Wednesday Book Recs

[elspethdixon]

I'd post a Wednesday reading list, but then I'd have to admit to how many truly dreadful romance novels I read and how often I listen to the same handful of audiobooks over and over. Instead, I'll spare you the Lora Leigh (ever wanted to read badly written het A/B/O fic? She has a whole 20+ book series), murder mysteries, and Harlequin Historicals and give themed recs instead. I'm linking to the Brooklyn Public Library's page for each book rather than Amazon because a) that's where I read them all, and b) fuck Jeff Bezos.

Today's Theme: Evolution & Paleontology
HARD MODE: NO DINOSAURS OR FOSSIL HOMINIDS

Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species by Sean B. Carroll
Great overview of some of the biggest discoveries in evolutionary science & paleontology, with short biographical sketches of the people who made them. This is written for general audiences, so you don't need any previous knowledge about biology or evolutionary science to follow along.

Life Ascending - The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane
Most of which took place long before dinosaurs, or even vertebrates, existed. Lane discusses a number of evolutionary leaps that were paradigm-changing (photosynthesis in plants, the origins of sensory organs, sexual reproduction, the transition from bacterial RNA to nuclear DNA), but which don't get nearly as much media attention as the origin of humans or the emergence of tetrapods onto land.

The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane
If you enjoyed the previous book and want a more in-depth look at the biochemical theories surrounding the origin of complex life and the evolution of eukaryotes. This is all single-celled organisms and DNA-from-RNA and "let's speculate about what life was like back when we were all bacteria clustered around hydrothermal vents" kind of stuff.

Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters by Donald R. Prothero
This book might as well be subtitled Evolution: Why Creationists are Really Freakin' Stupid, and I love it for that. The only part better than the author's constant dragging on creationists is the part on invertebrate paleontology where I learned that arthopods are descended from unsegmented worms while molluscs are descended from segmented one, which is pretty much the opposite of what you'd expect and therefore cool.

When Life Nearly Died by Michael J. Benton
Who doesn't love the End Permian Extinction Event? Usually over-looked in favor of it's more famous End-Cretaceous/K-T Boundary Event/Flaming Asteroid Death From Above younger sibling, this grand-daddy of all extinction events is fascinating in its own right. It's certainly my favorite time that life on earth nearly died (accompanying controversial opinion: the BBC's Walking With Monsters is better than Walking With Dinosaurs).

Resurrecting the Shark by Susan Ewing
Fossils sharks can get weird as fuck, and Helicoprion, or as I like to call it, the Whorl-Toothed Fossil Shark (or WTF Shark) was about as weird as they came. Generations of paleontologists have wondered why the hell its teeth grew in a giant spiral like that and WTF it used them for. Now, you can read the results of their headscratching and boggle/wonder as well.

Comments

[muccamukk]

That shark book looks amazing!

Have you read A Monkey's Voyage? Mostly about the fight going between various evolutionary theorists re: Species distribution, very interesting.

[elspethdixon]

I knew I forgot to add something to the list! I think my favorite part of Monkey's Voyage was all the various ways people desperately tried to fanwank explanations for the geographic distribution of species before they knew about continental drift.

It really is the unified field theory of biology and earth sciences. "Why do volcanoes erupt?" "Why do earthquakes happen?" "Why are there there fossils of sea creatures in the Himalayas?" "Why do Asian and Asutralian species each cut off at the the Wallace line?"

[muccamukk]

I think my favourite part is the massive academic infighting TO THIS DAY by the people who believe strictly in continental drift rather than species being able to cross oceans, and coming up with all kinds of theories about how the frogs got to whatever island.

[nenya_kanadka]

I'm reading The Hunt For Vulcan (about Newtonian physics, the solar system, science history, and the long and wobbly road to Einstein, using the once-theorized intra-Mercury planet Vulcan as the story focus) and muccamukk started telling me about A Monkey's Journey. These all sound AMAZING and I know I will be checking out at least a couple of them.

(I grew up a young-earth creationist and there is SO MUCH cool stuff I haven't even heard about! I think I might enjoy the one with all the fossil-related shade, and the Permian extinction, and the monkeys, and the....yeah. 😆😍 Also I appreciate the "hard mode" setting on this, since I never really had a fascination with dinosaurs especially. :D)

[elspethdixon]

Awesome, thanks! I'm a huge evolution/paleontology nerd who watches PBS & BBC documentaries for fun, so I've got a long list of recs (I did this "hard mode" because my favorite dinosaur and human evolution books are really worth two entire separate lists of their own).

The Sean B. Carroll book is probably the best starting place out of the ones I recced here, because it's as much a history of how scientists figured out evolution as it is of natural history itself. It starts with 18th century explorers and geologists (the people Charles Darwin would have been reading in school as a young man, who figured out that the earth was a lot older than people had previously thought), goes through the Victorian era, and then finishes with some major twentieth century discoveries like "humans evolved in Africa" and "the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor."

The Permian extinction event is insane - as far as scientists can tell, it wiped out as much as 90% of life on earth, to the point that you get paleontologists saying things like "for the next ten million years the fossil bed contains nothing but one species of clam." The oceans might actually have lost most-or-all their oxygen for a while.

[nenya_kanadka]

Ooh, yes, how they figured this stuff out is especially fascinating to me. I love being able to follow the train of logic (at least on an amateur level) and WHY they decided that all these things are probably what happened. The detective work involved is just amazing.

It also helps with overwriting the remnants of "but evolutionists just hate god and fluffy kittens" scripts in my head, lol, to read about how the theories were actually developed. I do already know that it's also often a big pile of fandom wank ("my interpretation of the fossil record is more canon than yours!"), which is another entertaining aspect. :D

Damn, that is HARDCORE. O.O I have to wonder how much the life that sprang up after that near-total devastation resembled what came before, too. Like clearly we're all descended from what survived so there's continuity there, but the descendants of the species that were obliterated back then might have turned out pretty alien. Now that's an alternate history plot for you...! 😂

[copperfyre]

Hello! I hope you don't mind me appearing in your comments, but I just wanted to say thank you for this list! These all look super interesting, and I'm really glad to see that it looks like my local library has a lot of them! (Or can at least acquire them via inter-library loan)