see p. 62). While we didn't stop in Rawlins last summer on our road trip, this year, when we head west again, I'm going to make a point of it. But then, I never could pass up a rock shop, if I knew it was there.

The story told in Rising from the Plains is part biography (of geologist Love, and his parents, early settlers of Wyoming before statehood), and part dissection of the geology of Wyoming, which Love helped to codify and establish. It is clear that he held his work, and the landscape in which he had grown to adulthood, in deep regard, pragmatic and acerbic as his remarks to McPhee are. The interweaving of the two narratives, something of a stylistic hallmark for the author, build a particularly human level on which to understand the enormities of geologic time, or "deep time", as McPhee had by this time correctly taken to calling it.

Of the criticisms levelled against Rising from the Plains, two are worth being addressed briefly here. The first is that the science of geology has already moved on from some of the views which were considered new or heretical in 1985. The second is that by focusing on a single field geologist, McPhee unduly gives weight to field - over theoretical and laboratory-based - geosciences. In the case of the first, I would suggest that McPhee's books offer a snapshot in time, much in the same way that Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, or any subsequent major geological textbook does. The goal of reading McPhee is not to become an expert in geophysical structures. The goal is to capture and convey some of the romance and beauty that compels people to be geologists. This thought, in turn, helps me to address the second criticism regarding preferring field geology over the geophysics. By focusing on the characters - sometimes irascible, sometimes thoughtful, always human - in each book, McPhee has really committed a classic act of journalism. He has melded a character with a vested interest in his topic into the overall narrative, lending human interest to a subject which otherwise might be found somewhat too arcane for readers. Honestly, I think that this is a good thing as it makes the process of scientific thinking accessible to a broader audience.

Together, the Roadside Geology of Wyoming and Rising from the Plains tell a compelling story of geology in Wyoming, and share it with McPhee's story of a man, his origins, and his passions. Read these two books together, and it will enrich your experience of both. They are vital reading if you are curious about the world around you, or if you happen to be driving through the stark beauty of Wyoming.

EDIT: I've found one further review of Rising from the Plains here (quite recently reviewed, too, oddly enough), and I'm grateful for author Ron Scheer's linking to a short profile of David Love, from the Made in Wyoming site.

Review: The Radioactive Boy Scout by Ken Silverstein

2008-11-27T18:38:00.000-08:00

The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor by Ken Silverstein. New York: Random House, 2004. Notes, 209 pages.

Of course, you can learn a lot of useful things as a Boy Scout. Anything resembling woodcraft that I now know comes from those days. Starting fires, using knives and axes without injuring yourself, camping out and pitching a tent, open-air cookery, leatherworking, basketry, knots, basic tool usage, rudimentary nature studies: all of these things I learned through Scouts. But I also learned about cowardly, bullying boys, about braggarts and empty bravado being rewarded by thick-headed and coarse adults, about cruelty and unpleasantness. More recently, I've been appalled to learn that the spirit of boys doing their own work and achieving on their own, unaided, in such events as the Pinewood Derby has been replaced by a lot of adults doing the work for them and showing off. My son's entry, a modest effort which we made together, was far overshadowed by cars which were clearly made from start to finish by adults - I heard the boys saying as much - and no one seemed to have a problem with this, except for me. Cliché though it may be, times have clearly changed.

Whatever we undertook, and whatever I experienced in my time in Scouting, though, one thing that we did not ever do was build our own nuclear breeder reactor. And the protagonist of Ken Silverstein's utterly fascinating book, The Radioactive Boy Scout, didn't do so either. Yet with only rudimentary understanding and what he gleaned from books and professionals in the field, he came very near to constructing a device which, had he been able to obtain more materials, might have presented a real and immediate danger to his neighbours and family.

Silverstein recounts the classic tale of a loner: boy doesn't get on well with his peers or make many friends, boy joins Scouting, boy encounters chemistry book published before the asphyxiating safety culture with which we now suffer, boy develops interest first in chemistry, then in collecting the elements of the periodic table, and finally in crudely refining his own nuclear materials. Boy constructs his own crude nuclear device using help from old chemistry books and by posing as a professional chemist or teacher and writing to government agencies for additional information that he couldn't get from his texts in his quest to construct a fully-fledged nuclear device. On reflection, that's perhaps not how the classic tale goes - not exactly. But in the story of David Hahn, this is basically how events unfolded.

Hahn's story (which apparently continues to have unhappy endings, judging from news stories in recent years) is that of a boy trying to find a way to fit in, and, failing that, finding an obsession to which to cling. In that way, I can relate to his story, and most people who had awkward, unpleasant, and confused teen years will probably be able to do the same. They may be surprised not only at how far Hahn was willing to go in his single-minded radioactive quest, but in how far he actually got.

Blending the history of the Boy Scout movement with the history of a troubled youth, and sprinkling in a healthy dose of the history of human involvement with radioactive materials, from the Curies' first discovery and tragic death from exposure to radium, up through the development of the first atomic weapons and nuclear reactors (and the often chequered history of both), this is a fascinating book which reads very quickly as you race, impatiently, toward the conclusion.

With his entertaining blend of science, history, and the tale of a boy nearly getting into a great deal of trouble, Ken Silverstein's The Radioactive Boy Scout is a book that almost anyone should enjoy, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

To end with an aside: a good number of people are surprised when I occasionally admit that I was once a Boy Scout. They're slightly more surprised when I further explain that, in fact, I was driven enough to reach the Eagle Scout rank. The final surprise comes from my saying that I don't mind at all if my son participates, as long as he's enjoying it, and yet in the same breath I say that he could leave whenever he wanted. My pronouncements are the result of the ambiguity I feel about Scouting as an experience. It would be better, perhaps, with less of the religious, para-military overtones, and the hints of sadism seemingly encouraged in the older boys, and more of the education, mentoring, leadership, and encouragement to be a moral and ethical individual. That might have been of more use to young men like David Hahn - and me, all those years ago - than anything else.

Review: Evolution Exposed: Your Evolution Answer Book for the Classroom by Roger Patterson

2008-09-22T13:44:00.000-07:00

Evolution Exposed: Your Evolution Answer Book for the Classroom by Roger Patterson. 2007: Answers in Genesis, Hebron, KY. Indexed, with notes and illustrations, 326 pages.

Like so many re-treadings of the ideas of a divine creation, ideas which have not changed since William Paley wrote Natural Theology (a book that's due for a review in the near future for comparison's sake), Evolution Exposed is tired and worn from the outset. Published by Answers in Genesis, a site which provides a web refuge for biblical literalists and was a guiding force behind the Kentucy Creation Museum debacle, the casual reader would expect a book that focuses on the mystical and the supernatural at the expense of the rational and real.

