Evo devo for the everyday reader, with the personal stuff adding color needed to sustain a skirmish with molecular...
Brash, world-renowned paleontologist confesses that if he had his druthers, he’d “Bring ‘em Back Alive.”
Horner (Paleontology/Montana State Univ.) wants to introduce readers to “evo devo,” a jazzy moniker for evolutionary development. But first he wants to tell a story—and it’s a good one, though at times meandering—about paleontology, where it’s been and where it may be going. Co-written by New York Times deputy science editor Gorman, who’s collaborated with Horner before (Digging Dinosaurs, 1990, etc.), the polished narrative has a comfortable, intelligent flow. It starts with Horner’s early career digging fossils in eastern Montana, where he famously helped in the unearthing of a T. rex that prompted a sea change in his thinking. During the excavation, it was necessary to break one of the dinosaur’s femurs in half, thus revealing fossilized bone tissue that led fellow researcher Mary Schweitzer down the road of cutting-edge molecular inquiry. Horner digresses about skinheads, Ted Kaczynski and chicken carcasses, but his main idea is reverse evolutionary engineering. Might we, by joining the research of embryo development with the study of evolution, be able to intervene in an embryo’s growth to manipulate events at the molecular level toward ancient forms? The genetic materials are there, but can we tap them? In the 19th century, German naturalist Ernst Haeckel famously declared that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”; 20th- and 21st-century expression of DNA appears to be bearing this out. “Why couldn’t we take a chicken embryo and biochemically nudge it this way and that,” asks Horner, “until what was hatched was not a chicken, but a small dinosaur?” A few centuries back, he would have been burned at the stake for this suggestion; today, it’s exciting.
Evo devo for the everyday reader, with the personal stuff adding color needed to sustain a skirmish with molecular paleobiology.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-525-95104-9
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
A tiny book, not much bigger than a pamphlet, with huge potential impact.
A collection of articulate, forceful speeches made from September 2018 to September 2019 by the Swedish climate activist who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaking in such venues as the European and British Parliaments, the French National Assembly, the Austrian World Summit, and the U.N. General Assembly, Thunberg has always been refreshingly—and necessarily—blunt in her demands for action from world leaders who refuse to address climate change. With clarity and unbridled passion, she presents her message that climate change is an emergency that must be addressed immediately, and she fills her speeches with punchy sound bites delivered in her characteristic pull-no-punches style: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.” In speech after speech, to persuade her listeners, she cites uncomfortable, even alarming statistics about global temperature rise and carbon dioxide emissions. Although this inevitably makes the text rather repetitive, the repetition itself has an impact, driving home her point so that no one can fail to understand its importance. Thunberg varies her style for different audiences. Sometimes it is the rousing “our house is on fire” approach; other times she speaks more quietly about herself and her hopes and her dreams. When addressing the U.S. Congress, she knowingly calls to mind the words and deeds of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. The last speech in the book ends on a note that is both challenging and upbeat: “We are the change and change is coming.” The edition published in Britain earlier this year contained 11 speeches; this updated edition has 16, all worth reading.
A tiny book, not much bigger than a pamphlet, with huge potential impact.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313356-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
McPhee (Irons in the Fire, 1997, etc.) winds up his artful geohistory of the US by going deep into the heartland—Kansas, Nebraska—in pursuit of deep time: the Precambrian. Included in this collection are his four previous forays into geology—Basin and Range (1981, which, to encapsulate, delineated plate tectonics), In Suspect Terrain (1983, Appalachian geohistory and some broadsides at plate tectonic theory), Rising from the Plains (1986, Wyoming curiosities and environmental conundrums), and Assembling California (1993, a showcase for active tectonics). Here he adds "Crossing the Craton"—craton being the rock basement of the continent—delving into the realms of "isotopic and chemical signatures, cosmological data, and conjecture," in the company of geochronologist Randy Van Schmus. McPhee has a way of making deep structures seem freestanding, right there to ogle: "the walls of the rift are three thousand feet sheer," they're also 600 feet below the surface. Dexterous as ever, McPhee takes on the creation—early island arcs and vulcanism and microcontinents—and tells it with all the power and simplicity a genesis story deserves.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-10520-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
