Author: inquisitivebiologist

Craving books and passionate about the communication of scientific knowledge, The Inquisitive Biologist is a blog where I review fascinating academic books on biology and related disciplines.

Book review – Imperfection: A Natural History

8-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology

This is the second of a two-part review where I am revisiting the idea that evolution by natural selection is not a process that will always result in perfect adaptations. I first touched on this back in 2019 when reviewing Daniel S. Milo’s Good Enough which, as per its title, argued that evolution does not care for perfection: good enough to survive will do just nicely. Having previously reviewed Andy Dobson’s witty Flaws of Nature, I am now turning to Telmo Pievani’s Imperfection: A Natural History which offers an altogether more erudite take on the topic.

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Book review – Flaws of Nature: The Limits and Liabilities of Natural Selection

7-minute read
keywords: evolution, popular science

Back in 2019, I reviewed Daniel S. Milo’s book Good Enough which was a critique of adaptationist storytelling. For organisms to survive, evolution by natural selection does not, and need not always result in perfect adaptations. Here, I revisit this topic with a double review of, first, Andy Dobson’s Flaws of Nature and, next, Telmo Pievani’s Imperfection. There is plenty more to this thought-provoking idea and Dobson will reel you right in: “It’s evolution, but not the Greatest Hits” (p. 16).

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Book review – Ocean Life in the Time of Dinosaurs

5-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, paleontology

In this review, I am revisiting the spectacular diversity of marine reptiles that flourished in the planet’s oceans and waterways during the time of the dinosaurs. After having gone without popular titles on the subject for almost two decades since Richard Ellis’s Sea Dragons in 2005, suddenly we have three. Last year April-May I reviewed Ancient Sea Reptiles and The Princeton Field Guide to Mesozoic Sea Reptiles, and mentioned that this book was in the works. Ocean Life in the Time of Dinosaurs was originally published in French in 2021 as La Mer au Temps des Dinosaures by Belin/Humensis and has been translated into English by Mark Epstein. Technically speaking that makes it the first of this recent crop, though the English translation was only published in November 2023, after the aforementioned two works. It brings together four French palaeontologists and one natural history illustrator for a graphics-heavy introduction. So, what is in this book, and how does it compare?

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Book review – The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics

9-minute read
keywords: economics

Do you know what warms the cockles of my heart? A neoclassically trained economist turning on his own education and discipline. That describes the career trajectory of economist Jon D. Erickson. The Progress Illusion is part history lesson of how neoliberal economics ended up on top, part manifesto for a different economy. For Erickson, the answers lie in the emerging discipline of ecological economics. Though there is much to like here, I did notice some curious omissions.

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Book review – Cro-Magnon: The Story of the Last Ice Age People of Europe

6-minute read
keywords: anthropology,  archeology, human evolution

During the Last Ice Age, Europe was home to groups of hunter-gatherers that were virtually indistinguishable from humans alive today. Commonly known as Cro-Magnons, they seem to have overlapped in time with Neandertals, even exchanging genetic material with them. Who were these people and what do we know about them? Palaeoanthropologist Trenton Holliday has studied the ice age Europeans for the last 30 years and in this, his first book for a popular audience, he gives you a detailed picture of their lives as it played out over some 30,000 years.

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Book review – Talking Heads: The New Science of How Conversation Shapes Our Worlds

7-minute read
keywords: neurobiology, psychology

This is the conclusion of a trio of reviews on communication in (non)human animals. The previously reviewed The Voices of Nature and Why Animals Talk offered, respectively, a foray into animal bioacoustics and a thought-provoking answer to the question of why animals need to talk in the first place. Though highlighting that we routinely underestimate animals, both books also agreed that human language really is unique and unlike anything heard in other species. So, what is all of our chatter good for? Talking Heads argues that conversation is the glue that bonds us together as the hypersocial animals that we are; a process by which we co-create cognitive realities such as collective memories, cultures, and, if neuroscientist Shane O’Mara is to be believed, even countries.

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Book review – Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication

7-minute read
keywords: ethology

This is the second of a three-part review on acoustic communication in animals. Zoologist Arik Kershenbaum impressed me with the previously reviewed The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy. That popular work on astrobiology was a diversion from his actual research on vocal communication in animals. Rather than asking what animals are saying, Kershenbaum is foremost interested in why animals talk in the first place. How do they live, what do they need to say to each other, and are there any parallels with human language? The answers Kershenbaum presents are a highly stimulating and thought-provoking exercise in decentering the human experience and trying to understand animals on their terms.

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Book review – The Voices of Nature: How and Why Animals Communicate

8-minute read
keywords: ethology

On account of our good eyesight, humans are said to be a visual species. However, when you stop and think about it, human language (at least English) has a surprisingly large vocabulary for the squawks, grunts, chirps, honks, growls, etc. that other animals make. What, if anything, are they saying? Two recent books delve into this question, The Voices of Nature and Why Animals Talk. A last-minute entry on human language, Talking Heads, turns this into a three-part review. In other words, we need to talk…

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Book review – Of Cockroaches and Crickets: Learning to Love Creatures That Skitter and Jump

5-minute read
keywords: entomology

Of all the insects that have a PR problem, cockroaches must rank very high. That, however, did not stop German entomologist, journalist, and filmmaker Frank Nischk from spending a year-long internship studying them. In this book, he regales the reader with stories of his time in the lab and the field studying first cockroaches and later crickets. A light and breezy read despite the serious undercurrent of biodiversity decline, Of Cockroaches and Crickets turned out to be an entertaining read.

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Book review – The Evolutionary Origins of Life and Death

9-minute read
keywords: abiogenesis, cell biology, evolutionary biology

In this second foray into the biology of death, I will examine programmed cell death or PCD. You might have heard of the process of apoptosis, but, as the previously reviewed The Biology of Death mentioned, this is just one of many ways in which cells can actively kill themselves. It is a vital part of life in multicellular organisms, for instance sculpting our hands so that we are not born with webs of skin between our fingers, or allowing leaves to fall from the trees in autumn by triggering cell death in so-called abscission zones. These are small sacrifices to serve the larger organism. Surprisingly, single-celled (unicellular) organisms also show PCD. But wait, is that not tantamount to suicide? How did that evolve?

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