| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Reviews Fame on the Wing Whose Bird? Common Bird Names and the People They Commemorate, by Bo Beolans, Michael Watkins, and Ben Schott. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2004. 384 pp., $35 paperback. Ever wondered who Allen was and what he (or she) did to get a hummingbird named after him? And what about Brewer and that blackbird, or Cooper and the hawk? Or, for that matter, who was the Zino of Zino's petrel? How did these birds get their names? Once, while visiting the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences collections, I overheard a member of the public ask "how do they know what the animals are called when they find them? Where do they look for the name?" Animals' names are given to them by taxonomists who generally choose a moniker that distinguishes them from other species in one of three ways: by a unique physical attribute; a geographical locality; or someone's name. This is true both for scientific and common names. In Whose Bird?, Beolans and company relate the stories of how particular birds got named after certain people and just who these individuals were. The result is a fascinating stroll through the archives of ornithology, exploration, taxonomy, and colonization, among many other topics. There is no hard-and-fast rule for what you have to do to have a species named after you, so the 1,124 people listed in this book are a mixed lot. They range from kings (of Saxony's bird of paradise), queens (Alexandra's parrot), feather traders (Bruijn's pygmy parrot), wives and sweethearts (Aurelia's puffleg, Zöe's imperial pigeon), daughters (Thura's rosefinch) to soldiers (McCall's screech owl), expedition patrons (Rudd's apalis), and field assistants (Klaas' cuckoo). Others are named after the collecting scientists themselves (Wallace's standard-wing, Zappey's parrotbill) or in honor of other academic colleagues. This final category includes several female ornithologists, including Lulu-May Von Hagen (Lulu's tody-tyrant), Emilie Snethlage (Snethlage's woodcreeper) and Maria Koepcke (Koepcke's cacique). Apart from introducing some amazing over-achievers (Spix of Spix's macaw earned his doctorate at 19 years old), Whose Bird? also helps you answer such vexing zoological questions as "Is the Smith in Smith's shoveler the same one as in Smith's bare-eyed pigeon?' (yes, but a different Smith than for Smith's longspur). Organizing its subjects in alphabetical order, frequently with pictures of the people (but never, sadly, "their'' birds), the style brims with enthusiasm and disarming honesty. The charming headings include Artists, Kleptomaniacs, and Diplomats. Coverage varies, however. While some individuals (Geoffroy St. Hilaire) receive just a few lines, others (Richard Meinertzhagen) get a full-page biography. The book covers 2,246 species with human names. The only omission I could detect was Im Thurn's blackbird. In this treasure-house of information and ornithological minutiae, sometimes one can only wonder at the authors' tenacity. How on earth, for example, did they find out that Cora's shearwater was named after a character in an eighteenth-century Swedish opera? The book's spot-on accuracy falters a bit when the authors leave birdland: the mammalogist Oldfield Thomas is listed as Thomas Oldfield and the "shrew" named after Richard Archbold is actually a mouse. But these are quite excusable lapses in a book of this size, scope, and novel approach. Revising Darwin Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, by Joan Roughgarden. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2004. 474 pp., $27.50 hardcover. According to Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden, it's time to bring Darwin's theory of sexual selection into the twenty-first century. In her controversial book, Evolution's Rainbow, Roughgarden argues that Darwin's theory of sexual selection is obsolete. The paradigm of "discreetly discerning damsels seeking horny, handsome, healthy warriors" is not only too simplistic, she writes, it's been rendered even more unscientific by subsequent theorists, who claim that "males are supposed to be more promiscuous than females because sperm are cheap." This devolution, Roughgarden says, is due to cultural bias and sloppy science, promoted by scientists who "benefit from the biological excuse for male philandering that Darwin's sexual selection theory provides." Ouch. Roughgarden does not mince her words, nor does she hide behind academic jargon. Her witty style makes this hefty topic accessible and, more importantly, enables her to pull back the fake curtain of objectivity scientists have labored behind over the past two centuries. "Please consider that everyone writing on these topics is writing from a particular perspective and with a vested interest," she cautions in her introduction. Roughgarden's approach to Darwin's theory of sexual selection derives from her own life experience. At the age of 52 she changed from Jonathan to Joan, and realized that Darwin's theory pathologized her. Her training as a scientist meshed with her experience as a transgendered woman to synthesize a new way of looking at diversity in nature. To prove her point, Roughgarden begins with a tabula rasa, posing such questions as "What is normal?" and "What makes a male, male, and a female, female?" In the first half of her book, she surveys the animal kingdom and finds it teeming with