Physicist Lindley (The End of Physics, 1993) and DeSalle, a DNA-in-amber expert at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, have a fine time taking to task the tangled web Michael Crichton has spun in his Jurassic Park books and movies. Rather than producing a smug put-down, however, they provide a fine guide to the perplexed on genetic engineering and evolution. For a start, they point out that warm tropical islands off the coast of Costa Rica may have Technicolor charm but are the wrong places to look for really old amber (65 million years at least, if you want dino DNA). You're better off in New Jersey! But that's a minor detail. All of the clever gene amplification methods today would not be enough to reconstruct all you need to know to fashion your favorite brontosaurus or velociraptor from what could be recovered from a mosquito in a chunk of amber. To understand why, the authors review what we know about fossils, about dinosaurs, and about manipulating DNA. They explain how to extract DNA, map and sequence it, identify genes, and make comparisons across species. Even presuming that the DNA recovered miraculously contains a full dinosaur recipe, the next hurdle would be to puzzle out where to grow it; you need a receptive egg and egg-layer. And other problems follow: How would a dinosaur, without parents, learn to behave like a dinosaur? There is, perhaps, a little overkill here, as the authors indulge in the numbers game of how much land (and food) it would take to maintain the dinosaurs described in the books. Not that they are total skeptics: Recent headlines, after all, have demonstrated the spectacular possibilities of cloning. If, as they say, everything in life is a matter of timing, DeSalle and Lindley could hardly have brought out a book at a more propitious time. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 4, 1997
ISBN: 0-465-07379-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An anthropologist (Penn State Univ.) examines one of the most famous fossil organisms ever discovered, and discusses its meaning in the ongoing debates about evolution. The first hint of Archaeopteryx—the impression in stone of a solitary feather—was unearthed in the limestone quarries of Solnhofen, Germany, in 1861. At an estimated age of 150 million years, it was immediately hailed as representing the earliest known bird. The fossil, and seven more specimens later uncovered, reveal a creature much like many small dinosaurs—but with the unmistakable impressions of feathers around its forelimbs. The first discovered skeleton appeared to be a clear-cut example of the sort of intermediate form, part reptile and part bird, that Darwin's brand-new theory of evolution needed to bolster its case. But was it really? One German scientist tried to rename it Griphosaurus, classifying it not as a bird, but as a feathered coelurosaur. Others argued that the feather impressions were faked—a claim that still surfaces in anti-evolutionary tracts. Thomas Huxley led the evolutionists' countercharge in several seminal articles, deploying evidence for the now widely accepted position that birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs. Shipman (The Evolution of Racism, 1994) presents a detailed history of the fossils and the debate around them, including quotations from many of the original articles. Shipman pays particular attention to the question of flight itself—how and why over many generations, a small dinosaur developed anatomical structures that allowed it to take to the air. In the process of answering this question, the author investigates aerodynamics, the anatomy of birds and other flying creatures from insects to pterosaurs to bats, modern theories of dinosaur life and ecology, and other issues that will fascinate natural-history buffs. Lively and well written, offering a good sense not only of the intriguing first bird, but of the way science works.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-81131-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
Physicist Krauss (Case Western Reserve Univ.) has tackled the daunting task of explaining the complexities of modern physics to the uninitiated before (Fear of Physics, 1993), with mixed results; here he uses concepts from the super-popular Star Trek television series as a kind of hook to make the lessons a little easier to swallow. Krauss leads off with a look at travel in the futuristic Trek setting: Does all this talk of ``warp nine'' amount to anything? Might we ever leap from star to star like Kirk, Picard, and the others? The answer is a hesitant maybe, as Krauss explains with reference to Newtonian, Einsteinian, and more modern theories of space and time, which do indeed seem to leave room for ``warping'' space as a means of travel. (A recurring theme throughout is how often the Trek writers seem to get the terminology at least close to correct—the original series, for instance, used the term ``black star'' before the name ``black hole'' had been coined.) From warp drive he moves on to the transporter, with somewhat less encouraging results (the physical hurdles suggest we'll never beam anyone up at all), and then to the holodeck, which seems the most likely of all Trek tech to actually work. Thereafter the book drifts further and further from Trek specifics, glancing at the likelihood of alien life, cosmic strings, solitons, and other edgy subjects, with only a few allusions to maintain the Trek theme. That theme certainly makes it all more user-friendly, but Krauss's brevity will leave readers who don't subscribe to Scientific American a little lost, and those who do without much new to chew on. (photos and illustrations) ($75,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-00559-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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