I finally did it. After a number of delays due to scheduling and new discoveries (i.e. Aerosteon, Epidexipteryx) I have nearly completed the dinosaurs/birds chapter. It still requires one more edit (from a low of 25 pages it ballooned back up to 30), but it is essentially complete.
Writing the chapter was much more complicated than I expected. There are so many new discoveries (many of which require more study) that creating a synthesis of the information was difficult. Indeed, I expect some of the information I have presented to change in the near future, possibly even as the book goes from my hard drive to press, but I am trying to be cautious while paying attention to how the wind is blowing.
I also had to cut a fair bit of material I really wanted to include. There were many little details and quotes I quite liked that, while interesting, did not serve to keep the "story" I'm telling moving forward. I am going to try and remember those resources and keep them around for other projects and reviews, but I regret not being able to weave them into the later versions of the chapter.
After I do a penultimate clean-up of this chapter (there will be another one after I've taken a break from it for a bit) I am going to move on to the section on human evolution. I have been dreading it, if for no other reason than there is more information than I can hope to cover in the space I have allotted myself. I already have over 25 pages of material and I have barely gotten past the discovery of Homo erectus in China, so needless to say I have my work cut out for me.
Here's the latest Wordle for the dino/birds chapter;
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For previous posts dealing with this project, see the "Books" and "Great Book Project" archives.
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Is Life's Sublime Riddle still the working title? (Something about the sibilant slide from "life's" to "sublime" rubs my ear the wrong way, but it's hard to express exactly what the problem is, and maybe it's just me.)
(Negative comment day!)
I'd choose 'Life's Little Riddle' over 'Life's Sublime Riddle'.
But it would have to be kid friendly to a certain extent.
and...
what's with the fascination on word redundancy (wordle)?
Don't get stuck on the numbers (symbols) of words (symbols).
Symbols of symbols is not biology or ecology, it's numeracy and nomenclature. If you're gonna build a house, you need a few hammers and a bunch of nails. Don't count the nails!!
(pretending as if I could do better. I don't think have a point actually. but sometimes it's better to get criticised before the last sentence is written.)
Blake; I have actually grown more ambivalent about that title. I like Life's Splendid Riddle better, but it still has the problem you mention. It reminds me of what Gould wrote about his title The Mismeasure of Man, which many people pronounced "Mishmeasure."
Finding a good title is difficult. I do not want to pick something as uninspired as Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, or Why Evolution is True. (I think Endless Forms Most Beautiful is a good title, it just has been done to death already.)
I have been thinking about Paley's "Watchmaker" analogy and how he overlooked the history of the stone he mentions (that even the rocks have a history that an be understood that requires no special intervention), so I thought of something like "Stories from the Stones." It doesn't sound quite right to me, though, especially since it's not the stones themselves I am going to talk about. It sounds more like a subtitle anyway, and not a very good one at that. (I might use "Paley's stone" as a jumping off point in the introduction, and maybe I can turn that idea into a title, but it's difficult to do.)
It has been trying to come up with something gripping that accurately summarizes what the book is meant to be. I don't want to agonize too much about it, but I am not foolish enough to ignore that titles, covers, format, etc. are important.
My strategy, then, is to go back and read some of my favorite evolutionary works that fascinated me in the first place. Not to mine the text for some metaphor or phrase, but in the hope that I'll be inspired enough to think of something new. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but I don't want to settle for something bland.
DD; I'm probably going to drop the "Riddle" title. As I mentioned in the comment above, I have grown more ambivalent about it, and most of the comments I have received about it have been negative.
As for the Wordle that accompanies each post, I'm going it to see how the text itself evolves. It helps to know if I'm overusing some words like "however" or "although," but more generally it allows me to see how the chapter has come together in terms of key words. To continue your analogy, some of the words that show up with the greatest frequency are like beams that help support the chapter, and I just like to see if any patterns appear.
> For the title:
May I suggest this verse from Wordsworth's "Mutability"
"The unimaginable touch of Time"?!
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mutability_(Wordsworth)
> For whales' chapter:
"The past leviathans" [G. G. Byron, "Cain", Act II, Scene I, 1821]
http://worldlibrary.net/eBooks/WorldeBookLibrary.com/cainbyron.htm
Excuse me Brian, I'm in a poetic mood today!
Leo