Dunn, a biologist at North Carolina State University, does an admirable job of exploring the human drive to find and understand the manifold forms of life that surround them. With his light and enjoyable style, he also provides fascinating character sketches of some of the scientists ("often obsessive, usually brilliant, occasionally half-mad") who made the most important discoveries, with enough scientific context for readers to understand their significance. Dunn ranges from Antoine van Leeuwenhoek's amazing microscopic discoveries in the scientific backwater of 17th-century Delft to a major 20th-century undertaking to explore life near deep sea vents where the ocean floor is expanding. But Dunn has a deeper message: "life is more diverse and less like us than we had imagined." Indeed, he says, humans are far from central in the story of life's evolution on Earth; most life is microscopic, living in and deeply below the soil and likely comprising at least half of the planet's biomass. Finally, Dunn writes about scientific hubris: virtually every scientific prediction about conditions limiting life have been proven incorrect. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Overview
Editorial Reviews
Science writer Dunn (ecology, North Carolina State Univ.) and his wife were collecting insect and plant species in Bolivia and learning the names from natives when he became interested in the search for new species. His book, a series of portraits of obsessive scientists who have looked at the world in new ways, reveals that we are not even close to identifying every new organism on Earth. Dunn traces the history of scientific discovery, from Linnaeus's desire to name everything and Leeuwenhoek's extensive study of microscopic animals to the biologists who tried to organize all-species inventories around the world, Lynn Margulis's ideas of symbiogenesis, and Carl Woese's discovery of the new domain, Archaea. Dunn also writes about scientists who are pushing at the edges of what seem to be the extremes of life: the discovery of life around very hot deep sea vents and the search for life on other planets. Dunn's enthusiasm for his subjects comes through in this well-written book. Recommended for public and university libraries.
Margaret Henderson
If you have any interest in life beyond your own, you should read this book...Between the covers of EVERY LIVING THING you’ll learn both about life’s amazing diversity and that process of their discovery. Savor this fascinating volume and then help to preserve life’s wonders.” — Paul R. Ehrlich, author of THE DOMINANT ANIMAL: HUMAN EVOLUTION AND THE ENVIRONMENT
“His writing is concise and entertaining. So entertaining that I found myself laughing out loud and following my husband around saying, “Listen to this!” over and over again as I read.” — Internet Review of Books
His writing is concise and entertaining. So entertaining that I found myself laughing out loud and following my husband around saying, “Listen to this!” over and over again as I read.
If you have any interest in life beyond your own, you should read this book...Between the covers of EVERY LIVING THING you’ll learn both about life’s amazing diversity and that process of their discovery. Savor this fascinating volume and then help to preserve life’s wonders.
Product Details
BN ID: | 2940177625485 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
Publication date: | 03/10/2020 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Every Living Thing
Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys
Chapter One
What We All Used to Know
Just a few tens of thousands of years ago, we all lived in Africa. For most of human history and prehistory, we lived in small, illiterate communities. We began in the savannas where we foraged and hunted. We collected the animals and plants and named what we found. Slowly at first, some individuals or communities left on foot, following game or chance, or maybe just fleeing other people. They traveled along routes about which we continue to speculate. With time, they forgot where they had been. They carried no record of their past with them, beyond what survived in myth. Any story or name not mentioned in a lifetime disappeared.
Every year the front line of villages moved farther out. It was a slow wave of bodies and livelihoods. Individuals in that front line found, with each move, new animals, new plants, and more generally, new life. Collectively, humanity revealed pieces of the story of life. Because nothing was written and languages, as we spread, diverged, each discovery was local, each lesson learned repeatedly. Communities landed on the new landscape like a reader landing on a random page in a book. They found themselves surrounded by but a few paragraphs of something much larger. They set about translating those paragraphs. In each place, on each page, people would have to give names not only to all the wild beasts, but also to the plants, the fungi, the beetles, and the ants, and anything else that was to be used, avoided, or simply discussed. On these organisms and their new names they hung knowledge, stories, and belief.
That was the first great wave of discovery. It is a forgotten part of our scientific story. Long before Columbus or Magellan, much of the world had been found. Seldom do we consider what those first great explorers in small, fire-lit communities understood of Earth.
While drinking an espresso and readingPeople magazine, it is hard to imagine our kin ever ate shoots and leaves, that they ever knew most of the animals and plants by name.We look out now and see pigeons. We see the nameless green of the trees, and of the unclassifiable weeds among the sidewalk cracks. Insects bat at our screens and we swat them without partiality. We imagine now that the "natives" (of no relation to us) were ignorant or at least simple, but a few generations ago, we were "those people." We all lived in small communities, hunted, and foraged. We shat in the woods.
Clear views of how we once lived and what we once knew are illusive. History has left us potsherds and ruins, but little in the way of records of the knowledge our ancestors had of the species around them. Contemporary communities where people gather and hunt or even farm can, however, be models of parts of the past. In many such communities, people still record little, know mostly what they have heard and remember, and name new things they find. As long as we are careful to remember that they are also, in important ways, different from ancient communities, we can use these contemporary communities to understand aspects of how life might have been in the past. In these communities, we can find something of who we once were. Having a measure of what we once were and knew is necessary if we are to understand how far we have come and how far we might go.
One could go almost anywhere in the world to find communities of people living off the land in ways that require traditional oral knowledge of the species around them, knowledge our ancestors would have needed. I started in Cavinas, Bolivia. The road to Cavinas is long and in most places not a road at all, but instead a river or a footpath. To get to Cavinas our first big step would be to get to Riberalta, the biggest city in the northern Bolivian Amazon.
To get to Riberalta, my wife Monica and I flew to Santa Cruz, Bolivia. From Santa Cruz, we took a bus to Trinidad, a sleepy town at the southern edge of Bolivia's great, flooded Amazonian savannas. From Trinidad, we took the long bus north. We were traveling in what was to be the dry season, but the water had not yet drained out of the land. The floods still clung to grasses, forest and, as would soon be relevant, to the roads.
The going was slow. A bus ride that was to take one day took several. Mosquitoes flew in the windows, fed on us, and flew back out. The heat came in and stayed. Day came and was replaced by night, once, twice, and then a third time. For several days, the bus passed through what remains largely unbroken forest and savanna, a landscape populated with a billion insects, a dozen primate species, caimans, anacondas, and the occasional forlorn cow. During that journey, the bus made a single planned stop (in a one-hut town majestically named Sheraton). Of course, that excludes the stops for flat tires, broken axles (fixed with rope), and a six-hour period during which the driver of the bus tried to get it unstuck by hitching it to horses, cows, and then, all at once, a truck, two horses, and a cow. We suffered the same things that ailed the early Western explorers: bad food, bad transport, long days, and...let's face it...our own lack of fortitude. In retrospect, the trip was a kind of earned joy. During those days though, it was nearly all miserable.
Every Living ThingMan's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys. Copyright © by Rob Dunn. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
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