Book Progress #15

Even though T.H. Huxley proposed that whales had evolved from terrestrial carnivores as late as 1870, the origins of whales was exceedingly problematic until the 1980's. For about a century Basilosaurus, Dorudon, and Protocetus represented the oldest known stage of whale evolution, and the general lack of fossil evidence for the origins of whales and the common ancestor for modern baleen & toothed whales caused some to propose that the living cetaceans had separate origins. All of this makes the recent explosion of information about whale origins all the more exciting.

Like some of the other subjects I'm covering (like human evolution) there have been tantalizing clues for a long time, but it is only within the last 20-30 years that a more detailed picture of evolution has begun to emerge. This makes writing all the more challenging; whatever I write may very well be outdated by the time the book goes to press! (Whenever that may be.) I am more excited by such developments than discouraged, however, and I only hope that I can keep up as new discoveries are made and hypotheses change.

(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 - Huxley's linear phylogeny - Wherefore art thou, Hyracotherium? - "A gift from the Old world to the New" - Marsh's "toy horse" - Huxley buried under bones - Ladder of horse evolution - Putting the litoptern before the horse

Whales

Koch's Missourium - The king of the seas flees to Europe - Maybe Basilosaurus, maybe not - Huxley's overlooked insight - Intercalary whales - The problem of whale evolution - Diphyly of whales? - 70+ years of Protocetus - An unexpected skull - But what did it look like? - Indocetus - Teeth: confusion and convergence

Avian 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 intellectual Rubicon - Without language there is no thought - Glorified apes and lowly humans - Buckland's "Red Lady" - She's no lady - Where were the ante-diluvian humans? - Cave contamination - Brixham cave - An unequal partnership - Falconer's enthusiasm, Prestwich's skepticism - Evidence from abroad - Somme Valley turning point - 1859 - Complaints and queries - Pre-Adamites - 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 transitional gibbon-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

More like this

I spent most of yesterday running between different offices and trying to obtain old academic records so my writing time was cut down dramatically, but I still managed to get some work done in the evening. Most of what I have been doing this week has focused on whales, especially since I've been…
I was intending to sit down and write about whale limbs yesterday afternoon (homology, hyperphalangy, and other neat stuff), but by the time I was ready to do it I was feeling so restless that I had to get out of the house. My wife and I headed out to catch a showing of The Incredible Hulk (which…
After many long nights of scribbling down potential titles for the book I think I've finally got one that fits. Beyond the content itself I wanted to choose something that reflected the changes my thinking went through during the writing process (and the changing of my expected date of completion…
It baffles me how quickly my writing days go by. I usually wake up by 8 AM, get myself together (shower, check the blogs, etc.), and return from my morning walk by 10 AM, but even if I work constantly for the next few hours I can never seem to get as much done as I would like. I'm sure this will…

Like some of the other subjects I'm covering (like human evolution) there have been tantalizing clues for a long time, but it is only within the last 20-30 years that a more detailed picture of evolution has begun to emerge. This makes writing all the more challenging; whatever I write may very well be outdated by the time the book goes to press!

It's intimidating, isn't it? I've found myself almost frightened of writing at any great length about fundamental physics before the Large Hadron Collider changes everything. . . But then I realize that it (probably) won't change everything, and if I don't get practice explaining the status quo now, I won't be any good writing about what we will have discovered underlying that status quo five years from now.

To make a horribly grandiose analogy: science popularizers are like doctors. While a doctor works to eliminate disease, the source of their employment, a science popularizer seeks to educate and inspire, to touch lives and make people see the world a little differently. One of those lives we touch might be a young person who grows up and becomes a scientist and makes our old explanation obsolete. Occupational hazard! :-)