That expectation is wholly fulfilled.

The format of the book reminds one in a way of a misguided twin to the Index of Creationist Claims over at TalkOrigins, should such a thing exist. Divided into eleven chapters as follows, the book quickly hits all of the high notes that creation types love to sing along with:

Introduction

What Is Science?

Classifying Life

Natural Selection vs. Evolution

Unlocking the Geologic Record

The Origin of Life

The Origin of Microorganisms

The Origin of Plants

The Origin of Invertebrates

The Origin of Vertebrates

The Origin of Humans

Each chapter is divided, more or less, into these categories:

What you will learn

What Your Textbook Says about... [the chapter subject]

What We Really Know about...

Reference Articles

Questions to Consider

Tools for Digging Deeper

... and the book takes aim at four specific biology textbooks:

Glencoe Biology: The Dynamics of Life

Prentice Hall Biology (Campbell)

Prentice Hall Biology (Miller)

Holt Biology

There is also a glossary, a topical index, and an index of articles by chapter. For all of this material being covered, you'd expect a lot of well-organised, broadly-ranging substantiating material, wouldn't you? Like fun you would.

The 'What You Will Learn' section is a quick summation of the AiG position on the subject matter of the chapter. It is generally a single, light-weight page, just glossing over everything that Mr Ham and company dislike about the topic.

The 'What Your Textbook Says About...' section - and there is practically a sneer in the text every time that proper science is addressed - give a quick summation of the contentious points in the textbooks, organised in a handy chart for the logistically impaired. Well, when I say "contentious", I mean contentious to people from AiG. Young earth creationists are a special sort of crazy, and a special sort of lazy too, as we shall see.

The 'What We Really Know about...' section is where things get seriously weird. For a section called 'What We Really Know', you'd expect something like facts, substantiated with evidence, wouldn't you? Well, not in this book, you don't. Instead of being provided with things that we 'really know', that is to say, things that are observed in nature and are subject to experimental testing, reproducibility and falsifiability, we get the YEC equivalent of saying "no it isn't! no it isn't! can't hear you!" for several pages. Presented with any scientific concept, Evolution Exposed fires back with a hearty "yeah, but the bible says..." every time.

The reference articles are perhaps the most entertaining, as invariably they point back to the AiG website, or other allied efforts. This is single-source pseudo-academia at its very best. Which should have been obvious from the name on the tin. If you call your group "Answers in Deuteronomy", "Responses in Leviticus", or whatever else, then we can hardly be surprised when that is all that you provide. And all that AiG provides... is reference back to AiG.

Finally, there are Questions to Consider, which are little more than rehashing of the points already rehashed in the references, and Tools for Digging Deeper, which is a posh-ish way of giving a list of titles (title and author only, no publisher or ISBN or anything useful like that) and saying "come and buy our books". If it weren't so sad, it might look like a marketing scam.

I've been reading books by various Intelligent Design writers for a while now, but this was one of the first all-out, cards-on-the-table YEC book that I had seriously looked in to, and I have to say, it was disappointing. There's very little pretense to science here, and what science there is primarily a working over of points made already, not in a more coherent form. I'd thought about trying to rebut some of the points made here, but honestly, if you're reading this book, you're probably immune to argument in the main, and if you aren't so immunised, then the holes in the logic will become evident pretty quickly. As an attack on established science, though, this book isn't nearly as insidious as I expected. There are several instances of remarks like "biblical flood geology hasn't been fully explained yet... but just trust us, we're right", or words to that effect which are good for a laugh. Don't get me wrong: it's still unmitigated rubbish. It's only use might be as a primer for skeptics and scientists who want to get a first-hand look at the sort of ratiocination-immune magical thinking that YECs do.

Really, this makes me wonder about AiG in general. If the point of your organisation is to say that you have "Answers in..." whatever, then where are those answers? Where are the studies, where are the notes, where is the sweat and blood and toil and tears of research and science? What is it that you are doing all day? Because from here, it doesn't look like anything much other than wishful thinking.

At the end of the day, people can believe what they like, in their own small corner of the world, and as long as they aren't pressing it upon others, I don't care - I see it as a waste, but it's your life, do as you will (or "fais que tu veux", as Rabelais says). When I do care is when it impacts society at large, when it moves into the public square and demands equal time with the science that has provided us with the hideous apparatus of the modern world, for better or for worse. So you want to believe that the world is six thousand years old? Fine - go right ahead. You want to try to teach my children that? Then get ready for a fight. It's pretty much that simple. By telling students, who have not yet built up the critical apparatus to know the difference between reality and wishful thinking, or "baloney", as Carl Sagan put it... by telling them that they can use this book to challenge the "orthodoxy" taught them by their biology teacher is doing them - and all of the other students who share a classroom with them - a disservice.

In either case, if you want to wow a skeptic or persuade a scientist that your weird world view is true, this isn't the book to use.

More to Come

2008-09-15T06:43:00.000-07:00

No, I haven't fallen in a sinkhole, or been vapourised by creationists. Somehow, I've been reading but not really writing, and find that it's been too long since I last posted here.

But fear not... there's more to come - soon.

Review: The Politically Incorrect Guides to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, Science, and Global Warming and Environmentalism

2008-05-27T22:13:00.000-07:00

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, by Jonathan Wells. Indexed, with notes, 273 pages. Washington: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2006.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, by Tom Bethell. Indexed, with notes, 270 pages. Washington: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2005.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism by Christopher C. Horner. Indexed, with notes, 350 pages. Washington: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2007.

When my wife and I were discussing philosophy a few weeks ago, she made an interesting point. She recalled that a professor of hers at Drake once said something to the effect of this: "Don't approach a text as the enemy. Approach it as though the author, who has studied and researched the topic about which he (or she) is writing, and sometimes has been for decades, is absolutely in possession of all of the facts on the subject. Approach the text sympathetically, not combatively. Then, when you're read and worked to read from the author's point of view, you will be in that much better a position to critique the work, because you have already considered that everything that the author says might well be correct."

This "devil's advocate" view of reading, I thought, would be particularly useful in reference to a task that I had assigned to myself. I planned to read several of the Politically Incorrect Guides and see what they had to say on three sets of topics about which I have some background and knowledge: their guides to Science, Global Warming and Environmentalism, and Darwinism and Intelligent Design. So an open mind would come in handy, for reasons that you will see.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Politically Incorrect Guides, I must first disabuse you of the notion that they have anything at all to do with Bill Maher. Few statements could be further from the truth. The PIGs are published by Regnery Publishing, Inc., who bill themselves under the About section of their website in this way:

"Regnery launches into 2007 celebrating 60 years as the nation’s leading conservative publisher. This year promises to deliver another blockbuster lineup of all-star authors and front-page issues."

