Making the most of evolutionary narrative

Illustration, either through text or pictures, has always been important to explaining sciences like paleontology and evolution. In terms of pictoral illustration, books like Niles Eldredge's Fossils and Jean Baptiste de Panafieu's marvelous Evolution are stunning books that are as pleasing to look at as to read. Before glossy, lavishly-illustrated books were able to be produced, though, writers often had to construct evolutionary or paleontological "epics" to help draw the reader in to a better understanding of the topic at hand.

The construction of "Just-so" stories is abhorred, but the construction of narratives about the history of life on earth has traditionally been an effective method for communicating scientific topics to the public. Sometimes outdated narratives (like the "Savanna hypothesis" for human origins) become entrenched and are difficult to dig out, but the occurrence of such evolutionary explanations make it even more important to be aware of what previous popularizers have said and how the science has changed. As Philip Pauly recently wrote in a review of Bernard Lightman's Victorian Popularizers of Science;

Stephen Gould's Wonderful Life brought [the issue of the evolutionary epic] to the fore. He emphasized that historical narratives--whether about humans, the extinction of the dinosaurs, or the more obscure period of the Burgess Shale-- were real knowledge. Martin Rudwick's Bursting the Limits of Time delineates the deeper historical background of this approach. Scientists reluctant to embrace the position that historical accounts are real knowledge hobble their ability to speak persuasively about evolution.

[Hat-tip to Michael for sending me the review]