Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature

There are two types of writers of science books - the scientists and the journalists(or bloggers). The books from the first type are usually a lot more technical but at the same time they are also a lot more one-sided in cases when the science had not found all the answers yet. The second type can be either great or mediocre - depending on how much the authors understand of their subject and how good writers they are. Switek is not exactly a scientist (he is a research associate in a museum but he is also a blogger and journalist). And he had written a very accessible, readable and enjoyable book about evolution.

He chooses a somewhat nontraditional format - instead of starting from the beginning and moving through the younger and show more younger fossils, he takes the reader on a trip through history... a few times in a row. Each chapter is the narrative of a specific group of animals or a specific change of a behavior. And inside of each chapter, the information is presented in the order the scientists actually learned it. This makes a lot of the theories through the last 2 centuries a lot more understandable - at each theory explanation you know exactly as much as the scientists at the time did and this helps seeing how this could have been the understanding at the time.

He starts with an introduction of fossils and an explanation of why they are important, spends a chapter on Darwin (if you are talking about evolution, you need to at least explain his ideas) and then starts his journey through time. Fish, birds and dinosaurs start the big parade of animal families, followed closely by whales, elephants, horses and humans. The same scientists show up in almost each chapter and with each new family, their theories flesh out and their growth through their careers is plainly shown. The book is as much about the fossils as it is about the scientists that found and identified them; it is as much about the evolution as it is about how we had learned about it and how it had been proved that it is not just an imaginary theory.

In places the fossils are coming fast on top of each other, with their Latin names and miniscule differences. But Switek manages to write even these sections in a way that allows you to read them easily enough - and when you are through one of the denser passages to realize that it did not even slow you down - the terms and names fit very well and the explanations are more than enough. And the big number of figures and pictures and drawings helps in some cases.

And then there are the notes. Unlike most books where references and notes are mixed and you never know if you need to check them (I really do not care for references when reading through a book like that - not while reading a chapter anyway), Switek had split them. The notes are real notes - adding more details about the topic that is discussed or clarifying a point. The references are in their own section and the text is not marked with them (but each reference quote the start of the passage that it is about).

Overall a very good book about the evolution and about how the scientific knowledge has reached the stage at which it is now. show less

Once upon a time, if you were rich enough then you could be a polymath. The word polymath comes from the Greek “mathe” for learning and “poly” for parrot, and as the etymology suggests it refers to people who know everything there is to know and can repeat it back to you when offered a cracker. True polymaths, those who know the sum total of extant human knowledge, probably haven't existed since the first group of homo sapiens in Ethiopia split into two. But there's a second etymology: “polus” from the Latin for much, and “mathe” from the Latin for heavy. As in: he's learnt so much that his brain is quite heavy. And so polymath came to mean simply someone who knows a lot, in particular they should be able to hold a show more decent conversation on any scientific topic (knowledge of arts not required).

The last polymath was apparently a guy called Thomas Young who died in 1829. Look: there's even a book about him. It's no secret why polymathism died off. It takes ten years to go from secondary school to finishing a PhD, and all that means is that you're very knowledgeable about one question in one small area of one small sub-field of your area of science as a whole. So you might know all there is to know about, say, I don't know, counting algebraic points in sets that are definable in certain o-minimal structures, but know nothing about other areas of maths, never mind chemistry, biology, or physics.

So until someone figures out how to download Wikipedia into people's brains, there's little hope of anyone ever knowing everything about everything, or even something about everything. But science is a big and awesome world, and I'd rather explore it all my life than sit down where I am and complain that I'll never see it all.

Written in Stone is a nice little book for this venture. It captures some of the science behind palaeontology as well as its history. The fossil record is infamously incomplete – a boon for young Earth creationists who smugly point out there's no evidence for evolution because no one has ever found a fossil of a fish with legs, or an amphibian with half a spine, or a young Earth creationist with an open mind. But fossils of all these things are out there (save the last one I guess), they're just rare and hard to find. Every fossil found is a single frame from a movie that's been running for billions of years. How people read the script of this aeon-long film based on a few thousand stills makes for an interesting story in itself, and Brian Switek tells it well. show less

Once upon a time, if you were rich enough then you could be a polymath. The word polymath comes from the Greek “mathe” for learning and “poly” for parrot, and as the etymology suggests it refers to people who know everything there is to know and can repeat it back to you when offered a cracker. True polymaths, those who know the sum total of extant human knowledge, probably haven't existed since the first group of homo sapiens in Ethiopia split into two. But there's a second etymology: “polus” from the Latin for much, and “mathe” from the Latin for heavy. As in: he's learnt so much that his brain is quite heavy. And so polymath came to mean simply someone who knows a lot, in particular they should be able to hold a show more decent conversation on any scientific topic (knowledge of arts not required).

The last polymath was apparently a guy called Thomas Young who died in 1829. Look: there's even a book about him. It's no secret why polymathism died off. It takes ten years to go from secondary school to finishing a PhD, and all that means is that you're very knowledgeable about one question in one small area of one small sub-field of your area of science as a whole. So you might know all there is to know about, say, I don't know, counting algebraic points in sets that are definable in certain o-minimal structures, but know nothing about other areas of maths, never mind chemistry, biology, or physics.

So until someone figures out how to download Wikipedia into people's brains, there's little hope of anyone ever knowing everything about everything, or even something about everything. But science is a big and awesome world, and I'd rather explore it all my life than sit down where I am and complain that I'll never see it all.

Written in Stone is a nice little book for this venture. It captures some of the science behind palaeontology as well as its history. The fossil record is infamously incomplete – a boon for young Earth creationists who smugly point out there's no evidence for evolution because no one has ever found a fossil of a fish with legs, or an amphibian with half a spine, or a young Earth creationist with an open mind. But fossils of all these things are out there (save the last one I guess), they're just rare and hard to find. Every fossil found is a single frame from a movie that's been running for billions of years. How people read the script of this aeon-long film based on a few thousand stills makes for an interesting story in itself, and Brian Switek tells it well. show less

Early proponents of evolution by natural selection were hampered by their inability to provide “transitional” fossils demonstrating the stages of change from one species to another. Darwin theorized that human ancestors would be found in Africa—rightly, as it turned out—but none had yet been discovered. In many other species lineages, similar gaps in the fossil record led to misunderstandings of those species’ histories and the connections between species. Switek ably and clearly traces what I might call “the evolution of evolution” in this popular-science work. Each chapter focuses on a particular type of animal…horses, whales, reptiles, etc…tracing a path from scientists’ early understanding of that species and its show more place in nature through to our current views, explaining the importance of the transitional fossils that have been discovered while never losing sight of areas in which science’s understanding is still limited.



Written for the layperson, the book nevertheless does not “dumb down” the science, instead laying out the facts clearly and allowing the careful reader to see the connections for him or herself. Fascinating portraits of some of the early naturalists and evolutionary theorists, including Darwin; Cuvier; Lamarck; and Lyell fill out this able survey of the history of evolution and natural science. show less

One of the better popular histories of evolution and the fossil record I've read. Very up-to-date (at least as of the time it was written) and a good thorough dig (pun intended) into the field.