I started this book in March, the second selection for the 2010 Freethinker’s Science Book Club. It was just before the semester became a long series of deadlines and the book was recalled by another patron of my local library. Once the semester ended, I checked it out again and finished it in a little over a week.
Remarkable Creatures is a collection of short biographies of “adventurers,” starting with Alexander von Humbolt, the Dutch naturalist whose Personal Narrative describing his explorations of South America inspired Charles Darwin. Darwin’s chapter was mostly a rehash of material I’ve read elsewhere, which I would expect given my field. But the remainder of the book, even the chapters on Eugène Dubois (who discovered Homo erectus) and the Leakey family (who combined discovered the majority of hominin fossils in Africa) – whose discoveries I teach in my intro physical anthropology classes – presented richly detailed portraits of some of the pivotal figures in the field of evolutionary biology.
One of the more interesting chapters for me was “The Day the Mesozoic Died,” the story of the discovery of the K-T boundary in the fossil record. Disclaimer: I am an anthropological geneticist, but one of my undergrad degrees is in zoology. I was one of those kids who went through the dinosaur fascination phase, and later considered being an astronaut. So this chapter, with the mystery of the “end of the dinosaurs,” and the radical notion that it had come from outer space, was right up my alley. The formidable accumulation of evidence of an extraterrestrial source of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, and rejection of other hypotheses (volcanic eruption), is an elegant account of both the transdisciplinary and skeptical nature of science.
The final two chapters discuss the tension between paleoanthropologists and molecular anthropologists in the quest to understand human origins, and are now dated, due the recent work on the Neandertal genome.
Despite that, the book is a great introduction to breadth of research subsumed in evolutionary biology. The life stories of these remarkable scientists will hopefully inspire a new generation of researchers.
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There are also children’s biographies of some of these explorers (and others), for those who might want to encourage their little scientists.
- Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution
- Dragon Bones and Dinosaur Eggs: A Photobiography of Explorer Roy Chapman Andrews
- Dinosaurs Of Waterhouse Hawkins
- Mary Leakey: Archaeologist Who Really Dug Her Work (Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Inventors and Scientists)
(Their series on artists and musicians is fantastic, I can’t wait to get these for my younger kids.)
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July’s picks for the 2010 Freethinker’s Book Club are
Happy reading!
