January 2009
© Janet Davis
Perhaps it’s an attribute of advancing age, but I find the time available for leisure reading to be increasingly curtailed. So in the long nights of winter, rather than focus exclusively on fiction, I try to cram in as much ongoing education as I can through books on natural history and popular science. Though this sometimes means nodding off on my pillow at midnight as I inspect sapsucker holes on white pines with Bernd Heinrich, count the zeroes on the number of stars in the cosmos with Carl Sagan or peer at trilobite fossils in Devonian rocks with Richard Fortey, it also means that learning about our planet and the heavens beyond becomes a joyful, life-long quest, if at my own troglodyte pace.
Listed below are twenty new and old classics from my natural history/science bookcase and a brief quotation or two from each. If you’re inclined to learn more, you can explore the books online by clicking on each cover illustration.
Angier, Natalie The
Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful
Basics of Science (2007)
Imagine
an overview of the mysteries of science written by a stand-up comic from the
Catskills who also has a PhD in astronomy, biology and nuclear physics. That’s the flavor of this wonderful book by New York Times science writer Natalie
Angier, whose energetic, funny and highly informed tour of the universe bounces
from bell curves to electron bonds to natural selection to DNA to carbon
sequestration to a blow-by-blow account of the birth of a supernova (or
“sequined shrapnel” as Angier so poetically puts it).
“There are more than one hundred different types of atoms,
from lightweights like hydrogen and helium through welterweights like tin and
iodine and out to such mumbling mooseheads as ununpentium and ununquadium, but
they’re all pretty much the same nearly nil size. You can fit more than three atoms in a
nanometer, meaning it would take 1013, or 10 trillion of them, to
coat the disk of our pinhead. And the
funny thing about an atom is that its outlandish smallness is still too big for
it; almost all of its subnanometer span is taken up by empty space. The real meat of an atom is its core, its
nucleus, which accounts for better than 99.9 percent of an atom’s matter. When you step on your bathroom scale, you are
essentially weighing the sum of your atomic nuclei. If you could strip them all from your body,
go on a total denuclear diet, you’d be down to about 20 grams, the weight of
four nickels. Or roughly the weight of
the doornail that you would be as dead as.”
Bryson, Bill A Short History of Just About Everything
(2003)
Bryson’s
delightful, conversational tone rings through this romp across science, a book
triggered by the author’s recollection of his disappointment as a young boy at
looking into a school text with a riveting cover of the earth in fiery
cross-section, only to find it full of incomprehensible and “soberly
unfathomable” facts. As he grew older,
Bryson decided “there seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among
textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too
near the realm of the mildly interesting…”.
In correcting this deficit, Bryson tells the stories of the scientists,
many working in relative obscurity, who shaped our understanding of myriad
scientific concepts, including the Big Bang and supernovae, stratigraphy,
palaeontology, the periodic table, atoms, particle physics, relativity,
tectonics, meteorites, earthquakes, volcanoes, wind, evolution, bacteria,
taxonomy and DNA, among much more. It’s
a crash course, certainly, but Bryson succeeds in turning those soberly
unfathomable facts into exciting stories that whet our appetite for more.
“In the summer of 1971, a young geologist named Mike
Voorhies was scouting around on some grassy farmland in eastern Nebraska, not
far from the little town of Orchard, where he had grown up. Passing through a steep-sided gully, he
spotted a curious glint in the brush above and clambered up to have a
look. What he had seen was the perfectly
preserved skull of a young rhinoceros, which had been washed out by recent
heavy rains. A few yards beyond, it
turned out, was one of the most extraordinary fossil beds ever discovered in
North America, a dried-up water hole that had served as a mass grave for scores
of animals – rhinoceroses, zebra-like horses, saber-toothed deer, camels,
turtles. All had died from some
mysterious cataclysm just under twelve million years ago in the time known to
geology as the Miocene. In those days
Nebraska stood on a vast, hot plain very like the Serengeti of Africa
today. The animals had been found buried
under volcanic ash up to ten feet deep.
The puzzle of it was that there were not, and never had been, any
volcanoes in Nebraska.”
