A profound, scientifically based appeal for recognition of the kinship of all living things.
Award-winning ecologist Safina (Nature and Humanity/Stony Brook Univ.; The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World, 2011 etc.) disputes the dogma among scientists that forbids speculations about the “the inner lives of animals.”
As the author notes, “a young scientist is taught that the animal mind—if there is such—is unknowable.” They are taught to always refer to animals as “it” rather than “who.” Attributing emotions to animals is to commit the sin of anthropomorphism. Safina refutes this idea by examining the social behavior of primates, elephants, wolves, whales, and many others. “Not assuming that other animals have thoughts and feelings was a good start for a new science,” he writes. “Insisting that they did not was bad science.” To dissociate man from other animals is to deny the evidence. We recognize when animals are hungry, so why not admit “when animals seem joyous in joyful contexts, joy is the simplest interpretation of the evidence.” The author cites experiments that demonstrate how electrical stimulation of the brains of animals and humans trigger similar emotional responses, and he based his examples on his personal observations of animals in the wild and discussions with experts with firsthand knowledge of them. For example, the matriarch in an elephant or wolf family depends on other adults for support, and they, in turn, depend upon her. Safina illustrates this with poignant descriptions of how the social lives of both adult and young animals are shaped by the interplay of individual adult personalities within the family. The author's chronicles of his observations of wild animals are captivating, but they also serve to make a larger point: why are people unwilling to admit that nonhuman animals also think and feel as we do? Safina suggests that perhaps it is “because acknowledging the mind of another makes it harder to abuse them.”
A profound, scientifically based appeal for recognition of the kinship of all living things.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9888-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PROFILES
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
IN THE NEWS
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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