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Tag Archives: evolution

Creation and Destruction: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds

05 Monday Sep 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, creation, destruction, Earth, evolution, extinctions, fossil records, history, paleobiology, poetic science, Thomas Halliday

Review: Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday
Random House, 2022. 303 pp. $29

Every once in a long while, I come across a book that takes my breath away and makes me glad I learned to read. This one tells the history of our planet through sixteen instances of extinction, as awe-inspiring and dramatic a story as there is, narrated with sheer brilliance.

Halliday, a paleobiologist who has re-created these sixteen snapshots in time based on fossil records, leaps around the globe to illustrate how climate, geography, topography, and geology have changed, supported, and often annihilated life over the past several billion years.

Let’s unpack that summary. Paleobiology combines the study of living organisms with the evidence of dead ones; until now, I didn’t even know that discipline existed. When I say leaps around the globe, for each chapter, the author has to reset where the continents have wandered, because they’re never in the same place as before, and almost never where they are now. Things change over 600 million years.

Mark A. Wilson’s photograph of a bivalve fossil from the Logan Formation, Lower Carboniferous, Ohio (courtesy Wilson44691 at English Wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Rather than by chronology, Halliday narrates by ecological theme, as with the development of insect and bird calls, the collaboration between different species, or the advent of seasons, so each chapter presents a mind-boggling panorama. To call these snapshots does them little justice, because they appeal to several senses, not just the visual, and they’re anything but static:

By delving deep into the structure of fossils, we can now reconstruct the colours of feathers, of beetle shells, of lizard scales, and discover the diseases these animals and plants suffered. By comparing them with living creatures we can establish their interactions in food webs, the power of their bite or strength of their skull, their social structure and mating habits, and even, in rare cases, the sound of their calls. . . . The latest research has revealed vibrant and thriving communities, the remnants of real, living organisms that courted and fell sick, showed off bright feathers or flowers, called and buzzed, inhabiting worlds that obeyed the same biological principles as those of the present day.

Halliday writes science from the soul of a poet, only fitting, because of his universal themes. You can’t read Otherlands without realizing how nature is even more infinitely varied and variable than you probably thought, and just how ridiculously late we humans arrived to the party. So much happened before we got here, in such complexity, that I can’t read these stories of empires rising and falling without feeling humbled.

One of my favorite chapters recounts the era when the Mediterranean was a hard-rock basin whose surface was hotter than Death Valley. Tectonic plates closed the Straits of Gibraltar, and mountain ranges blocked off several rivers from emptying into the basin; nothing lived on the baked rock save a hardy form of microbe. The Mediterranean, which later washed the shores of the great “ancient” Western civilizations, held no water—and it gives me pause to read that this arid condition occurred on two separate occasions during our planet’s past.

If there’s a drawback to Otherlands, it’s that there’s so much in it. Even if you read only one chapter at a time, as I did, you can’t retain a fraction of what Halliday says, and often I had to pause to think. Sometimes it’s his use of metaphor that’s arresting, as when he compares a present-day freshwater crocodile to Gothic architecture. Other times, he tosses out an astonishing fact, such as why deer suffer a much lower rate of cancer than other mammals, or why we’re related to dinosaurs (it has to do with laying eggs).

Sometimes, I wanted to know more, but I got why he didn’t linger—he’s got worlds to create and destroy, and that takes pages and pages. Often, I shook my head in wonder, as with his explanation for why the colors yellow and black mark certain insects, or the ingenious adaptations of the simplest creatures that had no brains. If you’re like me, you can’t just run your eyes over that and move on; you have to think. I paused for a while over his single paragraph theorizing about the origin of life, in which he rejects the once-popular idea of lightning striking the so-called primordial soup and embraces the current reigning hypothesis, a hydrothermal vent in the ocean deep.

You can’t read about sixteen extinctions without wondering what that means regarding global warming, an issue that Halliday leaves for an epilogue. Refusing to play doomsayer or argue that we must stop exploiting the planet’s resources, he nevertheless presents a concise, authoritative description of where that exploitation has led us. Further, he stresses how people who have profited the least from that exploitation stand to lose the most from our increasingly destructive climate.