Darwin, Charles The Origin of Species (First Edition, 1859)
For
anyone interested in biology, and evolutionary theory in particular, Darwin’s
classic volume is like cod liver oil:
very good for you but a little difficult to get down. Highly recommended, therefore, as a pre-Origin aperitif is David Quammen’s The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, below, which
sets the stage by giving a sense of the pressures that came to bear on Darwin
as he worked up the courage to broadcast his stunning theory. Thus prepared, it’s easier to move through
this book and its chapters on Variation Under Domestication; Variation Under
Nature; Struggle for Existence; Natural Selection; Laws of Variation;
Difficulties on Theory; Instinct; Hybridism; Geological Succession of Organic
Beings; Geological Distribution; and Classification. In a quote, below, from the final chapter,
Recapitulation and Conclusion, Darwin sums up in a few elegant and prescient
words the argument that Creationists often use against him even today: If we can’t see it with our own two eyes, it
simply can’t be happening.
“I have now recapitulated the chief facts and
considerations which have thoroughly convinced me that species have changed,
and are still slowly changing by the preservation and accumulation of
successive slight favourable variations.
Why, it may be asked, have all the most eminent living naturalists and
geologists rejected this view of the mutability of species? It cannot be asserted that organic beings in
a state of nature are subject to no variation; it cannot be proved that the
amount of variation in the course of long ages is a limited quantity; no clear
distinction has been, or can be, drawn between species and well-marked
varieties. It cannot be maintained that
species when intercrossed are invariably sterile, and varieties invariably
fertile.....( ) But the chief cause of our natural
unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to other and distinct
species, is that we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we
do not see the intermediate steps. The
difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when Lyell first
insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys
excavated, by the slow action of the coast-waves. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full
meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive
the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost
infinite number of generations.”
Dawkins, Richard Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)
In
1884, the poet John Keats wrote a poem in which the following verse
appears: “Philosophy will
clip an Angel’s wings/Conquer all mysteries by rule and line/Empty the haunted
air and gnomed mine/Unweave a rainbow…..” (In the late
19th century, “philosophy” included the realm of science.) The last three words of the verse were widely taken
to represent Keats’s criticism of Isaac Newton’s failure to appreciate the
simple beauty of a rainbow, rather than reducing it scientifically into mere
prismatic colors. Thus Dawkins launches
his exploration of “Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder”, attempting
to square what some call “the nihilistic pessimism” of science with his own
view that science “can generate a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the
finest that poetry and music can deliver”.
In doing so, he also gathers tentative ammunition for his later,
hard-hitting, anti-religion bestseller, The God Delusion, with passages like this one:
“I remember once trying gently to amuse a six-year-old
child at Christmas time by reckoning up with her how long it would take Father
Christmas to go down all the chimneys in the world. If the average chimney is 20 feet long and
there are, say, 100 million houses with children, how fast, I wondered aloud,
would he have to whiz down each chimney in order to finish the job by dawn on
Christmas Day? He’d hardly have time to
tiptoe noiselessly into each child’s bedroom, would he, since he’d necessarily
be breaking the sound barrier? She saw
the point and realized that there was a problem, but it didn’t worry her in the
least. She dropped the subject without
pursuing it. The obvious possibility
that her parents had been telling falsehoods never seemed to cross her
mind. She wouldn’t have put it in these
words but the implication was that, if the laws of physics rendered Father
Christmas’s feat impossible, so much the worse for the laws of physics…… My
contention is that trusting credulity may be normal and healthy in a child but
it can become an unhealthy and reprehensible gullibility in an adult. Growing up, in the fullest sense of the word,
should include the cultivation of a healthy scepticism.”
Dillard, Annie Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
Accompanying
Dillard in prose from her little house in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains
across the property to her beloved Tinker Creek is a little like sitting on the
brush of an impressionist painter whose swirling strokes are abstract
approximations of what she sees. In a
way, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek (at 31, Dillard was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer for
non-fiction) takes us on a voyage of discovery that tells us more about the
artist than the art. Dillard herself
called the book a “theological treatise”; others refer to it as meditation. Intensely mystical and sprinkled throughout
with a host of philosophers, holy men and naturalists from Buber to Saint Luke
to Thoreau, Dillard’s stream-of-consciousness reflections on the mysteries of
nature take us through four seasons on her property and range from muskrats to
Melville and grasshoppers to the Gnostics.