- retrieved 27 April 2008

I'm not certain what to make of the lack of updates into 2008, but apparently the publisher is still thriving and kicking. In the interests of balance, you may access their site by searching for "Regnery Publishing" in any search engine.

Unfortunately, an open mind is very difficult to maintain in the face of the change in both the conservative and liberal political movements in the past twenty years. Where in the past Regnery might have published like the late William F. Buckley, Jr., they have moved into the realm of the less civil and more shrill voices of the conservatism of recent years, voices which Buckley himself found disheartened. Authors like D'Souza and Ingraham could appear on a list of two of these latter voices. That is not to say that there are no shrill voices on the left, either, it is merely to point out that Regnery boasts of keeping many of those who inhabit "the right" so close to home.

The first thing that will probably strike the casual observer who has done any reading previously in the sciences is the fact that these books do not read in the same manner traditional science books. That is because there is very little real science in them. They are constantly broken up by small bubbles and block quotes, intended to draw the reader's attention - none too subtly - to the points which the authors and editors would particularly like to drive home.

The second thing that any careful reader will note is that these books are typically heavily referenced, with lots of squirrelly little quotes to track down if you are suspicious of the original context of what was said. However, most general readers ignore footnotes and endnotes, I am told, so really the presence of these notes is more damaging, because they deceptively convey an air of authority where none is really present.

The third thing that readers will notice is the tone of desperation. These books are written by people who want to appeal to every ugly impulse that the public has to offer. They want readers to feel as though they are being lied to, excluded, and bilked in the interests of global fantasies of catastrophe, knowledge, and humility in origins. They work themselves to a febrile sweat to make it seem to a reader that they are being laughed at by "them". I have every hope that readers are smarter than this.

Logical and ratiocinactive inconsistencies abound in the PIGs. For example, in Mr Bethell's entry, one of the bullet points at the beginning of Chapter 12 reads:

"Galileo, one of the first casualties in the alleged war between science and religion, could have avoided trouble with the Catholic Church if he had stuck to science and not ventured into theology."

-- The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, p. 181

There are so many things wrong with that single statement that it is difficult to know where to begin with the criticism. I suspect that Bethell has never cracked, much less studied, the Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems, for a start. It is true that Galileo's troubles with the Church were in part of his own making, but this was because he finally refused to accept the prohibition on the teaching of the Copernican model of the solar system (at the time, it would have been called "the universe"). Casting the Pope's arguments into the mouth of the character called Simplicio didn't help to assuage the Papal Father's ire, to be certain, but the inquisition had maintained a file on Galileo for years - it's still in the Vatican Library.

Much of what passes for argument in this book is the equivalent of claiming that the axiom "an apple a day" is really nothing more than a marketing tactic intended to promote the apple industry (or Big Apples) over the truer, purer pear, peach, strawberry, and kumquat industries. Of course, there is only one True and Holy Fruit, that being the banana - just ask Ray Comfort.

Mr Horner's entry into the fray, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, which is cited on the cover as "a definitive resource to debunk global warming alarmism" by that known champion of reason, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. This is perhaps the hardest of the PIGs to get through, not because Mr Horner deploys anything resembling intellectually challenging arguments, but rather because of the sheer level of miserable prose, patently false analysis, and poor editing make it seems as though the book will never end. Mr Horner is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has been described by Media Transparency, a non-profit 501c3 examining the sources of media funding, in the following way: "It postures as an advocate of "sound science" in the development of public policy. In fact, it is an ideologically-driven, well-funded front for corporations opposed to safety and environmental regulations that affect the way they do business." If the words "sound science" didn't immediately cause alarm bells to toll in your head, then perhaps they should have done. In the meantime, Mr Horner's profile on the CEI website may be found here.

To take but one example, Chapter Seven ("Melting Ice Caps, Angrier Hurricanes, and Other Lies About the Weather"), the reader is confronted with this:

"If you're going to give up your freedoms, your conveniences, and your affordable energy to them, they need to scare you. Every bad thing that's already happening becomes the fault of Manmade glboal warming. Hurricane Katrina: Global Warming. Droughts: Global Warming. Flooding: Global Warming. Too many insects: Global Warming. Too few insects:Global Warming.

"The weather is now your fault."

-- The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, p 141.

Mr Horner continues by discussing the plight of the polar bear, making certain to mention, now doubt out of an amused perversity, that they feed upon baby seals (or seals in general, or anything else they can get their claws around), thus, in his mind, presenting a conundrum for environmentally-minded individuals who previously balked at the slaughter of seals by unfettered hunters. However effective polar bears may be as hunters, though, their present status is not rosy, as Mr Horner would have his readers believe. Recently cited studies in the Wikipedia article on polar bears suggest that "The polar bear is classified as a vulnerable species. Of the 19 recognized polar bear sub-populations, 5 are declining, 5 are stable, 2 are increasing, and 7 have insufficient data." Oh, and by the way, Mr Horner, Vice-President Gore never claimed that polar bears were unable to swim (sidebar, p. 141: "Most polar bear populations are thriving, (even if Al Gore falsely says they cannot swim)." (sic)). Mr Gore indicated in An Inconvenient Truth that polar bears were indeed swimming, for such a great distance between ice floes where the polar cap had been contiguous within the past century, and that sometimes they drowned from exhaustion before they could reach land.

It is the fact that so much dissection is required on one tiny section of the book - a mere three pages - which makes the PIG to Global Warming and Environmentalism so manifestly horrible. Another example: on page 135, Mr Horner laments the inaccuracy of climate modelling, claiming that it is a poorly attested and inexact science. In part, he states that: "In short, models cannot "hindcast" past climate. As such, they cannot reliably forecast, the precise use to which they are put. No GCM (General Circulation Model) has yet replicated the medieval or Roman climate events. The models are simply not real world." Are they not, solely because they can't accurately retrocast the weather conditions on the Ides of March in 44 BCE? Is that really what you want to say? Who, exactly, is your source in the Classical world for weather observations on a day by day basis? Climate models indicate trends. They indicate strong probabilities, based upon observations of the natural world of the present, applied as predictive to the past and future. But to suggest that they can't be trusted because they fail to predict the weather in Roman times to a non-scientist's arbitrary standard is a fundamental logical fallacy. Scientific models and theories are self-correcting, based on data. The same, alas, can not be said for willful ideological ignorance.

