Book Progress #18

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 always be the case but there never seems to be quite enough time for me to feel pleased about what I've written in a day.

Although I was hoping to write more about whales, evo devo, and Albert Koch's contentious (but often forgotten) contribution to the debate over the antiquity of man, most of my attention was focused on the concluding chapter. The recent paper on what E. coli can tell us about contingency, "nylon-eating bacteria," the Dinosauroid, why our arboreal ape ancestry allows us to play baseball, and Prof. Ichthyosaurus all popped up here and there, and the chapter is probably the most heterogeneous of any that I've written so far. This could probably be expected in a chapter that I hope will eloquently bring the rest of the book into focus, but given such different examples jumping the gaps from one subject to the next can be a little hazardous. I know how all the concepts are connected but I don't want to write under the assumption that the reader is going to be able to follow my steps if I end up packing too much into too small a space. I want the book to have a strong ending, and I imagine that this will make my work on the conclusion very challenging.

I'm still accumulating information and trying to track down rare papers, too. (C.W. Beebe's 1915 paper on "Tetrapteryx" has been maddeningly difficult to find, especially when bookstores that have listings for it say they're already sold it by the time I e-mail them.) My copy of The Emergence of Whales arrived today, although I haven't even started to dig into it. I really wish I had more time to read. I used to devour several books a week and now it is difficult to find the time to get through one. Between my day job, night classes, working on my book, and other activities I just don't have enough time to read as much as I did this time last year, and I'm hoping to find a way to work reading back into my daily schedule. All this work with little to show for my efforts has been a bit of an emotional drain, as well; it feels like I'm still in the middle of the spring semester even though I'm halfway through June already. If I'm going to reach my goal of completing 3-4 chapters by the end of the summer I'm going to have to pick up the pace a little bit.

In spite of my complaints I am feeling better about the book with each page I complete. When I started seriously working things out a few months ago, scrapping a previous draft and working from a new foundation, I wasn't entirely sure that I would be able to produce coherent paragraphs, much less produce entire chapters. Presently, however, I have written so much that it's difficult to imagine not finishing it. I've got plenty of work to do (I still have yet to complete one entire chapter) but I have at least a modest amount of hope that I will finish what I have started.

(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

Conclusion

Troodon sapiens? - It's all about the brain - Walking with dinosaurs - Eerie similarity - Evolution doesn't close a door without opening a window - Generations - "Nylon-eating bacteria" - Hop, skip, and a jump to citrate use - How can we know? - Unfamiliar ET's - Alternative apes - No fast-ball-throwing baboons - Prof. Ichthyosaurus - Little but a twig