“When I see
this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over
logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing
and tilting my head. Some days when a
mist covers the mountains; when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s
mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm
the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a
rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.”
“I want to have things as multiply and intricately as
possible present and visible in my mind.
Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burnt books where the
starlings fly over and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the
quarried rock, the viney woods, Hollins pond, and the mountains beyond, but
also, and simultaneously, feathers’ barbs, springtails in the soil,
chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the
pines.”
Egan, Timothy The
Worst Hard Time (2006)
When
I returned from a conference in Oklahoma City, having made a personal excursion
to the tallgrass prairie reserve several hours to the northeast, I resolved
to learn more about the devastation that visited the Great Plains during the
dust bowl years of the ‘30s. Timothy
Egan’s National Book Award-winning The
Worst Hard Time is that rare combination of page-turner and historic
account, capturing in vivid prose the stories of the hopeful sodbusters who took
up the U.S. government’s invitation to dig up the native prairie grasses and
plant millions of acres of wheat. The
1920s were boom times and the wheat farmers made buckets of money – until the
rains stopped. As severe drought took
hold and the stock market collapsed, wheat prices sank and huge tracts of
farmland were abandoned to nature, leading to an ecological disaster of
unimaginable proportions. Egan’s book
(he’s a reporter for the New York Times)
is a cautionary tale about the hard-learned science of soil conservation and an
excellent companion to Candace Savage’s book, Prairie: A Natural History, below.
But it’s also a heartbreaking tale of hardworking, ordinary folk,
institutionalized greed and dashed dreams.
And it’s got enough seat-of-the-pants action to keep you reading long
into the night, like the following passage about the infamous Black Sunday
duster on April 14, 1935.
“A telegraph inquiry around 2:30 p.m. came by Morse code from northern
Kansas to the railroad depot in Dodge City, Kansas, about 140 miles northeast
of Baca County. “Has the storm
hit?” The reply came a few minutes
later, tapped from the Dodge City depot.
“My God, here it comes!” Dodge
City went black. The front edge of the
duster looked two thousand feet high. Winds
were clocked at sixty-five miles an hour.
A few minutes earlier there had been bright sunshine and a temperature
of eighty-one degrees, without a wisp of wind. Drivers turned on their
headlights but could not see ahead of them, or even see the person sitting next
to them. It was like three midnights in
a jug, one old nester said. Cars died,
their systems shorted out by the static.
People fled to tornado shelters, fire stations, gyms, church
basements. There was a whiff of panic,
not evident in earlier storms, as a fear took hold that the end was near. A woman in Kansas later said she thought of
killing her child to spare the baby the cruelty of Armageddon.”
Fortey, Richard Life:
A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth
(1997)
Nothing
in the planet’s biological development escapes Fortey’s astute observations,
from the tiniest bacterium thought to have started the whole process to the
hulking shadow of Tyrannosaurus rex
looming over the Jurassic landscape.
Witty, erudite and eminently respected in the world of fossils (he is
senior palaeontologist at London’s Natural History Museum), Fortey also gives a
lively anecdotal overview of the scientists who shaped his field, from the 19th
century baby steps taken by schoolmaster/amateur geologist Charles Lapworth to
the revolutionary ramifications of Willi Hennig’s 20th century
cladistic theory. A monumental achievement.
“Even the single-celled protist, with its pedigree of more
than 1,000 million years, was as inventive as if newly minted. Just because some type of organization has
been on the Earth for a long time does not imply that its capacity for change
is obsolete. One of the glories of the
fossil record is that it continually surprises.
Some organisms seem to vanish, or disappear into obscurity, only to
reappear in a new guise. Rather like the
last concert performances of Frank Sinatra, there always seems to be another
appearance in a different place. The
ammonites nearly disappeared on several occasions, only to burst forth again
into prolific life. However, eventually
they gave what was truly a last performance, and no curtain-calls.”