Focusing, then, on The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design by Jonanthan Wells. Dr Wells was already known to me, having previously penned the infamous Icons of Evolution: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong. (Interestingly, my second-hand copy is like a classic undergraduate textbook - highlighted heavily in the first chapter or two, and then completely pristine for the remaining ten. I guess that creationists get bored even with their own fabrications?) As you can learn pretty easily, Dr Wells has something of a chequered history due to Icons, and his association with the Disco Instititute. So what, knowing Dr Wells, can you expect from the PIG volume that wasn't in Icons?

The short answer to this question is "nothing". The PIG volume in some ways serves as a way to update Icons, without, it might be added, taking advantage of the update to answer some (or indeed, any) of the criticisms levels at the book from multiple sources. But it is the crassness of this volume that disturbs me as much as anything.

For a start, and as in all of the PIG volumes that I examined, the book modestly pulls out, under its "Books You're Not Supposed to Read" side bar, Icons. To be fair, that could have been an editorial or layout call, and not Dr Wells'. However, its tired harping on the usual litany isn't that much different from Icons, which was pretty thoroughly refuted eight years ago. Either the boys at the Disco really believe the distorted worldview that they peddle, or they have incredibly short memories. Given the existence of the Wedge Document, I know which one I am more likely to believe.

More revealing, perhaps, is a similar plug for Dr Richard Weikart's 2004 opus, From Darwin to Hitler, which I have briefly discussed previously. Dr Weikart is one of the the scholars who makes an appearance in the Creationist roadshow film featuring Mr Ben Stein as "man in search of the opinion that he has already formed", and therein looks on sympathetically as he explains that the evils of the National Socialists in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s were due, in fact, to Darwin.

In reality, much of what we read in Dr Wells' volume served as the ideological foundation for Expelled. There is a sadly triumphal note at the end of the PIG to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, which merits quotation and refutation:

"Darwinism will lose, most importantly, because of the evidence. Even though Darwinists have had almost 150 years to find some, the evidence for their view is underwhelming, at best. Otherwise, we wouldn't be reading almost every month about some discovery or other that finally "proves" it."

-- The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, p. 198.

What a spectacular reversal of reality, wherin fact and fantasy are cunningly swapped. The amazing thing about the last 150 years has not been some paltry show of meaningless fossils touted as evidence, as Dr Wells would have his readers believe. What is amazing is that the discoveries do indeed keep coming, and that with each new one, another link in the chain that forms the history of evolved life on this planet is forged and worked into place. The list of transitional fossils, of mutually supported areas of theory (genetics and paleontology, genetics and developmental biology, et cetera), have left evolutionary biologists and other scientists in a stronger position than ever to illuminate the mysteries of life on Earth. Dr Wells would, it seems clear, prefer the darkness, which he and his colleagues and ideological brethren have worked to foster for ten times the 150 years allotted to science to "find evidence".

Here are some final thoughts:

The PIGs also appear to be a curious mixture of disconnects, for lack of a better word. On the one hand, they eschew any whiff of a connection with what anyone might consider proper, creditable institutions, and continally speak, in all of their volumes, of how "big science" and "big academia" are out to get both them, the PIGgy authors, and you, John and Joanna Q. Public. But notice, in many cases, that they go to great pains to point out that they themselves, the PIGgy authors, are PhD holders: it's prominently featured on the covers of the books. So the message there is what, exactly? "I have a degree, so I know what I'm talking about, but all of the thousands of others of degree holders, they're full of sawdust and hatred for your freedoms?" It also speaks to a certain level of insecurity - how many authors who aren't writing complete and utter twaddle and yet hold some advanced degree insist on reference to that degree appearing on the book cover? In terms of a logical fallacy, it is an appeal to authority. However, in this case, it's not really an authority at all, but more an animated fiction, a caricature of what authority might be like.

Finally, for books that are routinely shelved in the Science section of bookshops around the US, these are not books about science. As with Expelled, there's hardly any science in them. In place of science? The constant sound of drums, beating out the same misinformation, in the desperate hopes that a lie repeated may eventually be accepted as truth.

Other References and Reviews

Here are some other reviews of these titles, for comparison and reference (and I will come back and add to this list as I find new reviews):

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design by Jonathan Wells
- Combined Review and Analysis at The Panda's Thumb

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism by Christopher C. Horner
- A Favourable Review at No Blog of Significance, which repeats without criticism the "shadowy world body wants to force the West to de-industrialise" line of "reasoning"

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science by Tom Bethell
- Anthony Kendall's Review at anthonares.net
- Chris Mooney's Reivew at the CSICop site

Finally, for some much-needed comic relief: 90% True has its take on the books, and...

... another bit of comic relief, courtesy of Uncyclopedia: The Politically Incorrect Guides

Afterword

You may notice that while typically I link to these books through Amazon so that you can order them if you want, I can't, in good conscience, put those links here. These books foist such a catastrophic load of nonsense onto unsuspecting readers that it simply seems ludicrous to even consider paying for them. I can't even recommend nicking them just to get them out of the shops, as the big chains would only absorb the loss and order more, and it would hurt smaller shops. And it would be wrong. So here are my suggestions, if you still want to order or obtain these titles (because, presumably, you dislike the level of misery in your life and wish to increase it):

Check your local library. Unsurprisingly, uncritical library circulation managers will have obtained these titles for their library systems (and that's good, that's the way that the system is supposed to work), and probably even shelved them with the science books. I like scanning through my two area library systems to see what they have, and then placing requests, because you never know when something will actually turn up - and then twenty-one titles arrive on the same day and you have no time to read them. It's the best.

Check your local second-hand bookshop. I have never bought a book by any supporter of ID or creationism new - they turn up with surprising regularity at places like Half-Price Books, so check around.

Check online second-hand bookshops, like ABEBooks. No matter where you are in the world, you can probably find a copy of whatever it is that you're looking for on ABE.

Yes, I also realise that you could use my Amazon search box to order these titles, if you chose to do so. That's up to you - but, again, do so at your own risk.

But, most of all, arm yourself well with real science, and then read a PIG. You may even try to do so sympathetically. It might help. Ask questions of your friends and colleagues and science bloggers, if you need help with something. But read these books, in order to learn not only what the forces of unreason think, but what you think. It is by challenging our own conceptions about the world and what we think we know that we learn anything. And that, unfortunately, is the only use that I can conceive for these books.

EDIT 28 May 2008: Edits for HTML fixes and clarity - lost a few things from my original document in the copying process.

Review: The Planets by Dava Sobel

2008-05-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

The Planets, by Dava Sobel. Indexed, illustrated, 276 pages. Penguin Books, 2006. Paperbound, US$13.00.

