42. The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us by Alice Roberts
OPD: 2014
format: 361-page Kindle ebook
acquired: July 1 read: Jul 1-27 time reading: 11:03, 1.8 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Popular Science theme: Naturalitsy
about the author: English academic, TV presenter and author, born in Bristol, 1973

Read with the Naturalitsy group on Litsy, this was a surprisingly difficult read. Several people dropped out early. It's not hard on the sentence level. Roberts is a radio personality and writes in a chatty tone that is enjoyable. It's just very dense. It's essentially a human anatomy book, and human anatomy has a lot of parts, and Roberts wants to cover everything. So chapters have a tendency to go on and on.

But if you're ok tolerating that, you will be rewarded. The information is terrific, maybe exceptional. Roberts brings in a variety of ideas and hunts down perspectives, and it left me feeling very up-to-date. Highlights include ideas on the human spine, brain, the muscles we only use when run, the human trick of turning our palms up (a trick most mammals lack), all the intricate movements behind throwing - something we do really well. Did you know human knees are pronated? And there is all the evolutionary theory behind this all. Her chapter on genitals is fantastic, maybe the best chapter in the book ... but I was too shy to bring that up in our discussion.

Recommended to the willing.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/351556#8203293 ( )

Sort of an impulse purchase, as I hadn't heard anything about this book, but a book about evolution with the improbability of it leading to us as the frame rather than the teleological "people as pinnacle" simplification was an easy sell. Evidently it was an easy sell to my kids, too, as I put this on the bedtime story shelf and one of the kids picked it out.

I love including science non-fiction into family story time, and this was mostly at an appropriate level for our crew (one 10, one 14/15 at the time.) There were a few parts that got a little dry/theoretical, but the diagrams helped. My youngest did get squeamish during the discussion of the development of sex organs, but we all survived.

I hadn't really done much reading on embryology -- on just how an embryo transforms into an actual human, so there was even more new information for me here than I expected.

A fascinating read. ( )

Real Rating: 3.75* of five, rounded up because *I* really liked it

The Publisher Says: The presenter of the BBC's The Incredible Human Journey gives us a new and highly accessible look at our own bodies, allowing us to understand how we develop as an embryo, from a single egg into a complex body, and how our embryos contain echoes of our evolutionary past.

Bringing together the latest scientific discoveries, Professor Alice Roberts illustrates that evolution has made something which is far from perfect. Our bodies are a quirky mix of new and old, with strokes of genius alongside glitches and imperfections which are all inherited from distant ancestors. Our development and evolutionary past explains why, as embryos, we have what look like gills, and as adults we suffer from back pain.

This is a tale of discovery, not only exploring why and how we have developed as we have, but also looking at the history of our anatomical understanding. It combines the remarkable skills and qualifications Alice Roberts has as a doctor, anatomist, osteoarchaeologist and writer. Above all, she has a rare ability to make science accessible, relevant and interesting to mainstream audiences and readers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A narrative approach to a complex scientific study that's occupied Humanity for millennia is going to fall short in both rigor and scope. In that sense, Dr Roberts was doomed from the outset. What anyone who undertakes such an enterprise anyway chooses, then, is to fail in a particular way. In the case of Dr Roberts, an actual, practicing scientist, the choice was obvious: rigor, begone therefore to allow me the scope to speak directly to the audience for this book.

I'm quoting this bit from the chapter entitled "RIBS, LUNGS, AND HEARTS":

When I look at an archaeological skeleton, the first thing I do is lay out the bones in an anatomical arrangement, as though the individual were laying on {their} back, arms by the sides, palm uppermost. Then I make an inventory of the bones, before moving on to look at each bone more carefully, taking note of features that might help me to determine the age and sex of the individual, as well as any telltale signs of disease.

Ribs can be a real pain—they're often broken into short fragments—but after some patient work on this jigsaw puzzle, it's possible to put them in order. A human chest is shaped like a barrel that has been squashed front to back, and the shape of the individual ribs reflects their position.

Careful, clear, and just a bit humorous...you got the "pain" play on words, right?...but the next sections are peppered with "rectus abdominis muscles" and a list of hominin names like Homo rudolfiensis and Homo habilis and we're way out of most people's comfort zone. This explains, I hope, my mingy-seeming rating.

What this book is doing, that is presenting the astounding evolutionary development of the Homo sapiens writing and reading this review, is very valuable. In and of itself, the existence of this project is heartening and necessary. There is an audience for science stuff that wants to know a lot of the material in here. But there aren't that many of us. Dumbing down, as any scientist wishing to communicate with laypersons absolutely must do, is a process of selection and elision. Author Roberts (I typoed "Riberts" and thought long and hard about just leaving it to see if anyone noticed) chose well, for me at my level of interest and information. But what about everyone else?