Heinrich, Bernd The Trees in my Forest (1997)
Heinrich
is a professor emeritus in biology at the University of Vermont and this book
is a collection of his lovely essays on the flora and fauna in the 300-acre
woodlot surrounding his cabin in the forests of western Maine. As the book jacket says: “Heinrich is a scientist, but his words speak
with the power and subtle grace of a poet.”
“Yet, a little apple scab is harmless and tasteless. Given the choice, I’d purposely pick out
apples with some black fungus scabs, because they could not more honestly be
labelled ‘fungicide free’, in the same way that a tiny tasteless moth
caterpillar in the apple core says ‘insecticide free’.”
“I ramble in my home woods at different times and
circumstances. I’ve struck out in the
middle of a blizzard. Once in July I
waited until midnight to head out. I’ve
wandered out on spring dawns when the warblers were returning, on sweltering
summer afternoons when the blackflies were biting, in thunderstorms and also
under blue sunny skies in Indian summer when the woods were a kaleidoscope of
brilliant colors. In my memory, I savor the images that were collected on these
rambles and that bind me to this place.
Some might consider these images trifles. But I am hard-pressed to come up with greater
riches than those memories.”
Henig, Robin The
Monk in the Garden (2000)
The
Austrian abbot Gregor Mendel dies on page 170 of Robin Marantz Henig’s
biography, succumbing to kidney disease on January 6, 1884. But Henig’s book goes on for another ninety
pages in order to explain the remarkable series of events that occurred long
after his death. Seven years of
Mendel’s life had been devoted to patiently studying and recording the
inheritance patterns of the peas he grew in the abbey garden; his research
culminated with his 1865 presentation of a 44-page scientific paper titled “Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden" (Experiments in
Plant Hybridization) and its publication the following year. However, there was little reaction to his
paper and when he died almost two decades later he still had not been
recognized for his groundbreaking discoveries on the proportions of inherited
dominant, recessive and hybrid traits.
But in 1900, his paper was uncovered by
scientists working in the field and their research and that of others
corroborated Mendel’s work and led to his being called “the father of modern
genetics” and his results the “Mendelian laws”.
“Mendel probably believed that counting his pea progeny
would reflect an underlying mathematical relationship. He got this idea from
his math and physics training at the University of Vienna, as well as from
attitudes circulating at the time. This
was, after all, the middle of the nineteenth century’s “avalanche of numbers”,
and a hallmark of Mendel’s genius was his receptivity to the moods and methods
of his generation. So, like so many of
his contemporaries, he counted. But
Mendel counted more than most other botanists did. He applied his passion for counting, which
helped him reach his breakthrough conclusions about inheritance, almost
indiscriminately to everything in his own little world. He counted not only peas but weather
readings, students in his classes, bottles of wine purchased for the monastery
cellar. He counted because that was what
was done in the mid-nineteenth century, and because he had an abiding faith in the
clarity of numbers.”
Leopold, Aldo A Sand County Almanac: Outdoor Essays & Reflections (1949)
If
there is a face behind the phrases “land ethic” and “wildlife ecology”, it is
that of Aldo Leopold. Born in Iowa in
1887 and steeped in naturalism by his father, he graduated in forestry from
Yale and became a U.S. Forest Services ranger in the Arizona Territories in
1909. He moved to New Mexico in 1911,
marrying and subsequently settling his young family near the Rio Grande. During the First World War, while still
working for the Forest Service, he served as the secretary of Albuquerque’s
Chamber of Commerce, designing a large city park for the city. After the war, Leopold was given
responsibility for the entire U.S. Southwest forest. In this role, he became the first senior
forester to question long-held views about predator control and firefighting in
national lands. A lifelong advocate of
conservation, it was Aldo Leopold who was responsible for the first federally-protected
tract of land, the 750,000-acre Gila National Forest, thus bestowing on him the
title of “father of the National Forest Wilderness System”. Four years after his transfer to Madison,
Wisconsin, Leopold tendered his resignation to the Forest Service and began to
write, lecture and consult full-time, becoming a founding member of the
Wilderness Society. The essays in A Sand County Almanac, many written from
a little cabin on his farm on the Wisconsin River, were published shortly after
his death in 1948. Intimate and often
domestic in its storytelling – a combination of reflections on nature and
recollections of his pioneering southwest adventures -- this book is considered
one of the seminal works in the nature writing pantheon.
