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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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!

[T]wo subjects which moved my Father perhaps more deeply than any others were cruelty to animals & slavery – his detestation of both was intense, and his indignation was overwhelming in case of any levity or want of feeling on these matters.  – William Darwin

The trick to finishing books this year is getting up early, apparently.  I managed to get through the last four chapters of Darwin’s Sacred Cause this weekend while the baby slept. In the process, I’ve had to come to terms with  the disquieting beginnings of my own discipline and the bloody and violent antecedents of the town I’ve called home for the past dozen years.

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln share a birthday, but they also share a tumultuous period in history. I’ve always been struck by the realization that Origin of Species was published just a few short years before the Civil War. After reading Darwin’s Sacred Cause, I get the idea that it was not coincidental.  Yes, Darwin sat on his big idea for 20 years, publishing travel journals, works on geology, and a four-volume monograph on barnacles. Why barnacles?  First, to document the amount of variation present in species, which natural selection requires to operate; and second, to establish himself as a knowledgeable naturalist in the eyes of the Royal Society, and provide the credentials needed to discuss his theory. In addition, describing the complete lineage of these marine arthropods provided an example of common descent. Barnacles were a proxy for a much more controversial topic – human variation.

Not science

Human variation is what I study as a biological (or physical) anthropologist. Physical anthropology has its roots, at least in part according to the authors, in phrenology. That’s the pseudo-science of determining temperament from the shape of the skull.  Not surprisingly, given that phrenology developed in Europe, Europeans were said to have the most refined skulls, and phrenological findings were used to justify slavery, something Darwin’s entire family was against.  Darwin would not have been impressed with the physical anthropologists of his day, especially in America, where differences in skull morphology were seen as “proof” of a polygenic origin of humans. According to the polygenists, each human “race” had its own pair of progenitors and were separately created, an idea used to justify all sorts of atrocities, since non-Europeans were seen as less than human. Darwin held the monogenist view, and saw all peoples as descended from a common ancestor, meaning they were all worthy of being treated with dignity and respect, and slavery was unjustified.  Actually, he took it farther than that, and saw a common ancestor for all living things.

It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another.–We consider those, where the cerebral structure/intellectual faculties most developed, as highest.–A bee doubtless would when the instincts were. – Charles Darwin

He spent a number of years studying pigeons, just to demonstrate that all the fancy breeds (“races”) descended from a common ancestor. Another proxy for human variation.

Darwin’s Pigeons – from Variation in Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), with the common ancestor, the rock dove, in the center.

The tension between these two worldviews played out in my hometown, before the Civil War even started. In 1856, Sheriff Samuel Jones led a pro-slavery posse into Lawrence, Kansas, which had been established by abolitionist settlers two years before, sacked the town, burned the Free State Hotel, smashed the presses, and killed an antislavery supporter.

The ruins of the Free State Hotel

Darwin’s mentor and friend, geologist Charles Lyell, who encouraged him to publish his ideas on natural selection, was a Southern sympathizer. The Anthropological Society of London was founded in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, with three Confederate agents on the council, whose sole purpose was to push a pro-slavery agenda.

Plaque marking the site of the Free State Hotel, downtown Lawrence.

That’s what Darwin was up against.  Not just other naturalists, but Victorian society. No wonder he waited two decades to publish.

My discipline has come a long way since Darwin’s day.  The American Anthropological Association’s “Statement on Race and Intelligence” states in part:

WHEREAS all human beings are members of one species, Homo sapiens, and

WHEREAS, differentiating species into biologically defined “races” has proven meaningless and unscientific as a way of explaining variation (whether in intelligence or other traits),

THEREFORE, the American Anthropological Association urges the academy, our political leaders and our communities to affirm, without distraction by mistaken claims of racially determined intelligence, the common stake in assuring equal opportunity, in respecting diversity and in securing a harmonious quality of life for all people.

And the American Association of Physical Anthropologists has their own “Statement on Biological Aspects of Race,” which says:

Physical, cultural and social environments influence the behavioral differences among individuals in society. Although heredity influences the behavioral variability of individuals within a given population, it does not affect the ability of any such population to function in a given social setting. The genetic capacity for intellectual development is one of the biological traits of our species essential for its survival. This genetic capacity is known to differ among individuals. The peoples of the world today appear to possess equal biological potential for assimilating any human culture. Racist political doctrines find no foundation in scientific knowledge concerning modern or past human populations.

