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New narratives of creation
Life: An Unauthorized Biography
by Richard Fortey HarperCollins: 1997. Pp. 399. 20 Andrew H. Knoll
In his brief poem When I heard the learnd astronomer, Walt Whitman recounts an evening spent at a scientific lecture. Facts and figures swirl about the hall, oppressively weighting the air, until he is compelled to flee into the night and restore his spirit beneath the canopy of stars. Although written more than a century ago, Whitmans verse resonates with a surprisingly large contemporary readership. Earlier attempts to understand the Universe and our place in it distilled natures mystery into powerful narrative; science replaces awe with statistics.
This is a maddening accusation, and many readers of Nature would counter it by insisting that knowledge promotes wonder as effectively as ignorance. That may be, but scientists seldom do a good job of demonstrating the point. Current texts on the history of life might even be introduced as evidence in support of Whitmans view. The successive dominants of global ecosystems are generally recounted like the generations of Abraham in prose that instructs but rarely inspires. What a pleasure, then, to read Richard Forteys elegant new book. Fortey, a distinguished palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, London, authoritatively serves up the facts that lend substance to scientific debate about evolution, but in doing so he never loses sight of the fact that the evolutionary history assembled from fossils and comparative biology remains a story, and a darn good one at that. The result is the best account of lifes history that I know, an engaging narrative that succeeds as literature as well as science.
Conventionally, Fortey begins with Darwins warm little pond (or hot little hydrothermal vent) and ends with the rise of Homo sapiens. In between, there are illuminating discussions of Precambrian microorganisms, the Cambrian explosion, the great radiations and extinctions, dinosaurs, and more. Fortey acknowledges that the Earth itself plays an important role in this drama, as continents shift and climates fluctuate for better or worse. His focus, however, is squarely on character development the trilobites, eurypterids and ammonites that populate his text emerge as organisms that lived and breathed rather than merely as the skeletal signposts of a lost world.
Not surprisingly, Fortey is...