Mark Jaffe

Disappointing

My paleontology professor (a great raconteur) used to tell Cope/Marsh stories – which is why I bought this book in the first place (and a geeky love of fossils). Uncle… I give up. The thought of reading any more of this was making me grind my teeth.

A juicy story about scientific backstabbing, skullduggery, theft, slander, and venomous, snarky epistles … is surprisingly boring in Jaffe’s hands. The narrative quickly becomes bogged down in all the socio-economic and political background. The cast of famous characters is legion (I ordered a book about P.T. Barnum), but it only serves to further cloud the meat of the story. I’m going to try The Bonehunters Revenge by David Wallace.
… (más)

I was reluctant to read this book, since I already knew the ending, and it's sad--a non-native snake somehow hitched a ride to the island of Guam where, over a period of three decades, it managed to spread over the island and obliterate all the resident bird-life. Three species of birds went extinct and two more, the Guam rail and the Micronesian kingfisher, are extinct in the wild. These are the facts, but there is much more to the book than that. "And No Birds Sing" is a fascinating account of how the scientists involved, especially a young woman, Julie Savidge, who was working on her dissertation, explored the problem and found the evidence that the invasive brown tree snake was, indeed, the culprit. Up until that point, no one thought a single invader would be capable of such devastation and other explanations, such as disease or pesticides, were favored. There are also chapters on how captive breeding programs are established in zoos and detailing the attempts to release the Guam rails on a neighboring island. The brown tree snake is a fascinating villain, continuously proving itself capable of things that snakes "shouldn't" be able to do. Finally, as the author makes clear, the importance of this story goes far beyond the fate of one Pacific island. As more and more habitat is fragmented and surrounded by endless cities and suburbs, species are stranded and the few pockets of wilderness left begin to act as islands in a sea of people. Like Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," this is a book that easily moves from "current events" to "classic."… (más)

Fitting way to end the year in reviews, no? Talking about fossils, by a fossil, referring to a fossil medium.

Ah, science. You successor to religion as a means of explaining everyday life's many and various mysteries. You pretender to the Throne of God in your assertions of omniscience and omnipotence. You silly, arrogant adolescent brat! I love you no matter what, just like I do my kid.

Science in the 1840s, when this book begins to trace its protagonists's courses through life in earnest, had fewer stagnant backwaters more rank and turgid than our own USA. Germany, France, England! The Big Three! The Commanders of the Heights looked down on us rude mechanicals in the all-too-recently Colonies and viewed Harvard and Yale and Princeton much as we today view community colleges: They serve a purpose, one supposes, but one would never allow one's daughter to marry a "graduate" of same.

So how, with such a richly deserved international rep as a scientific backwater, did the USA emerge as one of the preeminent scientific powers? In fairly large part because of the fight between Cope and Marsh, each determined to describe and name and claim credit for discovering the most, the biggest, the earliest, the crucial fossil, preferably of a dinosaur but in a pinch of a Pleistocene mammal, or a bird, or even a fish. FIRST counted MOST because of the convention that the first guy gets to name the discovery, and that's a huge---HUGE---deal because ever afterwards (well, almost ever afterwards, the exceptions needn't concern us here) your name is It.

Cope was a Quaker, with the seemingly universal Quaker trait of reserve. He was a married man, possessed of a deeply beloved wife and adored daughter. He was well-off, from a well-off family and never thought of himself as an outsider. He, naturally, was the underdog in every fight with Marsh because of this.

Marsh was a poor lad from a poor family, never married and no close ties to his birth family, though he (crucially for his ambitions) had a super-rich Uncle Peabody who funded his fossil fetish. He was hail-fellow-well-met, he never failed to browbeat, overawe or cow those he needed to accomplish his ends, or suck up to those whose ends he could serve while doing himself the maximum good. In short, a politician, and a surprisingly good one, given that his emotional constitution was both jealous and iniflexible. I think that, had I ever met Othniel (he hated that name!), I would have LOATHED him and attempted to belt him in the chops on G.P.s.

Cope, milder of manner but completely ruthless in his pursuit of fossils, was also the more prolific publisher of papers. He won many a battle in the Fossil Wars simply by being first on the field, though very often with the wrong information or with the right information wrongly interpreted. Famously, he assembled a pleisiosaur's skeleton with the head on the tail! And it was exhibited in the principal scientific museum of the day that way! And Marsh corrected him, publicly! Juicy stuff, and stuff that Jaffe makes excellent use of in his well-paced text.

The role of human nature's failings in the progress of the world is not an unexplored subject. It's evergreen, though, in its interest to us, and rightly so. Without Cope and Marsh's Fossil Wars, would we possess an interational scientific reputation today (albeit a steadily eroding one)? Yes, of course, it was inevitable that a huge, increasingly rich country like the USA was in the 19th century would come to the forefront. It was a matter of survival, really, since without scientific advance there is unlikely to be technological advance. But the Fossil Wars added so much to the world's store of knowledge that they were instrumental in affording American scientists something almost beyond price: Prestige. The burnished glow of merited repute. It's a huge gift these men gave to posterity, and one we've squandered most foolishly in recent times.

Anyway, I think this is the perfect end-of-year book because it's such a fun read, because it's a fascinating subject, and because, to a few important people, it's a reminder that a nation that fails to move forward is sliding backward. We're in danger of doing that again. In fact, I argue that we're already 10 years behind. The superconducting supercollider; the American absence from space; the abysmal condition of science education among our youth. It's a worrisome return to the status quo antebellum. I can only hope that the end of the Aughties means the end of the conservative, nay-saying, how-dare-we anti-science league's power.

Recommended. Really, truly good stuff here.… (más)