I was about ten years old when Carl Sagan's Cosmos first aired on PBS, in the midst of the historic missions of the Voyager 1 and 2 robotic space probes. When I started school, the Viking 1 and 2 probes had just landed on Mars. The Mariner programme had sent probes to the inner solar system as well. In short, I was forming my first notions of the world in relation to a much larger notion of the world - a notion of the solar system, of the galaxy, of the universe. Although I can't recall its name and I haven't been able to find it since, I can still remember the book that I used to check out of my primary school's library and pore obsessively over: it was a book about the planets of the solar system, illustrated with those softly focused black-and-white photographs of distant worlds that were de rigeur for astronomy books of the late '60s and early '70s. Those were good days for an aspiring young science enthusiast.

The intervening thirty years have brought changes in our knowledge of astronomy, especially the solar system. We now formally consider there to be eight planets, rather than the nine that I learned as a child. I will probably, irrationally, forever consider Pluto to be a planet, even if I have to be generous as a result and include the other trans-Neptunian worlds in my calculation. They have also brought more frequent and less costly colour printing, which means that Dava Sobel's The Planets is primed with some exquisite artwork depicting the various worlds of the solar system, created by artist Lynette Cook. The result is a beautifully-illustrated, easily read volume which packs a good deal of depth into a limited space.

Sobel's narrative follows a systematic and hardly unexpected path, proceeding from the Sun, the medium-sized and unremarkable yellow star at the centre of our solar system, out through the planets. But it is in her fusion of the many disparate elements of culture, society, music, history, and science that Sobel excels. Mercury is portrayed as the mysterious world that it will remain until NASA's Mercury Messenger probe achieves its final orbit in three years' time. The discussion of Mars, the eternally-fascinating fourth planet (on which another probe, Phoenix, is due to land this coming Sunday, 25 May), Sobel makes reference to its appearances in popular culture, and some of the mistaken beliefs that have clung to the Red Planet through history. In her discussion of Saturn and the "music of the Spheres", Sobel brings together not only Gustav Holst's orchestral suite (an excellent soundtrack for scientific endeavours in general), The Planets, but presents it in relation to Johannes Kepler's book Harmonice Mundi. Her discussion of the discovery of the outer planets of Uranus and Neptune includes the trials and tribulations of both their discoveries.

The Planets won't contain anything that a hard-core astronomy afficianado doesn't already know about their favourite science, but it might shed light on some of the other aspects, cultural or otherwise, on which their sphere of knowledge plays its role. To anyone else, whether wanting an introduction to their own solar system, taking a first step into a larger world, or simply curious, Sobel's book is an admirable introduction, and deserving of a broad audience.

Other books by Dava Sobel include:

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

If you're interested in Lynette Cook's amazing and beautiful artwork in other forms, including posters (and more coming soon), her online store is worth a look (images in this review are used with her kind permission).

Review: The Canon, by Natalie Angier

2008-05-21T14:54:00.000-07:00

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier. Indexed, with bibliography, 293 pages. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007, $14.95 (paperback).

As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I have a sort of intellectual crush on Natalie Angier. Though cursorily aware of her newspaper writing, my real awareness of her dates back to when I first read her essay "Confessions of a Lonely Atheist", where she managed to write and express many things that I have often thought about being a lone skeptic in a crowd of less-querisome fellows, only much better than I have ever done. Perhaps, in the light of that admission, I should recuse myself from reviewing her most recent book, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, but I think that I can see through my biases and strive to be impartial, never mind "fair and balanced".

A Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for the New York Times, Angier writes with a voice and a style that are distinctive, and even playful, as she makes her way through the key fields of the scientific canon. The chapter headings of the book give adequate warning to the reader about what is to come:

Thinking Scientifically

Probabilities

Calibration

Physics

Chemistry

Evolutionary Biology

Molecular Biology

Geology

Astronomy

In each of the sections of this deceptively slender book, Angier deploys her formidable understanding of the topics, coupled with interviews with many leading scientists. The result is a dazzling display, a "whirligig tour" indeed. It is breathless, and fun, all in one go. Angier covers so much ground in this volume that I can only briefly mention some of the contents of the chapters themselves.

The first section, Thinking Scientifically, sets out the method of science, and how it works. To illustrate this, Angier illustrates her point with a discussion of a children's logic game, Mastermind. Building on a simple premise of permutations and combinations of coloured pegs, it is possible to deduce a pattern in a limited number of guesses. This simple logical problem demonstrates in part how the scientific method works. The second chapter, Probabilities, recapitulates many things that you thought you knew about how probability works - and how it doesn't. Interestingly, the discussion of probabilities is one which we were having only the other night during a discussion of evolution at the Beagle Society meeting - especially the discussion of the idea that, in fact, part of teaching students how to think would be to include teaching them about statistics and probability.

In Calibration we learn about the measurements that make up the universe, and how they are used. From the scale of the very big to the very small, it is sometimes hard to convey exactly how long a million years is, for example, never mind a hundred million or a billion. It's hard to make clear to students just how far away another planet is, or another star. This leads, it would seem, to a trivialisation of the times and distances involved in science, and furthers the ease of their misunderstanding.

Physics gives us a tour of the universe of objects in motion, as we understand it, with a discussion of how we came to understand what we know of the actions of bodies in motion. In the section on Chemistry, we delve into the building blocks of the universe. The stories of the discoveries of individual atoms are here set aside for a discussion of what atoms actually do, how they work, and how the peculiar properties of some molecules - like water - lead to the development of life itself. For the subject that more people apparently claim to have "failed at school", chemistry is so fundamental to our modern world that it should be considered crucial to have a full and thorough understanding of it.

The next logical area to which to move is therefore Evolutionary Biology. This section contains what is perhaps one of Angier's pithier remarks: "In biology, you should never believe your disbelief." This seems like an excellent rule to me - not only for biologists, but for non-scientists who just can't get their head round some of the most basic ideas in the sciences. In this section, Angier pursues a detailed analysis of the building blocks of life, as seen both through chemistry and paleontology. The result of this look at "Darwin's dangerous idea" is as clear and concise examination of the strengths of evolutionary theory as any that I have read.

If some of the proofs of evolution can be said to come from any particular spot, Molecular Biology might be a good place to look. It is in this field that, looking down at the minutiae of biological change, we find some of the most compelling evidence in support of evolution. Angier examines the nature and contents of the cell, and.

If biology at a molecular level leads us to try to understand the very small, then the scope of Geology is much different - it deals with both the very small and the very large - the makeup and actions of the very much alive earth around us.

The final chapter, Astronomy, carries the story out to the stars, galaxies, and the distant boundaries of the universe itself. It ends with a discussion of one of the more famous exercises in hypothesis, the Drake Equation, which attempts to calculate, using known variables, the possible number of technologically advanced and intelligent civilisations in the galaxy. Frank Drake's "back of the napkin" calculation implies that, of all things, SETI might be the scientific endeavour that we ought to most want to continue. The implications of finding another civilisation, as discussed in more than a hundred years of speculative fiction, are truly extraordinary.