“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and
poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To
plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own
a shovel. By virtue of this curious
loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say:
Let there be a tree – and there will be one. If his back be strong and his shovel sharp,
there may eventually be ten thousand.
And in the seventh year he may lean upon his shovel, and look upon his
trees, and find them good.”
Mayr, Ernst What
Evolution Is (2001)
Reading
Ernst Mayr is by no means the equivalent of reading “Evolution for Dummies”,
yet that is the level at which “one of the great shining figures of
evolutionary biology” is attempting to teach in this book, described as “an
elegant primer on evolution for the general reader”. Subjects explored by Mayr are the mechanisms
for evolution, natural selection, adaptedness, variation, speciation and human evolution,
among others. This is a thorough
discussion of a complex subject.
“Although the basic principles of inheritance were worked
out between 1900 and the 1930s, the real understanding of the nature of inheritance
was achieved only through the molecular revolution. It began in 1944 when it was established that
the genetic material consisted not of proteins but of nucleic acids. In 1953, Watson and Crick discovered the
structure of DNA, and after this one major discovery followed the other,
culminating in the discovery of the genetic code by Nirenberg in 1961. Finally, every step in the translation of the
genetic information in the course of the developing organism was understood in
principle. Unexpectedly, the basic
Darwinian concepts of variation and selection were not affected in any
way. Not even the replacement of
proteins by nucleic acids as the carriers of genetic information required a
change in the evolutionary theory. On
the contrary, an understanding of the nature of genetic variation greatly
strengthened Darwinism, for it confirmed the findings of the geneticists that
an inheritance of acquired characters is impossible.”
Naess, Atle Galileo
Galilei: When the World Stood Still
(2005)
Galileo
is one of my personal heroes and this is my favorite biography of science’s
Renaissance man. Highly readable and
enjoyable, the story is enhanced by Atle Naess’s clear understanding of the
astronomy and physics that Galileo advanced.
But he’s also a good storyteller and the quotes below of events some
three decades apart give a good sense of that.
“But Galileo was lucky enough to meet a young woman in
Venice with whom he could form a permanent relationship. Her name was Marina Gamba and she was only
just twenty when she and the professor met.
Instead of marriage, there were frequent trips to Venice. Galileo was in his mid-thirties and
well-established, Marina was young, poor and needed a provider – so neither she
nor her family were too scrupulous about the outward form of the liaison. Marina soon became pregnant, the professor
was in the process of starting a family.”
“Galileo recalled his triumphal progress in Rome four
years previously. Now he was ill and unable to work for long periods. Even so, he believed it was imperative for
him to return in person to bolster his friends and win round doubters and
opponents. He must make the Jesuit
astronomers show their true colours, and ensure Maffeo Barberini’s continued
friendship and support.”
Peattie, Donald A
Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America (1948)
Donald
Culross Peattie was born in Chicago in 1898 and studied French poetry at the University
of Chicago before transferring to Harvard, where he received his degree in
botany. He worked briefly for the USDA
before moving to the south of France with his novelist wife and three young
sons, seeking a place where “art is native and deep-rooted”. But he came to miss the “blue distance,
illimitable, uninhabited” of his native land and returned to launch a long
career as a nature writer, first in Illinois and then in Santa Barbara,
eventually writing some forty books. I
have several old Peattie classics on my bookshelf, including A Prairie Grove (1938), Flowering Earth (1939), American Heartwood (1949) and A Cup of Sky(1950). To my mind, and notwithstanding their fulsome
prose and dated science, they
constitute some of the very best nature writing in the genre.
In his introduction to this 1991 edition of Peattie’s 1948 classic on our native northeastern trees, Robert Finch writes: “Though I have acquired several more up-to-date texts on trees, I still return to Peattie, not primarily to identify trees, but to identify with them – how they look and feel, how they have insinuated themselves in our consciousness as well as our lives.” Given that he was a trained botanist, Peattie’s prose was unabashedly romantic and his descriptions of the trees often beautifully – and forgivably – anthropomorphic.
