The search for the solution to what Sir John Herschel famously called the “mystery of mysteries” – how new species come to exist – has brought a myriad of remarkable creatures to the attention of science. From Deinonychus to Darwin’s Galapagos finches, every discovery has added another clue to the assembled body of knowledge that may someday yield the solution. Yet after reading Sean B. Carroll’s Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species, the reader is left with another tantalizing question to ponder in addition to Herschel’s mystery; that question being which are really the more remarkable – the creatures that have been discovered in the one-hundred-fifty year old quest for the mystery’s answer or the “creatures” (meant rhetorically and with the greatest possible respect, of course) who made the discoveries.
Beginning with Alexander von Humboldt, the last of the great polymath naturalists and the direct intellectual predecessor not only to Charles Darwin, but Alfred Russell Wallace, Henry Walter Bates, and countless others as well, Dr. Carroll, Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, and an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin, chronicles the lives, quests, and accomplishments of some of the past two century’s most notable contributors to the many fields that comprise the study of evolutionary development – and what a series of chronicles they are. From the aforementioned triumvirate of Victorian naturalists, who assembled the initial evidence to prove the case that life did not begin in the manner that was then widely believed nor were its forms static in testimony to all things being created perfect, to Linus Pauling, a man not commonly thought of as a researcher into evolution yet whose discoveries at the molecular level of life helped to establish the idea of using a “molecular clock” to redraw and then recalculate the time frame between the branchings on the hominid evolutionary tree.
However while not diminishing Darwin and the other publicly well-known “heavyweights” whose adventures and discoveries are retold in Remarkable Creatures, it is Professor Carroll’s recounting of the lives and works of those who are not so well known outside their respective fields, or who at least may not be as familiar to the wider reading public, that really makes the book a gem for all with an interest in natural history. Charles Walcott for example, whose discovery of the Burgess Shale and subsequent contribution to the unraveling of the mystery of the Cambrian Explosion, is one such individual so profiled. Confidant to U.S. presidents and head of both the U.S. Geological Survey and the Smithsonian Institution (not at the same time of course, he was mortal after all), “Snowshoe Charlie’s” contributions not only to science, but American political and geographic history as well, merit at least a thick book to be written about them all to themselves.
As an author, Professor Carroll’s skill lies not only in his encyclopedic knowledge of his subjects but also in his ability to communicate his knowledge to the reader in a way that is erudite yet personal. He doesn’t shrink from presenting some of the more complex aspects of his subjects’ scientific investigations yet at the same time he never loses sight of the fact that the people about whom he is writing were just that – people. Because of this, the reader is allowed, even encouraged, to develop a deeper connection with them and their work than might be commonly assumed in a work on such subjects; and it is through this connection that the truly remarkable aspect of both the discoverers and their discoveries is most effectively communicated.
Remarkable Creatures was honored as one of the 2009 finalists in non-fiction for the National Book Award.
Title: Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species
Author: Sean B. Carroll
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Format: hardcover, 352 pages
ISBN-13/EAN: 9780151014859
In accordance with Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255, it is disclosed that the copy of the book read in order to produce this review was provided gratis to the reviewer by the publisher.
