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I spent yesterday in transit between Somerville and Bellevue, by buses, subway, airplanes, and taxi. A delayed and slightly jet-lagged post follows:
What have I read recently?
At the water's edge: macroevolution and the transformation of life, by Carl Zimmer. This book discusses two major changes in the history of vertebrate life and habitats: tetrapods coming out of the oceans and cetaceans going back to them. There's lots on exaptation—a trait developed for one context that is useful in another—and on how we figured out the information he's presenting. Exaptation is the opposite of the just so stories we sometimes get about evolution, which talked about one particular fish developing lungs and surviving when the pools they were in dried out. That one was based in part on no-longer-accepted ideas about the climate at the time. More to the point, lungs plus gills appears to be the primitive/older condition for ray-finned as well as lobe-finned fishes. There are just a lot of teleosts, a group in which lungs turned into swim bladders instead, and they're what most people think of when they think "fish." Since all the papers are by humans, a species with lungs, and neither gills nor swim bladders, we're tempted to think of lungs as better and more advanced than gills or swim bladders. Better they may be, certainly for us; that doesn't mean they evolved later.
After spending about half the book on the evolution of land vertebrates, Zimmer then discusses what traits the ancestors of cetaceans had that enabled them to move back into the oceans, again with material on individual researchers, the discovery of fossils in specific places, the tendency to see what we expect, and so on. An important group of whale-ancestor fossils is Basilosaurus, "king lizard," because a nineteenth-century fossil hunter thought he'd found a sea serpent, and reconstructed it as such, sometimes combining bits from multiple fossils to produce a longer and more impressive display.
Cladistics was a lot newer when this was written, and they were just starting to do molecular trees; Zimmer spends time on why this approach is valuable, as well as on conflicts between trees based on comparing DNA and those based on bones and other traits produced by the genes.
Three Blind Mice, by Ed McBain. I read a lot of McBain's 87th Precinct series, a long time ago; I picked this novel, from a different series, off Adrian's shelf to see if I still liked McBain. The investigator here is a defense attorney in a small city in Florida in the late 1980s; he is defending a man who insists he is innocent of murdering three men and then mutilating their bodies. It's well written, and somewhat gory. The book depicts racist characters; it's not at all sympathetic with them, and the worst racism is in the killer's internal monologue, but it didn't take much of that to make me wonder whether "takee-outee" for "take-out meal" was also racist as well as not being my dialect or something I can remember seeing before. Other than that, it's well done, and McBain doesn't hide the clues from the reader, though I'm not entirely convinced by the murderer's eventually revealed motive.
What am I reading now?
Volcanoes of the Cacades: their rise and their risks, by Richard L. Hill. An overview for the layperson, which defines terms like "lahar." I just finished the section on "Volcanic Hazards," with the eruption of Mount St. Helens for context and example. The chapters are short, with sidebars on things like "Rating the Risks"; it's a good idea, but would be better if the sidebars weren't printed in white on not-very-dark blue.
Banner of the Damned, by Sherwood Smith. This is a good but physically large and heavy fantasy novel, to the point that I not only didn't take it with me to Somerville—I try not to travel with library books anyhow—but that I tend to reach for something smaller when I am reading here at home.
What have I read recently?
At the water's edge: macroevolution and the transformation of life, by Carl Zimmer. This book discusses two major changes in the history of vertebrate life and habitats: tetrapods coming out of the oceans and cetaceans going back to them. There's lots on exaptation—a trait developed for one context that is useful in another—and on how we figured out the information he's presenting. Exaptation is the opposite of the just so stories we sometimes get about evolution, which talked about one particular fish developing lungs and surviving when the pools they were in dried out. That one was based in part on no-longer-accepted ideas about the climate at the time. More to the point, lungs plus gills appears to be the primitive/older condition for ray-finned as well as lobe-finned fishes. There are just a lot of teleosts, a group in which lungs turned into swim bladders instead, and they're what most people think of when they think "fish." Since all the papers are by humans, a species with lungs, and neither gills nor swim bladders, we're tempted to think of lungs as better and more advanced than gills or swim bladders. Better they may be, certainly for us; that doesn't mean they evolved later.
After spending about half the book on the evolution of land vertebrates, Zimmer then discusses what traits the ancestors of cetaceans had that enabled them to move back into the oceans, again with material on individual researchers, the discovery of fossils in specific places, the tendency to see what we expect, and so on. An important group of whale-ancestor fossils is Basilosaurus, "king lizard," because a nineteenth-century fossil hunter thought he'd found a sea serpent, and reconstructed it as such, sometimes combining bits from multiple fossils to produce a longer and more impressive display.
Cladistics was a lot newer when this was written, and they were just starting to do molecular trees; Zimmer spends time on why this approach is valuable, as well as on conflicts between trees based on comparing DNA and those based on bones and other traits produced by the genes.
Three Blind Mice, by Ed McBain. I read a lot of McBain's 87th Precinct series, a long time ago; I picked this novel, from a different series, off Adrian's shelf to see if I still liked McBain. The investigator here is a defense attorney in a small city in Florida in the late 1980s; he is defending a man who insists he is innocent of murdering three men and then mutilating their bodies. It's well written, and somewhat gory. The book depicts racist characters; it's not at all sympathetic with them, and the worst racism is in the killer's internal monologue, but it didn't take much of that to make me wonder whether "takee-outee" for "take-out meal" was also racist as well as not being my dialect or something I can remember seeing before. Other than that, it's well done, and McBain doesn't hide the clues from the reader, though I'm not entirely convinced by the murderer's eventually revealed motive.
What am I reading now?
Volcanoes of the Cacades: their rise and their risks, by Richard L. Hill. An overview for the layperson, which defines terms like "lahar." I just finished the section on "Volcanic Hazards," with the eruption of Mount St. Helens for context and example. The chapters are short, with sidebars on things like "Rating the Risks"; it's a good idea, but would be better if the sidebars weren't printed in white on not-very-dark blue.
Banner of the Damned, by Sherwood Smith. This is a good but physically large and heavy fantasy novel, to the point that I not only didn't take it with me to Somerville—I try not to travel with library books anyhow—but that I tend to reach for something smaller when I am reading here at home.