“Of all of our trees, none is more talkative than
this. A breeze that is barely felt on
the cheek will set the foliage of the Trembling Aspen into a panic
whispering….. And as they rustle, they also twinkle, their lustrous upper
surfaces catching the light like thousands of little mirrors flashed in
mischievous fingers to dazzle the eyes.”
“To everyone with a feeling for things American, and for
American history, the Shagbark seems like a symbol of the pioneer age, with its
hard sinewy limbs and rude, shaggy coat, like the pioneer himself in fringed
deerskin hunting shirt. And the roaring
heat of its fires, the tang of its nuts – that wild manna that every autumn it
once cast lavishly before the feet – stand for the days of forest abundance.”
Pollan, Michael The
Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of
the World (2001)
Apples,
potatoes, tulips….. and marijuana. In
this book, penned before Pollan turned his gaze on the food industry in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defence of Food, we benefit from the
Berkeley professor’s wry musings and considerable research skills as we learn
how humans shaped the cultivation of four of earth’s best known plants. It’s fascinating to read their natural
histories in light of the essential qualities Pollan ascribes to them in
satisfying human desire: the apple
embodies sweetness; the tulip represents beauty; the potato satisfies our need
for control; and marijuana offers the escape of intoxication. Within this framework, Pollan gets down to
the nitty-gritty as we learn the unfairy-tale version of the truly-weird John
Chapman, aka ‘Johnny Appleseed’ and his quixotic development of apple nurseries
from Pennsylvania to Indiana (when he wasn’t pursuing his child bride). We chart the tulip’s journey from the Ottoman
Empire through the Dutch tulip frenzy of the early 1600s and beyond. We explore the natural history of marijuana,
including its action on the brain’s neurotransmitters; its hallucinogenic
cousins and their place in religious, medical and popular history; and its
brushes with the law, from the early days of “reefer madness” through Pollan’s
own hilariously aborted experiment in growing what a friend labelled some
“really amazing Maui”. And we uncover
the fast-food conspiracy behind the narrowing range of potato varieties under
cultivation in North America, and the danger that represents to biodiversity.
“So the flowers begot us, their greatest admirers. In time, human desire entered into the
natural history of the flower, and the flower did what it has always done: made itself still more beautiful in the eyes
of this animal, folding into its very being even the most improbable of our
notions and tropes. Now came roses that
resembled aroused nymphs, tulip petals in the shape of daggers, peonies bearing
the scent of women. We in turn did our
part, multiplying the flowers beyond reason, moving their seeds around the
planet, writing books to spread their fame and ensure their happiness. For the flower it was the same old story,
another grand co-evolutionary bargain with a willing, slightly credulous animal
– a good deal on the whole, though not nearly as good as the earlier bargain
with the bees.”
Quammen, David The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2007)
This
book accomplishes two goals. It lowers
its readers gently into the swirling waters of evolutionary theory and natural
selection, allowing us to get our toes wet without sinking in over our
head. Second, it provides an intimate
glimpse into the genteel domestic and professional life of Charles Darwin,
helping us understand how the complexion of those Victorian times almost
prevented evolution’s pioneering theorist from publicizing his findings.
One constant in his life was the love of his wife, whose fervent religious faith was in stark contrast to her husband’s agnosticism. On proposing to Emma, Charles ignored his father’s advice not to mention his theological doubts.
“Nothing to be gained for anyone, according to the hardheaded doctor, in giving a woman cause to worry about the salvation of her husband’s soul. Things might go along well until one of them got sick, and then she would suffer miserably at the thought of eternal separation, making him miserable too. Charles promptly ignored his father’s advice (which may have been the most prescient thing, if not the wisest, that Dr. Darwin ever said to him), telling Emma at least something of his heterodox thinking. Most likely he didn’t raise the topics of transmutation, monkey ancestors, the idea of the deity as an inherited instinct, or the conundrum of male nipples, but whatever degree of apostasy he confessed was enough that she called it ‘a painful void between us’. Then she brightened up and thanked him for his candor, having reassured herself that ‘honest & conscientious doubts cannot be a sin’.”