gender-bending behavior and same-sex coupling. In an intellectual journey that rivals the voyage of the Beagle, she describes female hyenas with penises, coral reef fish that change sex, and male seahorses who give birth. These "exceptions" to Darwin's theory colorfully substantiate her claim that "nature abhors a category." Roughgarden argues that "biologists need to develop positive narratives about the diversity they're seeing." They also need to develop new narratives to describe animal societies because many are not based on aggression. Even at the cellular level, she finds, nature is more about negotiation than intimidation. In the book's second half, Roughgarden surveys human cultures and finds that humans, too, elude simplistic, heterosexual categorizing. This "human rainbow" should be respected rather than pathologized. She culminates the book by recommending that medical practices be revamped, biotechnology be more strictly regulated, and a "Statue of Diversity" be erected on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Roughgarden's fusion of science and social studies reveals how research is never conducted in a vacuum. Evolution's Rainbow not only enhances our knowledge of the natural world, it also offers an ethical way for such knowledge to be used. Pilgrims Progress The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, by Richard Dawkins. Houghton Mifflin, New York, NY, 2004. 673 pp., $28 hardcover. Biological evolution has no privileged line of descent and no designated end," warns Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor's Tale, his ambitious history of life on Earth. To avoid the impression that humans are evolution's apex, the influential biologist and author of The Selfish Gene tells his story as a pilgrimage modeled on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Instead of the Knight, the Miller, and the Wife of Bath, other species join humans on the quest-walking, trotting, flying, slithering, crawling, swimming, and ciliating backwards in time. Chaucer's pilgrims were headed for a cathedral; Dawkins's pilgrims are headed to a biological dreamtime, when life emerged from chemistry. Dawkins imagines 39 major rendezvous with our fellow pilgrims. Chimpanzees and bonobos join us at Rendezvous One, six million years ago; marsupials at Rendezvous Fourteen, 140 million years ago; sharks at Rendezvous Twenty-One, 460 million years ago; and so on. As each group joins, fellow pilgrims tell tales explaining how evolution works and the techniques scientists use to unravel its mysteries. "The Gibbon's Tale" describes how DNA is used to decipher the gibbons' family tree, and beautifully demonstrates how a similar technique is used by literary scholars to trace the lineage of different versions of The Canterbury Tales. "The Seal's Tale" is a wonderful riff about the evolutionary basis for human monogamy or polygamy, based on the size difference between male and female elephant seals and chimpanzee versus gorilla testes. Dawkins tells the fascinating story of a bacterium that has invented the wheel in "The Rhizobium's Tale." Too many science writers fail to impart much personality to the page, but Dawkins is an exception. In criticizing overheated rhetoric about the explosion of life during the Cambrian period, Dawkins says tartly: "All that stuff is just plain dotty." Dawkins isn't shy about his feelings for his fellow pilgrims, either. He says of a tiny invertebrate: "Whenever I see a tardigrade I want to keep it as a pet...you can only just see them without a microscope, waving their eight stubby legs with a charming air of infantile ineptitude." Dawkins's primordial Canterbury is a little-understood time when molecules somehow managed to copy themselves and set off an improbable chain of events. "The universe could so easily have remained lifeless...the fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing-is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice," says Dawkins. Despite his disclaimer, Dawkins makes an admirable attempt. First Primates The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey, by Chris Beard. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2004. 363 pp., $27.50 hardcover. Had someone told me a few weeks ago I would enjoy reading a popular book about the earliest phases of primate evolution, I would have said they were joking. As a student of the primate fossil record, I know that the earliest primates are known mostly from fossil scraps you could easily lose at the bottom of a pocket. They're nothing like "Sue" the T. rex or other big, famous fossils that conjure visions of strange creatures in alien environments. I also know that, when it comes to professional discussions about early primate fossils in evolutionary history, we are dealing with interpretations of fine and exquisitely boring anatomical details that center mostly on the size, shape, and orientation of teeth. I would have thought this stuff about as interesting to the public as a book on tax audits. But leave it to Chris Beard to prove me wrong with his first book, The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey. Beard, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, has been a towering influence in primate evolutionary studies since his days as a graduate student. He has the willingness to undertake fieldwork in untried places, a discerning eye for important fossils, superior skills in interpreting fossil anatomy, and