An inadequate story of life

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, history, taxonomy

You may need to look twice at this photo to see what it is. Just for the sake of suspense, I'll describe it a little further down.

The Story of Life in 10½ Species by Marianne Taylor incorporates a great idea, but its promise is marred by writing of spotty quality and dreadful graphic design. I will list some specific difficulties at the end of this review. First let's get to the concept.

It's practically a tautology that if you gave this book's title to a hundred biologists, the 100 lists of species would have very little overlap, although "Human" would probably be on nearly all the lists. With well over a million species described, and every biologist having some favorites, it's just a given. In this case, probably because Ms Taylor is a science writer rather than a working biologist, her view is broad enough to make quite a good selection. Furthermore, each chapter discusses numerous related species, families, and even orders or phyla, to put each choice in context.

I am not sure, were I given this task, that I would limit my exposure of the plant kingdom to only one, the Cinnamon Fern, Osmundastrum cinnamomeum. However, the author makes a good case that the ferns represent the beginning of plant life, and there is more than glancing mention of later developments in the history of plants, leading to the angiosperms (flowering plants). Each of the chapters is headed by a low-key white (or gray)-on-black photo of the subject: in this chapter, a closeup of the fiddlehead, a nascent fern leaf. Contrary to what is stated in the text, all fern leaves emerge as fiddleheads and then unfurl, not only those which have specialized sexual functions. Such factual errors sprinkle the text, and I will note just a few later on.

Eight chapters discuss various animals, after the subject of Chapter 2, Virus. The chapter's photo is of a norovirus (AKA Norwalk Virus), which looks like a coronavirus, but then so do numerous others, including Polio virus and Influenza virus. Other viruses look like icosahedra (Adenovirus), twisty bits of yarn (Ebola Virus), cigarettes (Tobacco Mosaic Virus), or even moon landers (Bacteriophages). This chapter discusses what it means to call something "living", because viruses are not considered "living" by many biologists: they don't have their own reproductive machinery but must co-opt it from other cells.

The eight animals discussed are, not in order, two birds (the extinct Dusky Seaside Sparrow, shown in the photo above, where you can see it's a bird after a second look; and Darwin's finches, which triggered his thinking about natural selection), a mollusk (Chambered Nautilus), an insect (Lord Howe Island Stick Insect), sponge (the least animal-like animal), a large mammal (giraffe), human (need I say more?), and a reptile (Yangtze River Soft-shelled Turtle, which is nearly extinct).

The extra half species is "artificial life", which is always "just around the corner" but never, it seems, closer than a generation or so. It may always remain so!

Each of the species discussed is from a different taxonomic family, at least, and usually a different order or phylum. The phyla (plural of phylum) represented are Pteridophyta in the Plant kingdom (fern), Vira (virus) in the unnamed semi-living kingdom, and then in the Animal kingdom Mollusca (Nautilus), Porifera (sponge), and Chordata (AKA Vertebrata: all the rest except artificial life). I was sorry not to see any representative of phylum Echinodermata (starfish, crinoid or urchin), a favorite of mine. The entire domain of the prokaryotes, which encompass two kingdoms (Bacteria and Archaea) are mentioned here and there over a few pages. Considering that they out-mass all the rest, they deserve more than that.

Except for the occasional cognitive glitch caused by an error, or by struggling to read black text on dark red or dark purple pages, the book made for interesting reading. I'd have enjoyed it more had I not felt that sometimes she was just parroting Wikipedia articles and didn't otherwise know her subject.

Throughout, the author waxes polemical about the Holocene extinction that is all around us. No surprise that; all my biologist friends would agree, as do I in part. At least she has the grace not to use the over-hyped term "Anthropocene".

I will close by taking the unusual step of listing some (by no means all) difficulties and errors:

• Photos I categorize with "black cat in a coal bin" The photo of the sparrow shown above isn't quite the worst. Also, to the right, is a color photo of a living coelacanth (p. 71) that is nearly as bad. This scan is actually easier to decipher than the printed photo in the book. In my notes I flagged four more "very bad pix".
• Page 13: The word "that" must be removed from the middle of the first sentence for it to make sense.
• Page 16 begins by mentioning "94 chemical elements that occur naturally on the Earth". There are 90. Uranium is #92, but 43 (Technetium) and 61 (Promethium) have no stable isotopes and are not found in nature. Elements 93 (Neptunium) and 94 (Plutonium) happen to exist artificially, and have long enough half lives that they haven't all decayed away, but did not occur on Earth before the invention of the cyclotron.
• Page 58 speaks of age-dating using radioactive decay, but calls radioactive elements "[those that] lose a neutron particle...". Neutron ejection is a very rare mode of radioactive decay. Loss of a helium nucleus (alpha decay) or electron (beta decay), or even a positron (beta-plus decay) are more common.
• Page 64, on albinism, mentions the pinkish eyes of albinos, "[because] the blood supply in the retina is visible". No, it is the blood supply in the iris. Without shining a bright light into the eye, whether albino or not, you won't see the red color of the retina. Continuing, more sparsely:
• Page 95 has illustrations of continental motions, and shows a possible configuration 250 million years in the future. While the text states correctly that the Americas will by then be pasted onto the east side of Asia, the illustration shows them against Africa and Europe.
• There are three places that show an outline map of the Galapagos Islands. In two cases, the colors are OK, but on page 193, light blue on dark purple, against which the black text is very hard to read, is an extremely bad choice, particularly where the text crosses color lines. To give credit where it is due, page 216 has medium green-gray on dark gray with white text, which is a much better choice, and the white text is kept in the dark background.
• The gray-on-black photo of a finch on page 209 is much worse than the pic of the sparrow on page 165.
• Page 246: Clearly the author meant to refer to a preceding page, but the sentence ends abruptly without the reference.

That's enough to show that as a reader I suffered some kind of disruption about every ten pages. I hope someone revisits this subject de novo, has the text and illustrations reviewed by competent scientists, and employs a good copy editor and graphic designer (The "Design and Art Director", Wayne Blades, needs to find other employment!).