Review by John C. Snider © 2009
I haven’t had a biology class since I was in high school in the late 1970s. Despite two college degrees filled with math, engineering and chemistry, I never took any more biology; as a result, most of what I know about biology in general, and evolution in particular, I’ve picked up from magazine articles, internet resources and the occasional TV documentary. So I was very excited when I heard that Richard Dawkins’ new book (The Greatest Show on Earth) would be devoted to the evidence for evolution by natural selection. I was equally excited to discover that the latest book by science journalist Carl Zimmer is a textbook titled The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution (pub. by Roberts & Company, Oct 2009, 385 pp hdcvr, $59.95)
Dawkins notably devotes the last chapter of The Greatest Show to a deconstruction of the final, lyrical paragraph of Darwin’s masterpiece On the Origin of Species, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. Fittingly, Zimmer uses Darwin’s same paragraph as the opening epigram to The Tangled Bank (indeed, the title comes from Darwin’s sentence, “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, with various insect flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms…have all been produced by laws acting around us.”).
Organized into 14 chapters, The Tangled Bank is a hefty tome, with glossy pages and illustrated with hundreds of full-color photos and charts. It covers much of the same territory covered by Dawkins’ Greatest Show: the impressive evidence for whale development; Richard Lenski’s two-decade-long (and still ongoing) experiments in E. coli evolution; and amazing examples of convergent evolution (like the striking similarities between the placental sabretooth tiger and the marsupial Thylacosmilus known from South American fossils).
Darwin famously devoted a sizable chunk of Origin of Species to describing and responding to anticipated objections to his theory. Zimmer doesn’t waste much time refuting 21st century Creationists: pretty much the only reference to the ongoing controversy (which is a sociopolitical controversy rather than a scientific one) is in a two-page break-out section called “How Not to Study Evolution” that makes short work of Creationist nonsense.
Zimmer states up-front that the story of mankind is inextricably interwoven into the story of life on earth, so he does not devote a special section or separate chapter to hominid evolution. Instead, he takes an integrative approach, showing how the development of multicellular structures, hard internal skeletons, complex neurological networks–even the evolution of emotions–led step-by-step to create the diverse biosphere which includes homo sapiens.
The Tangled Bank is, presumably, intended for freshman college students rather than highschoolers, although it’s written at a level comprehensible to well-read teens. And while the subject matter is fascinating, The Tangled Bank is filled with sometimes very dry, matter-of-fact prose. But as a resource for general readers who want to a solid overview of the state of evolutionary science, The Tangled Bank is unparalleled in terms of the amount of useful information delivered in a sturdy package. It’s a bit pricey at sixty bucks a pop (although about $15 less at Amazon.com), but I think well worth the money for science buffs cultivating a well-rounded home library.
The Tangled Bank is available at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
Tags: carl zimmer, evolution, tangled bank
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Thanks, John – I hadn’t heard of this new Zimmer book. It certainly sounds interesting; however, I’m not sure I can compel myself to throw down that kind of cash, after just having recently read Jerry Coyne’s “Why Evolution is True”… which I thought was excellent, and would highly recommend as well.