LIFE ASCENDING
The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution.
By Nick Lane.
Norton, $26.95.
For about 150 years, we have known how species evolve. The emergence of life itself remains more obscure. But as Lane shows with clarity and vigor in “Life Ascending,” fascinating studies on the subject abound. A trained biochemist, Lane smoothly pulls in evidence from genetics, proteomics (the study of proteins), paleontology and geophysics to show how the critical components and mechanisms of complex life — from DNA and photosynthesis to sex and vision — could have developed. Because “a chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate,” he dismisses the “thermodynamically flat” primordial soup as a starting point for life and instead looks for ways hydrogen and oxygen can get together. Someday we may need a sequential illustration showing man standing upright after emerging from porous rocks in hydrothermal vents — where suggestive research locates the first signs of complex molecules and DNA. This is not a comprehensive textbook, and the concluding chapters on consciousness and death lack the biochemical signature of the best sections. Still, Lane shows how thoroughly, if provisionally, we can reconstruct evolutionary developments. Reading the remote past, he argues, “is a science in its own right, one that can only enrich our understanding of life.”
NAMING NATURE
The Clash Between Instinct and Science.
By Carol Kaesuk Yoon.
Norton, $27.95.
Evolutionary theory has caused rifts within science, not just outside it. Yoon’s clever “Naming Nature” explores the historical tension between evolutionary biology and taxonomy. In evolution, species are mutable. But the 18th-century founder of taxonomy, Linnaeus, assuredly did not think so, and 20th-century taxonomists, in Yoon’s telling, struggled to define species in light of evolution while still relying on intuitive, visual judgments. Taxonomy has become truly modernized only in recent decades, Yoon argues, as it has moved from the field to the lab, adopted statistical and genetic methods of comparison, and organized itself around evolutionary changes. The dialectical sting in this tale, though, is Yoon’s stout support for old-fashioned forms of taxonomy. Lab-based taxonomy, she argues, yields counterintuitive results, whereas visual classifications logically express our predisposition to order the world in informal, sensible ways. Yoon marshals evidence for the near universality of the classifying instinct, which yields a “vision of the natural order” that “often stands in direct conflict with a scientific and evolutionary ordering of life.” But she plays down the idea that abstract classification can enlighten us. Recognizing birds as dinosaurs, or linking lungfish to cows — recent insights that Yoon sees as affronts to common sense — can attune us to the relationship of organism and environment in a changing world. Practical local knowledge and codified science are not inescapably incompatible, as she only briefly acknowledges. Ultimately, Yoon asserts that in conceding scientific authority to taxonomists, we have surrendered our observational skills and critical thinking, and contributed to our own alienation from the natural world. She hopes projects like Edward O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life will reconnect science with engaged observation. Whether or not you share her views, this is a lively blend of popular scientific history and cultural criticism, itself defying simple classification.
DARWIN’S ARMADA
Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution.
By Iain McCalman.
Norton, $29.95.
Charles Darwin was hardly the only significant evolutionary thinker of his era to make a formative sea voyage. This was a rite of passage for aspiring naturalists, as McCalman recounts in “Darwin’s Armada,” which traces the journeys of Darwin alongside those of Joseph Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace, each of whom spent years exploring the Southern Hemisphere. To know evolution’s early champions, this book implies, we should know their early adventures. McCalman notes significant observations that prefigured each man’s mature evolutionary thought. But his narratives are as much bildungsroman as scientific analysis, showing how the four voyagers were steeled and transformed by the demands of the sea and the wondrous unfamiliarity of life on distant shores. There are some vivid vignettes: Hooker nearly shipwrecked in the Antarctic, and a love-struck Huxley depressively remaining shipboard instead of exploring the Great Barrier Reef. Absorbing these trips in parallel reminds us that Darwin was only the most successful voyaging naturalist who discarded old verities about the fixed form of species. But the structure of “Darwin’s Armada” inevitably limits our ability to trace these four rather different intellectual trajectories over time. Still, McCalman has produced an accessible introduction to the lesser-known ocean voyages of Hooker and Huxley, while Wallace’s incredible wanderings retain their ability to amaze.
THE LINK
Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor.
By Colin Tudge with Josh Young.
Little, Brown, $25.99.
While the 150th anniversary of “On the Origin of Species” is being feted this year, Darwin’s older relative Ida has become a media star as well. Ida, to be clear, is the 47-million-year-old lemur-like fossil unveiled this past spring, who may be our oldest known primate ancestor. Then again, she may not be. The team that brought Ida to light, led by the Norwegian paleontologist Jörn Hurum, has been touting Ida as a “missing link” between human predecessors and other early primates. In “The Link,” part of Ida’s floodlit public debut (along with a documentary and a media tour), Hurum’s colleague Jens Franzen says Ida’s impact will be “like an asteroid hitting the earth.” But other scientists are wary of these claims, arguing that Ida may be a distant cousin, not a direct human ancestor. This book is a compromise between promoting the fossil and conceding the uncertainties around it. Tudge gamely outlines the relevant environmental, geological and paleontological history, and notes the provisional nature of many hypotheses involving fossils; and in separate chapters, Young describes Ida’s discovery and reception. What’s largely missing from “The Link,” however, is Ida. There are only brief sections analyzing the fossil’s characteristics and evolutionary implications. For now, Ida is less a link than an outlier, the most complete primate fossil of her time. Vivid as Ida appears, the meaning we extract from any one fossil necessarily depends on the presence of others. There are no solo shows in evolution, just ensemble performances.