If I had one complaint about The Canon, it would be that it seems to simply end, as opposed to providing a final, unifying summation. Perhaps that's an unreasonable expectation, considering the ground covered - how do you write a summary of everything? But a review, or a tying up of the loose ends, might not have been out of place.

Perhaps most importantly when you consider this book, remember that you might just stand a chance to refresh your knowledge on one or more of these subjects, or, better still, to learn about a subject about which you only had the vaguest of notions. It fires not only the imagination, but the desire to go out and learn more.

Whether you are a science novice, an interested amateur, or a respected member of your field, there is going to be something in this book for you to learn, delight in, or reinforce your knowledge. Angier's grand tour is everything that it promises, as edifying as it is entertaining. Required reading for anyone with the faintest scintilla of curiosity about the world around them.

Natalie Angier's other books include:

The Beauty of the Beastly

Woman: An Intimate Geography

Review: The Reluctant Mr Darwin by David Quammen (2006)

2008-04-11T17:41:00.000-07:00

The Relucatant Mr Darwin, by David Quammen. Indexed, 304 pages. Published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006.

While there are doubtless many people in many countries around the world who recognise the name "Charles Darwin", I have often wondered how many of those know anything of the man himself, either through the reading of his books or from reading any one of the many biographies which have been written in the years since his death. And it is many, in terms of Darwin biographies, from the magisterial and far-reaching, as in Janet Browne's two volume biography (Charles Darwin: Voyaging | Charles Darwin: The Power of Place), to the Desmond and Moore's Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, to Darwin's own Autobiography. Now, David Quammen's biography, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution, has entered the fray.

For all the vitriol cast in the direction of Darwin's grave in Westminster Abbey, it is difficult to understand except in the light of ignorance how the quote-mined assertions about his life and character can carry any weight at all. Darwin was a man whose "dangerous idea" proved to have explanatory power which, with some modifications (appropriately enough), has continued to illuminate all of biology, medicine, botany, animal behaviour, and a host of other fields. But the amount of work which led him to his idea, unlike, perhaps, the comparable work put forth by some of his adversaries, and the sheer volume of data which he collected in support of his idea constitute a genuine body of evidence which demands a verdict.

From the beginning, it looked as though Darwin might amount to very little in the world. For that matter, it looked as though him amounting to very little would also be entirely without larger consequence. As a youth, and at university, he was more interested in collecting beetles - and his medical studies sickened him. The change that was wrought in him was that made by nearly five years' voyaging aboard HMS Beagle, and his actions after he assumed the role of ship's naturalist. Not that he was originally intended to be the ship's naturalist - he was meant to be a companion for the Beagle's captain, Fitzroy, and only took the role when the expedition's first naturalist left the ship.

Darwin's return to England was a time of great excitement and promise: he had been sending back specimens from the voyage, and had accumulated a substantial body of materials on which further research was required. His Journal of Researches (later given the snappier title The Voyage of the Beagle, became a bestseller, and Darwin enjoyed a certain celebrity in the London scientific community.

The long span between the return of the Beagle and Darwin's formulation of what would first be called the "transmutation" of species was not accidental. Darwin, who had learned as a result of his voyage to be a careful and meticulous researcher and observer, began casting about for information which would either confirm or refute the ideas which he sketched in his notebooks - that of species which were not static or created, unchanging, as the conventional view of the early 19th century had it, but rather that animals, over time, were adapted by external factors to their surroundings. This germ, this kernel of a notion, grew into the idea of evolution, and was supported by Darwin's copious research and notes. If he did not solve some problems during his lifetime, it was because the answers were not yet to be had, or were incomplete, or, in the case of Mendel's concept of inheritance, published only in German in a modestly obscure journal in Brno.

The death of Darwin's favourite daughter Annie is often cited as the death-knell of his conventional theism, and this subject is treated touchingly by Quammen - and at rather greater length than some previous biographies, such as the 1963 effort by Gavin de Beer. For that matter, the death of his namesake son Charles is also dealt with at somewhat greater length by Quammen than de Beer, although this could be easiest explained by remarking that the focus of these two books is quite different. It is in recounting Darwin's feeling for his family, and especially his consideration for the undiminished religious sensibilities of his wife Emma, that The Reluctant Mr Darwin excels. Darwin the man, without wishing to create an unnecessary dualism, should not be considered so much as being different from Darwin, man of science, as intertwined one with the other.

Addressing the publication of Darwin's most famous and, indeed, greatest book, On the Origin of Species, Quammen covers the familiar story of Darwin's near-failure to publish at all, had it not been for the writing of an otherwise largely unknown collector, Alfred Russell Wallace, who independently arrived at much the same conclusion as Darwin had been writing steadily at for some twenty years in his "Transformation Notebooks". It was Wallace's letter to Darwin which lead first to the July, 1858 joint announcement at the Linnaean Society of their papers on evolution by means of natural selection, followed by the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species. Quammen recommends that anyone wishing to read the Origin begin with a facsimile of that first edition (and that is the link which I have included above). With the publication of this book, the intellectual landscape of first England, and then the world, was changed irrevocably.

And yet, Darwin did not change. He continued his life of retirement at Down House, and rarely saw visitors. The mysterious illness which had plagued him since his return from the Beagle voyage was kept in abeyance by limited contact with the outside world, apart from communication via post. He rarely saw even his closest friends, and he was equally rarely able to attend meetings or, later in life, funerals.

The legacy of Darwin continues to shape and be shaped by the world into which his ideas emerged, although, as is clear from the Wallace incident, had Darwin not published, someone else would have done: it was only a matter of time. However, the fact that so painstaking an observer and recorder thought for so long and so carefully about the theory which he proposed has increased its value and utility as an explanatory mechanism to no end.

Quammen's retelling of Darwin's life is conversational and easy to read, and does something that most of the discussion of Darwin does not do - it humanises and makes accessible the life of a man who felt very real anguish in his life - not only at the potential impact of his researches, but in the same way that all of us do: the lives and deaths of family, friends, and children; the difficulty of being a man of simple and retiring tastes who is thrust - largely inadvertently - into a position of prominence, and the problem of being a good scientist, and a good man.