Choices, in any event, were made and they were illustrated with interestingly detailed line drawings and they were developed to a deeper level than I would've advised she take them; but Professor Doctor Author Roberts is a skilled communicator and (if one is willing to put in the work) will reveal to her readers an astoundingly inspiring story of unlikely events that came up with the form and function of the Homo sapiens she wrote this fascinating, but dense, book to inform and educate. ( )

Alice Roberts, a paleoanthropologist and embryologist, uses insights from both fields to give a detailed account of how we develop in the womb. A veteran TV presenter, she writes in a scientifically well-founded yet accessible manner. I should clarify what I mean by accessible: This is not at the dumbed-down end of the spectrum. Instead, I found it required careful attention and occasional recourse to my dictionary. Even then, it was challenging to keep various terms straight. But that’s fine. When I read a book of popular science, I like to be stretched a bit.
My two takeaways from the book may seem contradictory, but to me, they are complementary. On the one hand, tracing the development of an embryo, then a fetus offers more convincing evidence for evolution than the study of adult species. The yolk sac alone is compelling. On the other, when you consider all that has to go right for conception to occur and to result in a viable live birth, it is incredible that we exist at all (see the book title). My name for the reason there is anything at all rather than nothing is God. Your mileage may vary.
Back to evolution: I was fascinated to learn in this book that while natural selection, as proposed by Darwin, is at work, it is not the only mechanism contributing to evolution. There is, for example, epigenetics (which, Roberts points out, is not the same as the discredited view of epigenesis). But I was also interested to read that epigenesis is only one of several discarded views (recapitulation and preformation are others) that nonetheless contained a grain of truth. All in all, this was an interesting lesson in how science develops.
Roberts repeatedly addresses the question of whether the human species is unique. In one sense, of course, it is—that’s what makes it a species. But the same is true of every other species, so that doesn’t take us much further. More relevant is our tendency to view ourselves as the pinnacle of life, which is a holdover from picturing life as climbing an ascending ladder (scala naturae). Instead, as many from Darwin to Gould have pointed out, a more appropriate metaphor is a tree of life. Additionally, the characteristics we point to when defining the species (habitual bipedalism, opposing thumb, large brain size) turn out to be not absolute differentiators from other species but a matter of degree.
Although this book required effort and concentration, I felt the payoff was worth it. ( )

Thanks goes to Netgalley!

This book tries to do a couple of things, and while I have no direct issue with any of its aims in any one particular, I kept asking myself a very important question, and asked it often, namely: "Who is this author writing to?"

At the opening, I got the impression that this was going to be a grateful pat-on-the-back for all evolutionists and those who believe in science and reason, and indeed, this is what happens, but instead of a few long focuses on a few of the pieces that make humans beautiful and just like the animals we come from, it gets bogged down "hip bone connected to the thigh bone" syndrome.

Instead of a readable series of anecdotes (whether personal, which there are quite a few, or a history of science, which there are also quite a few,) we're also subject to what reads like a first or second year college biology textbook, or perhaps even worse, because it's meant to name drop and exact upon us the price of knowledge without having the depth or experience of being an anatomist, general biologist, or just being extremely well read.

I'm no expert, but I followed most of this book pretty well and understood where the author was headed nicely and enjoyed a number of new info-pieces that I had never come across before. As a reader of lots of fiction and non-fiction, I know there's a fine line to be drawn between too much info-dump or too little, especially in popular non-fiction, but then there's the importance of my repeated question. "Who is this writer writing to?"

If you're reading this book, you're probably already a convert to the alter of science. Aye. My opinion isn't going to change after being shown hundreds and hundreds of examples how and why we're similar to so many kinds of animals. I understood that a long time ago. If she ISN'T writing a book to convert us, then this gigantic overview of the grandeur of the human body might have been better served as a slightly MORE detailed book (or series of books) with a lot more time spent teaching with a lot more depth. Unfortunately, even that's out of the scope for a book of this length, so I'm back to my initial question.

It dawned on me, late in the read, that the book might be best served as something to put on your coffee table. Anyone who's attempted to read it will know just how either *scary* trying to get through it is and will be doubly impressed that *you* got through it, or your scientist friend will see it on the table and proceed to write down all the other books that you should have started with.

If you just want to impress your educated friends and don't want to actually read this book, just display it, then it's probably a fine choice. If they pick it up and thumb through it, they'll pick up on the author's enthusiasm, may recognize her from her science shows (which I have never watched,) and they'll open their mouths in wide "O"s when the big words start tumbling across the page.

I know, I know, I sound like some uneducated yokel when I say this, but I seriously wanted to DNF this book many times. It was either extremely remedial in long passages or I was completely out of my depth in others.

I loved the portions on the brain and our sex organs, thought the one on the eye was rather cool, too, but for everything else, I either had a hard time keeping my eyes focused or I started questioning some fundamental aspect about the book, such as: Where are the symbiotes and all the biota that make up the human body in concert with our standard, not much different DNA from the Fruit Fly? Where is the expression of our DNA explored and how did we become what we are from all these many different starting points that follow from the fish and the primates and so many others? I'd have LOVED to see a lot more pondering along those lines, getting my blood pumping from some cutting-edge theories as well as the history of what we USED to think.

I'm no expert. I never claimed to be.

But... I also don't think I was the right reader for this book. It was either way too many details and being bogged down in the author's big brain or it was way too few, without the precise and logical steps to prove a thesis.

I wanted to like it a lot more, but I don't think it was a complete waste of time. I did get some enjoyment out of it. Maybe it ought to be read in a piecemeal way, grabbing the pieces of the anatomy that interests you the most. ( )