Henry Gee

Book digitized by Google from the library of the University of Michigan and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.

Describes various kinds of dinosaurs, including Parasaurolophus, Allosaurus, and Ornitholestes, and discusses how dinosaurs hunted, their life cycle, and how paleontologists learn about them.

"Henry Gee, Chief Science Writer at Nature, tells the story of a recent revolution in palaeontology. For the first time, all of us can share in the wonder of a deceptively simple idea known as cladistics, the science of comparison. The cladistics revolution is transforming almost everything we know about the science of life in Deep Time - the billions of years in which life has evolved on this planet. It provides insights and solutions to questions about ourselves ordinarily considered beyond the realm of science."--BOOK JACKET. "The real answers to how life evolved and how life forms are related come from cladistic analysis, from measuring the tremendous variety of genetic and anatomic variations between species and juggling them with computer technology. Because of cladistics, scientists have come to believe that hippos are more closely related to whales than pigs. We have learned that the old way of understanding nature, in which we squashed the teeming variety of life on earth into our own haphazard and arbitrary categories, must be replaced by understanding precisely how similar, and how different, each species measurably is."--BOOK JACKET.

"In 2001, an international team of scientists announced that they had substantially deciphered the human genome, which contains the genetic instructions for the creation and maintenance of a human being. But the mapping of the genome is just one moment in a long history that goes back not just to Darwin but all the way to Aristotle. Man's answer to the question of what brings form to the formless is an exhilarating and often bizarre history that encompasses - amongst many disciplines - genetics, the nature philosophy of Goethe, and preformation." "In this provocative and accessible account Henry Gee presents not just the history of ideas that led to the genome, but shows how the genome itself contains the scars and history of all the generations of life back to the very origins of life more than three billion years ago."--BOOK JACKET.

The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being "animal" and started being "human." In The Accidental Species, Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature, takes aim at this misleading notion, arguing that it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works and, when applied to the evolution of our own species, supports mistaken ideas about our own place in the universe. Gee presents a robust and stark challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation. Far from being a quirk of religious fundamentalism, human exceptionalism, Gee argues, is an error that also infects scientific thought. Touring the many features of human beings that have recurrently been used to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world, Gee shows that our evolutionary outcome is one possibility among many, one that owes more to chance than to an organized progression to supremacy. He starts with bipedality, which he shows could have arisen entirely by accident, as a by-product of sexual selection, moves on to technology, large brain size, intelligence, language, and, finally, sentience. He reveals each of these attributes to be alive and well throughout the animal world -- they are not, indeed, unique to our species. The Accidental Species combines Gee's firsthand experience on the editorial side of many incredible paleontological findings with healthy skepticism and humor to create a book that aims to overturn popular thinking on human evolution—the key is not what's missing, but how we're linked. - Publisher.