Berkeley Book List: Evolutionary Biology and Paleontology

Kevin Padian, professor, Integrative Biology; curator, Museum of Paleontology National Geographic Dinosaurs, Paul Barrett, National Geographic Society, 2001 Digging Dinosaurs, John R. Horner and James Gorman, Workman, 1988 The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth, Alan Cutler, Dutton, 2003 The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London, Adrian Desmond, University of Chicago Press, 1989 The Victorians, A.N. Wilson, Norton, 2002 The Bonehunters' Revenge, D.R. Wallace, Houghton Mifflin, 1999 An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890-1935, R. Rainger, University of Alabama Press, 1993 Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man, Bryan Regal, Ashgate, 2002 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin, Harvard University Press, 1964 (reprinted from 1859 original edition, with an introduction by Ernst Mayr) Tess of the Durbervilles: A Pure Woman, Thomas Hardy, 1891 (many reprints available)

As an evolutionary biologist and dinosaur paleontologist, I'm often asked to recommend books in these spheres, but for quite different kinds of people. For children and young students, National Geographic Dinosaurs and nearly anything from British publishers such as Eyewitness, Usborne, and Dorling Kindersley are good bets. Because I have friends on both sides of the aisle, I won't recommend a book on dinosaur extinction, another frequent request. But if you want to know how dinosaurs lived, and how paleontologists study them, my top choice would be Jack Horner's Digging Dinosaurs. Jack explains the problems and methods in reconstructing ancient animals, and he thinks and writes about these problems better than just about anyone in the field.

As for the history of the discovery of evolution, and the role that the understanding of the distant past had in this, a great many books interweave history, science, and culture in stimulating ways. In the late Renaissance, scientific methodology was not well established: experimentation and systematic observation were sometime things that were often trumped by the authority of the Church or the ancients. And so Alan Cutler's book on Nicolaus Steno, who had some great insights on anatomy, fossils, and geology, is a fine place to begin to understand this world.

The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth is marvelous for making one think about what qualifies as an explanation, and for exploring the endless debates that mix strands of partial knowledge with the need to reconcile religious testaments. And it is timely. About half the people in our country today, including the President, don’t accept evolution. Predictably, they have trouble with concepts of the age and structure of the Earth, the generation and sequence of its fossil remains, and cosmology itself. For these people, the dialogue between religion and science has not changed much since the 1600s. So, both the pious and the impious should find much to ponder in Cutler’s account of Steno’s times and the fate of his ideas.

Flashing forward to the early 1800s, Adrian Desmond's Politics of Evolution takes us to an untraditional source to observe the foment of evolutionary ideas: the London and Edinburgh medical schools and the journals of the 1820s and 1830s. Here, and not among the Oxbridge dons, we find the real radical element crying for reform of the privileged medical system, the new ideas in anatomical philosophy seeping in from the Continent, and the first murmurings of transmutation of species. This is the most gripping intellectual biography of a scientific era that I know, and it

is brilliant in exposing a previously untapped well. Today, for example, we regard The Lancet as an illustrious and trusted international medical journal. But in the 1820s, its Radical founder, Thomas Wakley, was continually being thrown in jail for criticizing the practices of the establishment medical schools and the Harley Street physicians. Wakley chose the title of his journal well; after all, what does a lancet do? Okay, I admit I had to go to my encyclopedia to remind myself what a Chartist was and what the Corn Laws were, but it was good for me. To be read alongside A.N. Wilson's The Victorians.

Happily, there is also something of a renaissance in the history of American paleontology. Many people know of the "bone wars" between Yale's O.C. Marsh and Philadelphia's E.D. Cope in the latter 1800s. Berkeley's own David Rains Wallace wrote a fine book, The Bonehunters' Revenge, in which he shows that the scurrilous practices of newspapermen, government bureaucrats, and the paleontologists themselves were responsible for the Gilded Age collapse of this proud science in America. And two other recent books describe its renaissance at the hands of a most unlikely savior, the scion of a wealthy New York family. Henry Fairfield Osborn almost single-handedly built the American Museum of Natural History into perhaps the foremost such museum in the world during the 1890s through the 1930s. Ron Rainger, in "An Agenda for Antiquity," shows how Osborn's views of evolution -- non-Darwinian, highly orthogenetic, constantly striving for improvement -- were informed by his patrician background and the strong belief that human quality could not come without struggle. Bryan Regal, in Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man, picks up Rainger's theme to explain the sociocultural reasons why Osborn and his colleagues decided to carry out the search for the earliest human fossils in Mongolia, rather than Africa. (Needless to say, they didn't find the hominids, but they found great dinosaurs, which to some of us is even better.) Rainger and Regal also situate Osborn's beliefs in the general sociopolitical view shared by his class that immigrants were likely to be of inferior stock, that American imperialism was the best way to bring other cultures to an enlightened standard of life, and that only some kinds of people were likely to have what it takes to make the grade. Whether these ideas, embodied in Osborn's public exhibits, ever percolated through to the thousands of museum visitors each year, is debatable. But these books provide wonderful historic depth to the science. You'll never look at another museum exhibit without wondering about the ideology behind it.

Finally, for the real sweep of evolution, the true "grandeur in this view of life," the original is still the best. Read Darwin's Origin of Species in the first edition facsimile, just to get the true feel of the ancient Bodoni typeface, the John Murray imprint, the courtly Victorian language that persuaded the world that after all, the indications of the world around us all point to gradual evolution, not sudden creation. And for the best reading of Darwin's ideas in the humanities, dust off your high-school copy of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the Durbervilles. From the opening lines, when the parson awakens in Tess's indigent father a misguided sense of his royal patrimony, to the last paragraph of the novel, when Tess is led to the gallows and her sister (with whom she shares more genetic information than anyone in the world) troops away with Tess's vagrant husband, evolution shines through nearly every passage. Hardy understood Darwin intuitively and organically; he saw the sweep of change through time, from the endless yearly renewal of plants and bugs in the meadows to the seemingly immutable layout of the rocks and the stars. And he knew Darwin's view of the place of humans in all this. "Let me enjoy the earth no less," he wrote, "Because the all-encompassing Might / That fashioned forth its loveliness / Had other aims than my delight." Did any scientific idea ever have a more eloquent literary embodiment?

About Kevin Padian
Kevin Padian is a professor of Integrative Biology and a curator in the Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on various aspects of macroevolution and paleobiology, particularly of vertebrates. He is mainly

interested in the origins of major adaptations, or how "great ideas" in evolution get started. He has studied and published extensively on the origins of vertebrate flight. He is editor and an author of "The Beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs" (Cambridge, 1986) and the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs" (Academic, 1997). A major current research thrust, in collaboration with Jack Horner and Armand de Ricqles, is on the microscopic bone structure of dinosaurs and other animals and what it tells us about the growth rates, life history strategies, and physiology of extinct animals. He is President of the National Center for Science Education and was Director of the College Writing Programs at UC Berkeley for 2000-2003. He is the 2003 recipient of the Carl Sagan Award for the Popularization of Science.