He doesn’t assume that science or engineering will solve our problem, though he does marvel at the two microscopic organisms, a fungus and a bacterium, that can break down plastic. Rather, he holds out cautious hope for international cooperation. His plea, like the rest of Otherlands, deserves a hearing.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Marsh Girl: Where the Crawdads Sing

11 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1952, 1960s, 1969, biology, book review, class prejudice, coming-of-age narrative, Delia Owens, evolution, historical fiction, inconsistent voice, injustice, Jim Crow, marshes, murder investigation, narrative tropes, South Carolina, wildlife

Review: Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
Putnam, 2018. 368 pp. $28

Six-year-old Kya doesn’t know her real name is Catherine, nor has she ever been to school. All she knows is the South Carolina marsh where she lives with several siblings, a drunken, violent father, and a much put-upon mother. But in summer 1952, Ma walks out, after which Kya’s brothers and sisters follow. Little Kya has to raise herself, essentially, because her father’s often absent on a bender, which can be a blessing. Her only friends are wild creatures, whose habits she comes to know intimately; her greatest, sole pleasure.

You see the wild creatures she loves, rendered with insight and deep feeling:

A great blue heron is the color of gray mist reflecting in blue water. And like the mist, she can fade into the backdrop, all of her disappearing except the concentric circles of her lock-and-load eyes. She is a patient, solitary hunter, standing alone as long as it takes her to snatch her prey. Or, eyeing her catch, she will stride forward one slow step at a time, like a predacious bridesmaid. And yet, on rare occasions she hunts on the wing, darting and diving sharply, swordlike beak in the lead.

Kya herself might answer to this description, especially that of the “patient, solitary hunter.” The vivid portrait of nature in a place nobody else wants, whose human inhabitants the inlanders consider trash, provides a superb background. And the tale of how this girl grows up by her own wits (and kindness of strangers), terrified of just about everybody and everything except the marsh, makes remarkable reading.

However, Where the Crawdads Sing doesn’t settle for the unusual coming-of-age story, and therein rests its greatest shortcoming. Jumping ahead to 1969, as many of these short chapters do, there’s a mystery as well. A former high school quarterback, the town Lothario, is found dead in the marsh. You guess right away that the police, utterly incompetent and desperate to find a murderer (they refuse to accept that such a demigod could have died accidentally), will home in on the Marsh Girl, what the locals call her. She’s reputed savage, lustful, and depraved, the townsfolk’s way saying that she’s different from them, therefore expendable.

The All-Star Bowling Alley, Orangeburg, South Carolina, pictured in 2015. In February 1968, police opened fire on Black students protesting the alley’s segregation policy at the time. Three students were killed and dozens injured. (Courtesy Ammodramus, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Granted, the southern-justice narrative provides an instantly recognizable means to raise the stakes. But Owens introduces the death in a prologue and keeps the police procedure front and center, as if the mind-boggling story of a little girl in a marsh weren’t enough. As years pass, there’s also a tender romance with a young man who accepts Kya as she is. I’d have thought all that sufficient and quite lovely, so I ask why we need the mystery. I will say that the murder investigation allows Owens to expound, sometimes cogently, on mating habits and the genetics of survival, linking her protagonist’s story to evolution, a clever conceit.

But much of the novel feels contrived. I never sense that Kya, who undergoes great hardship and takes brutal, yet often predictable, knocks, is ever really in danger. Terrible things happen, but just as the marsh protects her from outsiders who don’t know its waterways or approaches, the narrative cocoons her, in a way.

Start with how a child grows to her twenties in perfect health, without ever having seen a doctor or dentist. But if that sounds like nitpicking, consider the split time frame, which puts you in 1969 right away, undermining the tensions of 1952 and the immediate years afterward. Also, the kind strangers often appear at just the right moment, sometimes bearing a bounty too good to be true. After a while, I get the idea that whatever trouble comes her way, luck will favor her.

Further, Kya’s voice goes all over the map, which jars me and pulls me out of the story. Owens seems eager to get to the age where Kya speaks and thinks like an autodidact biologist offering thoughtful commentary about evolution (itself a stretch), rather than stay with the bewildered, frightened child who doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from, or how to prepare it. Since I want to hear the child and don’t always believe the self-trained scientist, the struggle between the voices is very distracting, especially when one intrudes on the other. The paragraph quoted above, about the heron, supplies an example; Kya wouldn’t know what “concentric circles” means, let alone “bridesmaid” or “lock-and-load.” So who’s watching the heron?

Finally, the year 1969 witnessed turmoil and great events, but I don’t recognize them here, or little about the Sixties, for that matter. The Vietnam War barely makes an appearance, and though Jim Crow seeps around the edges, it’s as if Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement had gone unheard of in South Carolina. Moon landing? Nary a mention, even among the inlanders.