an aptitude for communicating his findings to colleagues and the public. In less than 20 years, Beard's research has fundamentally changed the way that we think about the first 30 million years of primate evolution. The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey centers on the momentous discoveries made by Beard's team in China in the 1990s. Most of the fossils that Beard has discovered and spotlighted are jaw-droppers not in the sense of being amazing to look at, but in what they represent: the earliest members of the Anthropoidea or higher primates, the most ancient roots of humanity. Beard weaves the tale of the discovery and interpretation of these fossils around anecdotes of discoveries by earlier paleontologists. He relays a palpable feeling for history and the travails of past discoverers, as well as his own and others' frustrations. He has also captured, possibly better than anyone else, the heat generated by interpersonal disputes in paleontology. Because most of the fossils are incomplete and there aren't many of them to begin with, squabbles over their interpretation are rife, especially those fragments thought to hold critical positions in evolutionary history. Having taken many brickbats already in his career, Beard is in a good position to describe the sometimes absurd lengths to which academic colleagues will go to save their treasured hypotheses and the positions of "their" fossils. I would be doing this book an injustice if I didn't mention that it is packed with great science, and brimming with useful and fun facts. But it's not a book for sissies: To reap the rewards of Beard's knowledge and insights, one has to brave details of tooth anatomy, have a stomach for Latin names, and be able to keep Algeripithecus straight from Aegyptopithecus for more than five minutes. Fortunately, Beard is a great teacher, and some of the most challenging and important details are beautifully illustrated with drawings and reconstructions by Mark Klinger. And every now and then, Beard surprises you with a wonderful tickle. Primates' reliance on vision rather than smell, he writes, is clearly to blame for our preference for "visual pornographic material, rather than scratch-and-sniff cards." Now that's applied science! The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey traces the distant ancestry of humans back to a group of small rat-sized animals hopping in a distant rainforest some 50 million years ago. Beard is to be applauded for brin. Environmental Writers Conserving Words: How American Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement, by Daniel Philippon. University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA, 2004. 416 pp., $39.95 hardcover. No major social movement arises in a vacuum. That's particularly true for the environmentalism, a grassroots movement if there ever was one. Daniel Philippon demonstrates in Conserving Words how writers from Theodore Roosevelt to John Muir changed public attitudes toward nature. The book's opening discussions are aimed more towards scholars of the humanities than general readers. But things soon get better. Subsequent chapters show how environmental luminaries such as Mabel Osgood Wright, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey used language to marshal public support for what are now considered green causes. Roosevelt, alarmed at the increasing scarcity of game, founded the Boone and Crockett Club, a group of hunters organized for the preservation of large mammals. Membership was limited to men "...who had killed at least one individual of the various kinds of American large game." The club was elitist but influential, and racked up an array of environmental accomplishments that foreshadowed Roosevelt's contributions as president. This masculine frontier contrasts sharply with Mabel Osgood Wright's approach. Wright had gardened since she was a child on her father's Connecticut estate; her interest expanded in adulthood to birds and natural history. Wright wrote articles for the New York Times, later published as a book with the gentle title The Friendship of Nature. Her writing took environmental concerns to a broader base. Wright was instrumental in forming the National Audubon Society and in establishing the sanctuary Birdcraft. John Muir experienced nature in a rougher way than either Wright or Roosevelt. After nearly losing his eyesight in an accident, Muir migrated from the midwest to California in 1868 and spent time sheepherding in the mountains. He came to regard the Sierra as a sacred place, one defiled by sheep ("hooved locusts"), miners, and loggers. He founded the Sierra Club, worked to protect Yosemite, but failed to prevent the flooding of Hetch Hetchy Valley. Involved as Muir was with parks and inevitably with tourists, he had reservations about opening up sacred places to everyone. He wrote a friend, "As for the rough vertical animals called men, who occur in and on these mountains like sticks of condensed filth, I am not in contact with them." Aldo Leopold, cerebral and professorial, also had reservations about the relationship of the masses to the wilderness. He and his antithesis, the raucous Edward Abbey, are the subjects of the final two chapters of the book. Their writing and the organizations they helped to create reflect their very different personalities. For the casual reader Conserving Words is often heavy sledding, but it is leavened with piquant passages. |