Sagan, Carl The
Varieties of Scientific Experience: A
Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Carl
Sagan was a giant in astronomy until his untimely death in 1996 at the age of
62. He was also a self-described
agnostic. This book, edited posthumously
by his wife Ann Druyan, comprises Sagan’s 1985 Gifford Lectures on Natural
Theology”, titled “The Search For Who We
Are”. Established by the Scottish
Lord Andrew Gifford in 1888, the Lectures were intended by its founder to
“promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the
term—in other words, the knowledge of God”.
Intriguingly, Druyan riffed on the well-known title of a 1902 book by
Gifford lecturer, psychologist and philosopher William James, “The Varieties of Religious Experience”
to come up with this contrary title for her late husband’s lectures. She makes it clear, however, that Sagan was
gentle with his Gifford audience; “…what remains with me was his extraordinary
combination of principled, crystal-clear advocacy coupled with respect and
tenderness toward those who did not share his views.”
“Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time.”
Savage, Candace Prairie: A Natural History (2004)
I’m
a prairie gal, born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, though my family moved west
when I was an infant. Still, there’s a
school of thought that holds that the place of your birth assumes a sacred
importance in your adult psyche. That
must be so because prairies, grasslands and savannahs fascinate me, whether in Saskatchewan,
Oklahoma
or the
Serengeti. I love the majesty, the
quiet, the fragrance of these vast seas of wild grasses. Candace Savage has spent most of her life on
Canada’s Great Plains and has written many books on natural history and
science. This title is a thorough
exploration of the history, geography, hydrology, soil, range and farming use
and future of the prairie, including the “wild” spaces she writes about below:
“This land has never been disturbed by the plow – not even
a stone has been touched – and it would be easy to think of it as wild, the
last stand of the great North American grasslands. In the beat of the wind, you can almost
believe you are hearing the muffled drumming of a bison herd that, any minute
now, will come rolling over the horizon.
Through bones and stones and life-forms, these lands conserve not only
the memory of the past but the whole promise of a future for many grassland
animals and plants. The surviving native
grasslands bring us as close as we can get to the prairie in its natural
abundance. Yet when you walk toward that
horizon and peer down into the valley beyond, you will not find wild herds or
camps of nomadic hunters. Instead, you
are very likely to see a bunch of cows.
It’s still fabulous out there on the rangelands, but it ain’t exactly
wild.”
Schopf, William Cradle
of Life: The Discovery of Earth’s
Earliest Fossils (2001)
While
in Los Angeles last year, I interviewed Dr. William Schopf, author of Cradle of Life and director of UCLA’s
Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. I had made an appointment to photograph one
of his mineral specimens for my own project and I was delighted when he agreed
to meet me to answer my questions, particularly given that it was President’s
Day and the university was officially closed.
What excited me was the fact that I would not only be permitted to
inspect the Ontario rocks that first opened the door to understanding early
Precambrian (Proterozoic) biologic history, but I would have time to chat with
the scientist whose subsequent research has dated the presence of
photosynthesizing organisms on earth to a time almost 3.5 billion years
ago. And he is as engaging a storyteller
in person as he is in the fascinating lore and easy-to-grasp science of Cradle of Life.
“One Sunday in late August Tyler took a day off, rented a
dinghy and outboard motor, and went fishing near Flint Island up the coast from
the little lakeside village of Schreiber, Ontario. As he cast and reeled his line, he spotted an
odd-looking outcrop of Gunflint rocks on the nearby shore. He pulled the boat onto the rocky shingle (a
site later dubbed the “Schreiber Beach Locality”) and took a look. The flat shelflike outcrop, extending a few
tens of meters back from the water’s edge, was slightly inclined, sloping
gently into the lake. Tyler recognized
immediately that this was a bedding plane exposure – glaciation of the great
Ice Age and countless Lake Superior winters had stripped away overlying strata,
bring to view the upper surface of a half-meter-thick bed of dense,
fine-grained chert, a type of sedimentary rock composed of interlocking grains
of the mineral quartz, SiO2. But the
rocks were unlike the rusty-red, iron-rich cherts typical of Gunflint beds
elsewhere. These were jet-black, and
their distinctive waxy, glasslike luster suggested the quartz grains that made
them up were extremely small. He was
further surprised to see that the chert bed was packed with dozens of closely
spaced Cryptozoon-like mounds, some more than a meter across, each built up of
a nested series of more or less concentric thin wavy layers.”