I should also take a moment to say a few words about the audio edition of this book. I do a lot of highway driving during the week, and often dull the pain with audio books (or repeats of the the News Quiz on my iPod), so I picked up a copy of The Reluctant Mr Darwin on CD from the library recently for its potential analgesic qualities. Reader Grover Gardner does a fairly creditable job, but I am hyper-sensitive to the mis-pronunciation of English place names (eg; "Shrewsbury"), and hearing them mis-read tends to cause me to shout out loud at the - nearly always absent - reader. Apart from that, or if you don't suffer from my own distinct brand of mental abberancy, you may obtain this one in near-complete confidence that it will be a rewarding listen.

David Quammen's other books include:

The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, Revised and Expanded Edition

Review: The History of Astronomy by Heather Couper & Nigel Henbest

2008-04-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

The History of Astronomy by Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest, with a Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. Colour illustrations, indexed, 288 pages. Firefly Books, 2007, $59.95.

Human being have always been fascinated by the sky at night. It has been a source of inspiration, prediction, and fear to primitive cultures, and a source of wonder as the frontiers of science have been pushed further and further back, with the advent of greater and more powerful technologies for examining the skies.

The History of Astronomy

In the gorgeously and profusely illustrated new book, The History of Astronomy, Heather Couper, the Gresham Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, and Nigel Henbest, consultant to the Royal Greenwich Observatory, take readers on a whirlwind tour of the growth and development of the science of astronomy.

The book indulges in an historical voyage through the different eras of astronomy, covering everything from the earliest archaeo-astronomical efforts by cultures around the world to the very latest efforts of 21st century astronomy to push back the frontiers of our understanding of the universe. Its simple approach and anecdotal, conversational tone, enhanced by beautiful illustrations and photographs, draws the reader in and makes for fascinating, engaging reading.

All of the familiar figures from the history of astronomy are here, passing through the well-established chronology, from the ancient world, when the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans were among many of the cultures which investigated the nature and character of the universe. Devices like the Antikythera Mechanism are mentioned; this device, discovered in 1900, is currently suspected to be a marvellously-constructed simple computer, or orrery, for calculating the positions of celestial bodies. Arabic culture, which following the decline of the Roman and Byzantine worlds played a crucial role in the survival of much classical knowledge of mathematics and science, also gets a substantive mention, as do Asian efforts in the history of the human enterprise to understand the skies.

With the advent of the Renaissance in western Europe, which grew into the Enlightenment, knowledge grew by leaps and bounds, and efforts of Copernicus, Brahe, Halley, Flamsteed, Huygens, Cassini, Newton, and, of course Galileo all merit attention. Moving into the 18th and 19th centuries, astronomy again advanced spectacularly, driven in part by the efforts of the "planet hunters", which culminated in the eventually identification of the two outer planets, Uranus and Neptune.

The 20th century saw a further acceleration of the study of astronomy, with the use of spectroscopic photography to determine that stars and galaxies were in motion, the advent of radio telescopes, and the orbiting of satellites, whether around our world as an observatory of skies or landing probes on other planets. All of this is surveyed, obviously not at depth so great that specialists will find anything new. However, as an overview of these subjects, the book serves as a thorough introduction to astronomy's colourful and varied past.

When I studied the history of astronomy at university, this book would have been a fantastic and inspiring addition to our texts and to Dr Ashworth's lectures. Highly, highly recommended for anyone who has a passing or greater interest in astronomy, the history of science, or who simply wants a beautiful book to sit on their coffee table and to stimulate curiosity and provoke discussion.

Classic Review - All About Strange Beasts of the Past by Roy Chapman Andrews (1956)

2008-04-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

All About Strange Beasts of the Past, by Roy Chapman Andrews. Originally Published by Random House, 1956

I've been on something of a Roy Chapman Andrews kick of late. As a result of frequently coming across references to him in the course of reading around the history of paleontology, I've been trying to learn more about his life and work. As an adventurer and explorer, he was responsible for some of the first collecting in the Gobi Desert and the wilds of Outer Mongolia (a term which he apparently coined.

Fortunately for my book-buying budget, which is pretty tight just now, the two local library systems seem to have a fair number of his later books, and I can probably obtain the rest through WorldCat, if I want to drop everything else and only have one week to read them. But with thoughts of the upcoming Montana trip in my mind, and my fondness for the past and weird nostalgia kicking in once again, I've started reading some of these works, looking for inspiration. I've also found the very interesting, and well-illustrated book Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions by Charles Gallencamp, which chronicles some of Andrews' life and explorations.

The story told by Douglas Preston in his 1986 book Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History is that the character of Indiana Jones was based upon Andrews, and from some of the photographs in the Dragon Hunter, that's not hard to believe. Apart from the whip, much of the Indiana Jones image appears to derive from these photographs of Andrews. With the fourth and presumably final film in that series due out later this spring, perhaps there will be a concurrent, if manifestly smaller uptick in the interest in this man and his works, too.

We turn, now, to Roy Chapman Andrews' 1956 book, All About Strange Beasts of the Past, a book written toward the end of Andrews' life, and oriented toward younger readers. Andrews' narrative takes us from the La Brea Tar Pits to the understanding of the fossil record and the age of mammals. Andrews then briefly discusses his explorations in Mongolia, in a chapter called The Beast of Baluchistan. He then discusses animals of the last great Ice Age, including mammoths and rhinocerous, and finishes off the book with some of the more interesting - and now long-extinct - megafauna, primarily in the Americas.

I was interested to find just how many different animals were noted in this book, as I don't recall having read it as a child. What surprised me particularly were the mentions of creatures like andrewsarchus (named after Andrews, as it turns out), which I had learned of in Walking with Prehistoric Beasts. There's a long list of animals that you might know if you're a devotee of the Walking with series, including brontotherium (and the other titanothere named in Andrews' honour, Embolotherium andrewsi), indricotherium, the glyptodont (a relative of the armadillo, and mylodon, the giant tree sloth.

Unfortunately, this generally excellent book has a serious deficiency in their description of evolutionary development. There are repeated expressions of a sort of neo-Lamarckian view of evolutionary change; of animals actively changing themselves, or a projection of created change (as in: "The neck of the Irish elk was very strongly made. That, of course, was to support the massive antlers." from pages 121-122) and passing those traits on to their offspring. This could be a product of the time in which Andrews learned his evolutionary theory, as the popularity of Darwin's view of natural selection from chance variation, as noted by Mendel, was in decline in the 1890s and the early decades of the 20th century. In Andrews' discussion of eohippus, he makes the following statement: "In running, the middle toe bore most of the animal's weight. It did most of the work. Because it was used so much, it grew bigger than the other two toes. But the side toes remained, for they were still useful (page 101)." These expressions of adaptation by desire, akin to the old Lamarck view of "giraffes have longer necks because they did neck-stretching exercises, and then passed their longer necks on to their descendants" (I'm paraphrasing, obviously), are not a part of our understanding of evolution and heritability today. However, it is entirely possible that these slips were merely a way to make the book more easily read, without having to discuss the concept of inheritance at all. In either event, though errors like those described will probably grate on anyone with more than a passing understanding of evolutionary biology, as long as they are understood and can be explained to younger readers, the book still affords excellent and stirring descriptions of the sciences of archaeology and paleontology, and for that, for the sense of adventure and romance that it conveys (without dwelling too much on just how back-breakingly dull and tedious fossil hunting can really be...) it deserves a second reading.