Despite a terrific premise and beautiful prose, Where the Crawdads Sing is one of those novels that would have appealed to me more had the author crammed less in it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Who Are We, and Where Do We Come From?: The Great Unknown

23 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Austen, book review, Darwin, Edinburgh, evolution, historical fiction, human origins, literary fiction, nineteenth century, Peg Kingman, philosophical novel, random chance, science vs. religion, wit

Review: The Great Unknown, by Peg Kingman
Norton, 2020. 324 pp. $27

In 1845, Constantia MacAdam, just delivered of twins (one of whom died), serves as wet nurse to the large, ever-growing Chambers family, temporarily residing outside Edinburgh while their city home undergoes renovation. Constantia, unable to be with her beloved husband, makes the best of her grief over her lost son and her struggle to make ends meet, but she has lucked out. Not only has she landed among the kindest people in Scotland, who treat her like a family member rather than a servant, she’s never found such intellectual stimulation in her life, and she thrives on it.

Mr. Chambers, a newspaper publisher, takes a keen interest in the natural world and urges his immense brood to do likewise, even (if not especially) the girls. He impresses Constantia, who also loves natural science, because of the breadth of his knowledge and the liberality of his mind. A sensational book has appeared, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and its unorthodox views receive a warm welcome in the Chambers household. The reader will guess that Vestiges anticipates Darwin’s influential book almost fifteen years later.

Figures such as David Hume and Adam Smith, depicted here at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, were part of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, often presumed to be an eighteenth-century phenomenon. But their nineteenth-century counterparts included such scientific and cultural luminaries as Thomas Carlyle, Mary Somerville, Charles Lyell, and James Clerk Maxwell (courtesy Kim Traynor, via Wikimedia Commons)

While this is happening, the Chambers’ gardener, who has been at this residence all his life, has derived similar revolutionary ideas from observing the randomness of life and death, thriving and deformity, among his beloved plants. And on a Scottish island reasonably near in mileage yet isolated and hard to reach by even the fastest transport, a quarryman seeks to split apart a limestone ledge, in which, he believes, important fossils lie.

To say, therefore, that The Great Unknown is a philosophical novel about the origins of life restates the obvious. The story, at first glance, may seem thin. Constantia longs to rejoin her husband. She also strives to learn who her father was, which the Chambers family, being the soul of tact, infer is a troublesome matter, a secret best left unprobed. Her good character is plain; what more need anyone know?

That doesn’t satisfy Lady Janet, a distant relative of theirs who possesses neither tact nor sensitivity, though she does express much righteous superiority. (When Constantia finally gets the courage to talk back to Lady Janet, it’s delicious.) Lady Janet is the foil for the good-hearted spirit of inquiry that reigns chez Chambers, and a reminder of how different they are from most Britons.

But there’s much more besides the evocation of a country on the brink of a moral upending through scientific discovery, or the excellent, personal portrayal of the conflict between religion and science. We have a thought-provoking daily drama playing out chance and consequences, fortunate or tragic, and people trying to figure out whether these outcomes mean anything or merely display the benign indifference of the universe. (Note the name Constantia in this regard.) Add to that what makes a person human, and how we differ (or don’t) from other species; or is it just our vanity that we do?

In sentences that have a Victorian ring, Kingman has crafted a plot that often turns on Dickensian coincidences, perhaps too fortuitously, at times. But she’s also created a family as a perfect test case for her themes, and not just because of their scientific curiosity. The male species of Chambers are born with a sixth finger on each hand and a sixth toe on each foot. Random chance, indeed, as with the success of surgeries necessary for these digits’ removal. As for Mr. Chambers, imagine a Mr. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice as a witty, urbane man of science who’s more immediately concerned with his daughters’ grasp of Linnaean nomenclature than how to attract a husband—though, rest assured, they have dancing and music lessons too.

Further, when anyone in the household has a musical idea that grabs them at any time, they are encouraged to try it out immediately:

It was understood by all that musical ideas were so fragile, so evanescent, and so precious that they were to be snatched from the thin air upon the very moment of their wafting into existence; they might otherwise as evaporate as quickly as they had precipitated, never again to be recovered. No chances could be taken with them; it was a duty to bring them into the world. Constantia became accustomed to seeing an inward distracted stillness fall over the faces of the girls; any of them might, even in the midst of nursery-supper noise, fall silent for a moment; then spring from her chair, to run to the pianoforte—the harp—the violin.

Not everyone will gravitate toward a quiet, reflective story like this, a daguerreotype of the moment when brave thinkers began to ask the most earthshaking questions without fear of divine retribution. But readers who take The Great Unknown for what it is will be greatly rewarded.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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