Many readers will find the equations incomprehensible, but they will relish a lucid, provocative argument that the dazzling...
An insightful argument that evolution, despite producing complex creatures as different as bacteria, bugs, and humans, must obey scientific laws.
“Physics explains much about why living things look like they do; evolutionary biology provides much of the explanation about how they become like they are.” So writes Cockell (Astrobiology/Univ. of Edinburgh; Astrobiology: Understanding Life in the Universe, 2015), the director of the UK Centre for Astrobiology, in his latest, and he proceeds to make a convincing case. Laws set limits. There is life at temperatures above that of boiling water and below freezing, but not by much. When water is absent or locked up in extremely salty environments, life cannot exist. Honey doesn’t spoil not because it contains any toxins but because its water is unavailable. Our planet’s life is carbon-based and requires a universal solvent, water. Might creatures elsewhere in the universe form themselves from closely related silicon and prefer other common liquids such as ammonia or methane? Moving smoothly from physics to chemistry, biology, and beyond, the author is an amiable guide through some knotty scientific thickets. Ignoring the taboo on equations in popular science writing, Cockell sprinkles them liberally to illustrate their (relative) simplicity. Perhaps the simplest, P = F/A (pressure equals force over area), is critical to the mole, a burrowing animal designed to shift soil by maximizing the force over a small area. Evolution eliminates less efficient burrowers, so all moles, many entirely unrelated, look alike. “If physics and biology are tightly coupled,” writes Cockell, “then life outside Earth, if such life exists, might be remarkably similar to life on Earth, and terrestrial life might be less an idiosyncrasy of one experiment in evolution, but a template for much of life in the universe.”
Many readers will find the equations incomprehensible, but they will relish a lucid, provocative argument that the dazzling variety of organisms produced by 4 billion years of evolution may seem unbounded, but all follow universal laws.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1759-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Most of the adjectives and metaphors that initially come to mind to describe tigers seem to have originally come from them. Poetry in motion. Predatory cunning. We don't use other animal or human traits to describe tigers; we use tigers to describe the world. Or to sell cereal, hawk gasoline, or bestow on sports teams the combination of controlled ferocity and grace that William Blake called ``fearful symmetry.'' Poetry can't elevate a tiger. Being the thing itself, a tiger is already elevated. But pictures like the ones in this book are good. And facts are good, too. They ground wonderment in knowledge. How'd you like to be able to carry 50 pounds of meat in your stomach? This is just one of the facts in this companion text to a PBS installment of the In the Wild series. Barnes, who writes on wildlife for The Guardian in England, covers the lives and shrinking habitats of Siberian, Indian, Sumatran, and Indochinese tigers. He also writes about poaching and efforts to stop it. (75 color photos, 75 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11544-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
This new biography attempts not only to chronicle Edison's achievements but to set him in the context of his time. It falls short on both counts. Thomas Edison remains, more than 60 years after his death, the quintessential American genius. The electric light alone earned him a central spot in the pantheon of inventors. Add to it the phonograph, motion pictures, and over 1,000 patents for everything from an electric pen to a method for enriching iron ore, and it's no wonder Baldwin (Man Ray, 1988) seems overwhelmed by his subject. Fiercely competitive, Edison was a workaholic long before the term was invented. His first wife, Mary (who died an early death), rarely saw him. He would work 60 hours straight on a project that caught his fancy and frequently juggled four or five ongoing projects at once. His genius for assembling a team of men totally dedicated to his goals—and willing to delegate all the glory to the ``Old Man''—was surpassed only by his genius for promotion. (The incandescent light was far less significant than his convincing the world that his system, and only his, was the light of the future.) Baldwin does present an Edison more complex than the Horatio Alger template into which his contemporaries wanted to fit his life, but he never quite manages to pull together the various strands of his portrait. The reader gets only perfunctory descriptions of Edison's early inventions and how they were received, let alone any insight into how he was able to convince others to back his projects or to join his team, before the phonograph made him world-famous. Like many eminent Victorians, Edison was a fascinating monster, and Baldwin captures some of both the fascination and the monstrosity; but one comes away from the book feeling that the best part of the story remains untold. (50 b&w photos, unseen)
Pub Date: Feb. 9, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6041-3
Page Count: 534
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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