I find that there is a certain charm in books of this age, almost an innocence. Before the era of books for young people filled with a lot of flashy colour photographs and elabourate charts, there were books like this, with simple two-colour line drawings (in this case, provided by illustrator Matthew Kalmenoff) and well-written, compelling text. An entertaining book, and worth finding, reading, and discussing with an intelligent child in your general vicinity, if a copy comes your way.

Review: The Dragon Seekers by Christopher McGowan (2001)

2008-03-31T15:25:00.000-07:00

The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin by Christopher McGowan. Illustrated, 226 pages. Perseus Books, 2002, $15.95.

The field of paleontology could be fairly said to have been born in 19th century England. During this remarkable period, nearly everything about the world changed, from travel to communications to our very fundamental understanding of the nature of the world in which we live. Perhaps the single most famous development of the 19th century, the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), could fairly be said to be a part of the cultural, scientific, and philosophical foment that was underway in Victorian society. That Darwin might never have published without the work of the people discussed in Christopher McGowan's 2001 book, The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin, is clear.

In The Dragon Seekers, McGowan tells the tales of the characters who made the first efforts to systematically describe and understand the remarkable remains which littered the south of England. Fossils (from the Latin fossilus, meaning "dug up") had been known since Antiquity, and a variety of explanations had been put forward in an attempt to rationalise them in concert with the accepted world view, which, up until the 18th century, posited that the world was approximately six to ten thousand years old, and the product of a divine, special creation. However, with the careful examination of the remains - which existed in a variety of states of preservation and completeness - the then largely-unquestioned view of the Earth's origins, in concert with the observations of men like James Hutton and Charles Lyell, who both put the age of the earth at considerably greater than the accepted value, meant that everything was open to question.

The intellectual groundwork for this revolution came as a result of the efforts to systematise and study life, and thereby to classify it. Georges Cuvier, the French anatomist, was a student of life who noted the remarkable similarities between some species which survived in his day and fossils which could not, despite arguments to the contrary, still survive in some remote corner of the world. As more fossils were discovered, and examined in light of the thorough knowledge of anatomy of men like Cuvier, it became obvious that something had happened - something which the then-current explanations could not rationalise away.

Into this scene are injected a cast of colourful and sometimes amusingly eccentric, sometimes whimsically malfeasant characters. William Buckland, the first lecturer in Geology at Oxford University, who went collecting with Mary Anning, a woman unusual for her time whose expertise in fossil collecting along the Dorset coast where she lived was unmatched. Gideon Mantell, the country doctor and avid fossil collector, who loved fossils to such distraction that it caused his estrangement from his wife, William Conybeare, another avid collector of fossils and friend of Buckland. Richard Owen, the biologist and anatomist, who coined the word "dinosaur", and Thomas Hawkins, whose "restorations" of fossil icthyosaurs, later sold to the British Museum, were to cause heartache for Buckland and Mantell, who approved their acquisition despite their evident restoration beyond the point in which they were discovered. We encounter the young Charles Darwin, returned from his voyage aboard HMS Beagle with a host of fossils completely unlike any of those seen in Britain, and yet oddly familiar to those who had studied the living fauna of South America. And we encounter Louis Agassiz, the great Harvard anatomist and paleontologist, who was eventually convinced of the realities of glaciation, but never lost his belief in special creation, or his disdain for the theory of evolution.

Also present in the story are the fossils, the early attempts at understanding the nature of the "terrible lizards" which, it became evident, had once roamed the Earth, and were unlike anything alive in the Victorian world. Through McGowan's compelling and entertaining narrative, we are shown the first tentative reconstructions of what these creatures of the long-dead past were thought to have looked like, from the iguanodon to the pleisosaur, hylaeosaurus, icthyosaurs, and a host of others. As much as the people who sought them, fought over them, and studied them, the fossils of these long-dead creatures themselves are the stars of this book, the titular dragons indeed.

The book concludes with a return to the strangely fecund world of the fossils of Lyme Regis in the present day, presenting the modern descendants of those first intrepid fossilers, two hundred years after the birth of Mary Anning, who trawled along the shore and made her life collecting and identifying fossils entirely for the benefit of others.

In The Dragon Seekers, Christopher McGowan has provided us with an entertaining and informative history of a crucial period in the development of several different, yet closely related sciences: paleontology, anatomy, biology, and, of course, evolution. This non-technical book gives the reader a real sense of the novelty and complexity of the early attempts made to understand the history of life on Earth, and should certainly be read by anyone with a lively interest in the history of life, and how it got that way.

Christopher McGowan is a professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Toronto, and Senior Curator at the Royal Ontario Museum. Limited information about him may be found here.

McGowan's other books include:

In the Beginning: A Scientist Shows Why the Creationists Are Wrong

Make Your Own Dinosaur out of Chicken Bones: Foolproof Instructions for Budding Paleontologists

The Raptor and the Lamb: Predators and Prey in the Living World

Welcome to Science Books Reviewed

2008-03-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my new site of reviews of science books, and thanks for stopping in.

Unlike many people who read much and widely, I don't have the best of memories. I've started a system - several times now - of keeping notecards in books and jotting down interesting things as I read them. As an exercise in memory reinforcement, it has produced mixed results, however, I now find myself thinking on a grander scale. Why not turn my notes and jottings into fully fledged reviews? Why not keep them in a blog? Why not ask myself a few more rhetorical questions?

It has occurred to me that one more site on the web which focused on reviews of science, technology, and history of science books might not be out of place. In the coming posts, I hope to review books that I have read and found interesting, entertaining, or challenging. I'll also be reviewing some classics, some dogs, and some outright unworthy books... all in the interests, I hope, of entertaining and enlightening you, the casual reader.

Many of these books have been reviewed already, by others, and probably more professionally and skillfully. I can only hope that my effort will not only be useful, but will not fall too far short of the goals that I have set. Additionally, I will, where possible, post links to other reviews and relevant information about the books and authors that I am writing about, in the hopes that the collection of this information will, again, be of use.

There are, of course, other sites that do much the same thing, and you'll find those in the sidebar, in a list that I will keep and expand as I encounter them.

In the meantime, as I long ago said elsewhere, and in a different context... caveat lector...