Sobel, Dava The
Planets (2005)
In
this eclectic and beautifully-written book, science journalist and New York Times writer Dava Sobel (also
author of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, both excellent reads) turns her reportorial attention to the
Solar System and its heavenly bodies:
the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and
Neptune, and Pluto (demoted from the planetary roster shortly after the book’s
publication). Even if you’re not a
star-gazer, telescope-owner or all that interested in astronomy, there’s enough
mythology, history, literature and interesting lore in Sobel’s book to keep the
pages turning.
“The astronauts judged the dusty surface of the Moon a
shade of tan, like beach sand, when they looked at it facing Sunward, but said
it turned gray when they turned the other way – and black when they scooped
dust samples into plastic bags. The
unearthly glare of unfiltered Sunlight bedevilled their color and depth
perception, and that of their photographic film as well. Similarly attuned to the light of Earth’s
atmosphere, the film formed its own interpretation of the new landscape’s
subtle hues and stark relieve, so that in the end the men’s pictures betrayed
their color memories of walking on the Moon.
The view of the Moon from Earth is no less fooled by tricks of
light. How else could the Moon derive
its silvery gleam from dust and rocks dark as soot? The dusky markings that draw the face of the
Man in the Moon reflect only 5 to 10 percent of the Sunlight that falls on them,
and the brighter lunar highlands no more than 12 to 18 percent, making the Moon
overall as shiny as an asphalt roadway.
But the rough-hewn lunar surface, sprinkled with ragged particles of
Moon dust, multiplies the myriad planes where light may strike and
ricochet. Thus the tan, gray, black dust
clothes the Moon in white radiance. And
seen against the somber backdrop of the night sky, the Moon appears whiter
still.”
Toulmin, Stephen The
Discovery of Time (1965)
Goodfield, Jane
Scholarly
knowledge and readability seem so rarely to come packaged together, but they
certainly coexist in this fine book (1982 paperback edition from The University
of Chicago Press). The third in a
trilogy after The Fabric of the Heavens and
The Architecture of Matter, its
objective, wrote the then-married authors shortly before they left English
academe for Harvard, was to “trace out the main lines of intellectual
development by which the fundamental features of our contemporary picture of
Nature came to be accepted as common knowledge”. In short, they wanted to show how mankind
has grasped the passing of the days, moon cycles, seasons and years in the
context of history, superstition, science, religion and art. We now take for granted a sophisticated view
of our planet’s natural history and its place in the cosmos, but each
incremental discovery along the way was hard-fought.and complicated by
competing orthodoxies of science and religion.
Although not a page-turner by any stretch, and given that there have
been significant advances in science in the four-plus decades since its
publication, the book is nonetheless a substantive and rich exploration of the
multi-faceted foundation underlying our modern understanding of the passage of
“time”.
“Cuvier’s expansion of antediluvian time gave geology a
great deal more freedom of action; but he in turn became entranced by his own
biblical compromise, and was tempted into premature theorizing. He had mapped the geological strata of the
Paris region in great detail, and observed (quite correctly) that the
superimposed rock formation of this area showed sharp discontinuities; moving
vertically through a section of the terrain, one passed abruptly from strata
containing marine fossils to others containing fresh-water fossils , and then,
with equal suddenness to others containing nothing at all. (…) Cuvier was
deeply impressed by his discovery…. Such abrupt effects must have resulted from
equally abrupt causes – convulsive transformations of the Earth’s crust…”
By necessity, I’ve left out many other jewels of popular science and nature writing. Two are David Bodanis’s excellent E=mc2, A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation and Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Stephen Hawking’s classic A Brief History of Time is still on my to-do list, as is James Watson’s The Double Helix. And on my night table sit three Christmas gift books: a thick bio of Einstein by Walter Isaacson, The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra and The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan.
So bring on those winter blizzards! I’ve got my books to keep me warm.