Book Progress #9

Time flies when I'm not working on my book. The past month has been especially hectic and, in many respects, nerve wracking, so my goal of being "professional" and writing every day went out the window. I successfully survived the spring semester, however, and now I can devote more of my time to completing this project.

I spent most of yesterday refreshing my memory about horses and their evolution (appropriately enough, a new special exhibit on horses just opened at the AMNH). I knew from the very beginning of the project that I would have to include a chapter on horse evolution, but I could never quite figure out how to introduce the topic. Rather than "attacking" the topic of each chapter head-on, I like to come at it from the side, picking some small detail that ultimately ties together the main subject with some small "quirk" of scientific history. One particular example that I learned about in the last chapter of Rudwick's The Meaning of Fossils finally gave me the perfect introduction that I had been looking for, and I managed to produce 6 pages of new material.

The problem with writing about the evolution of horses, however, is that it is very difficult to find information on some of the European paleontologists that laid the groundwork for the hypothesized transition from older three-toed forms like Anchitherium to the "intermediate" Hipparion to Equus. I'm speaking, of course, about Jean Albert Gaudry and Vladimir Kowalevsky. Both are cited widely but (so far) it has proved difficult to find any of their actual work, which puts me in a bit of a spot. I cannot ignore what they contributed to paleontology and evolution (especially Gaudry's phylogeny of horses), but I don't feel quite right citing their work without having actually read it.

When I cite a paper or summarize a story, I want to have taken the time to find the original material and understand it. Even if I have made a mistake, at least I can go back and see where I missed one point or another. Simply taking the salient points of a summary and putting new clothes on them would be doing precisely what has so irritated me about so many treatments of the history of science, and whenever possible I prefer to go back to original sources. Reading Gould's essay "The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone" (collected in Bully for Brontosaurus) yesterday strengthened my resolve on this point, and while I do not intend to throw out what I've written about Gaudry and Kowalevsky so far, it is important to me to at least make an honest attempt at tracking down their work to see it for myself.

My research on the "dino-bird connection" this week has also changed things enough that I need to go back and do a re-write of my "Birds and Dinosaurs" chapter. The important points are already there, but it's only been in the past few days that I've been able to come up with a more sensible order of events. This would be the second time that I'm revising this chapter, particularly because the first version of it foolishly repeated a few falsehoods that sprung from an ignorance of original source material. (Many thanks to everyone who has sent me papers to help correct this.)

(New sections are in bold)

Introduction

Huxley's rejoinder to Wilberforce at Oxford - Darrow puts Bryan in the hot seat - Behe's astrological mishap - One long argument - Flickering candles in the dark - Monstrous myths - Evolutionary archetypes -

Horses

Darwin's problems with paleontology - Evolution, sure, but natural selection? - Gaudry and Hipparion - Kowalevsky and Anchitherium - "A gift from the Old world to the New" - Marsh's "toy horse" - Huxley buried under bones - Ladder of horse evolution

Whales

Koch's Missourium - The king of the seas flees to Europe - Maybe Basilosaurus, maybe not - Huxley's overlooked insight - Fast & furious fossil finds -

Birds and Dinosaurs

Noah's ravens vacation in New England - Hitchcock's Jurassic birds - A little fossil birdie told me about evolution - A misplaced feather - From London to Berlin - The source of Huxley's inspiration - Megalosaurus = an ossified, fossilized, underdeveloped chick - The unimportance of Archaeopteryx - Hypsilophodon as a good transition - Problems with the Pachypoda - How did we get such beautiful fossils? - Ornithosuchus or theropods? - The case of the missing clavicles - 75 years of pseudoscuhian narrative - Barnum Brown's forgotten Daptosaurus - Ostrom's "terrible claw" - "Tetrapteryx" and Microraptor

Human Evolution

Tyson's dissection of a "pigmie" - A chimp's place in the Chain - Where are the "missing links?" - White's 1799 attempt to save the Chain - The Neanderthal that was mistaken for an Irishman - The Neanderthal fossils get named - Dubois goes to Indonesia - Skull of an ape, leg of a human - "Java Man" - The discovery of "Peking Man" - Dart's Australopithecus - An irrelevant ape - Le Gros Clark to the rescue - Osborn vs Bryan - Harold Cook's Mystery Tooth - Hesperopithecus = Prosthenops - What makes us human? - Ask a stupid question... - Ape-like humans, not human-like apes - Caught in the Chain