An engaging resume of the pros and cons in the raging controversies that characterize anthropology/paleontology today, as...
Bipedalism long preceded tool use and bigger brains in human evolution, notes primate-watcher Stanford (Anthropology/Univ. of Southern California), and it was all for the love of meat.
Taking several giant steps backward in time from his earlier work, The Hunting Apes (1999), the author addresses what happened in African ecology six million years ago to give rise to early bipeds, the shufflers and short-distance walkers who eventually evolved into the modern marathon walkers who peopled the globe. Forget about opposable thumbs: primates have them. Forget about standing up to look for predators lurking in the high grass of the savannahs: Africa did not transform overnight from all forest to all savannahs; it was a patchwork of woods, forests, and grasslands abundant with multiple primate species and hominids living side by side. Forget about hands being freed to make tools or carry food or babies: that’s all part of the “linear, simplistic stories” in which a single species of hominid “progresses” to Homo sapiens. No, the advantages that favored early modifications of anatomy and respiration for efficient walking, states Stanford, were that they enabled our ancestors to forage more widely for small game and to eventually move onto grasslands where they could find carcasses of big herd animals to divide and share. Three million years ago, tools came into play; a million years later, the brain mushroomed in size. For all Stanford’s skillful demolishing of many current human-origin theories, especially those that propose a sole reason or a one-step process, his meat-eating incentive will surely be criticized as just another single-cause theory. This in spite of Stanford’s disclaimers to the contrary and his statement that “we have no reason to assume that the cause of the first steps was directly related to the cause of later improvements.”
An engaging resume of the pros and cons in the raging controversies that characterize anthropology/paleontology today, as well as a pleasing summary of the author’s own arguments.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-30247-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science...
Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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