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Image Credits:

Ryan Somma’s flickr stream

Wikimedia Commons

Dr. Steven M. Carr’s website

I read Einstein in Love by Dennis Overbye four years ago.  It was an interesting examination of Einstein’s early life, up through his marriage to Mileva Marić.  Einstein: His Life and Universe was written after the release of Einstein’s archives, and is a more complete biography of the man.  It makes a nice companion volume, revealing much of Einstein’s life in his own words.

I listened to the audio version of this book, read by Edward Herrmann.  He did justice to the German pronounciations, and made listening to the unabridged 21 hours a pleasure.  Having read other biographies of Einstein, I knew the basic outline of his life.  What was interesting about Isaacson’s treatment was his placement of Einstein’s theoretical work into historical context.

For example, I was aware that he knew Marie Curie, but not that he had a long-standing friendship and correspondence with Schrödinger (of cat fame), nor a cordially contentious relationship with Bohr.  I knew of his encouragement of FDR to develop the atom bomb, but not of his pacifism.  And I’m still wrestling with the idea that he was a determinist, and therefore didn’t believe in free will.  On top of all that, he did thought experiments in his head to figure out the properties of light.   And while he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, it wasn’t for E=mc² or relativity, but rather for his discovery of the photoelectric effect.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The one required undergraduate course I took was stodgy and didn’t cover anything as modern as Einstein. Despite that, I have a soft spot for the history of science, and this book satisfies it very well.

Spook is the third of Mary Roach’s books that I’ve read this summer. As with her other two books, Spook examines the scientific approach to the paranormal phenomena, such as hauntings and psychics. The history of paranormal investigation is fascinating, including exposure of mediums at the turn of the century. Some of the claims made (a woman giving birth to rabbits?!?) read like Weekly World News headlines.

Mary tackles the topic from the perspective of genuine curiosity, not blind belief or rigid skepticism, which I appreciate. She explores possibilities, such as the effects of infrasound and electromagnetism on human perception. While Bonk is still my favorite of her books, Spook is a pretty good read.

John Hawks, a biological anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, has a recent review of Spook as well.

After reading Bonk, I was curious about Mary Roach’s other books, so I reserved them at the library. I chose to read Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers first. Basically, Mary was exploring the options of what to do with your body when you die.

Burial is certainly the most common choice, but for those that donate their body for research, there are a myriad of options, not just being a cadaver in an anatomy lab. She went to the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm to find out exactly what happens to a human body after death, when left to its own devices. Some can end up in the embalming lab at mortician school, or as practice heads for plastic surgeons, or as crash test dummies. She found others in the Harvard Brain Bank, and thought that might be a possibility:

My reasons for becoming a brain donor aren’t very good at all. My reasons boil down to a Harvard Brain Bank donor wallet card,which enables me to say “I’m going to Harvard” and not be lying. You do not need brains to go to the Harvard Brain Bank — only a brain.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What she wanted was to be a brain in jar, a la Abby Normal in Young Frankenstein. She was disappointed to discover the brains sliced and stored in rubbermaid containers in a lab refrigerator.

While this book is not for the squeamish, it’s definitely an interesting read, and gives the reader plenty to think about. Instead of embalming, how about compost?

Bonk! is an interesting look at the scientific study of human sexuality. There’s the requisite chapter on the pioneers, Kinsey and Masters & Johnson, but Mary Roach’s tongue in cheek wit had me giggling through most of it.

There’s also information on current research, including the discovery that the scent of men’s cologne, grilled meat, and cherries turns women off, but a mix of cucumber and candy (specifically Good & Plenty) is a real turn on. Or her visit to an exhibit of homemade sex machines. And her interview with an Egyptian doctor who studied the effects of polyester pants on rat copulation. Turns out, it’s about the same effect as what you would expect for human copulation, though the doctor hypothesizes that the synthetic material creates electrical fields that affect the rat’s genitals, while the author thinks that the observed decreased copulatory frequency might have more to do with dressing like you’re going to a disco.

Funny and informative, Mary Roach’s writing style makes me want to track down her other books, Spook and Stiff.