Book Progress #16

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 tracing backwards through the literature to find more about how scientists thought they evolved before things started to change in the 1980's. I've still got plenty more to write about, but I think I have a fair amount of the skeleton of the chapter in place.

(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 - Hydrarchos - 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 - Mesonychids, Perissodactyls, and Artiodactyls - Telescoping - Toothed mysticetes - Aetiocetus

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