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Title: Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere
ISBN: 0309100615
Author:
Peter Ward
Publicate Date: 2006-09-26
Publish: 2006-09-26
List Price: $27.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $15.00
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $12.48
Amazon Merchant Price: $18.45
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| Customer Review: |
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1: And...?
The author begins with the observation that hypoxia is disadvantageous to life, and proceeds to infer breathing, in all its variations, is therefore more important than any other selection criteria. Such an argument is moot as any requisite attribute is by definition equally necessary. While portions of the book are well-formulated, the increasingly speculative and unsupported correlations quickly become tiring.
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2: Structured quite well
The title of this book refers to the general argument that oxygen levels in the atmosphere have been very influential in the evolution of animal life on Earth over the past 600 million years. The author structures this argument quite well by providing a chronological history of life on earth over the past 600 million years. Each chapter describes a specific age or Era; such as the Triassic Era. The author shows how oxygen levels, and the fluctuations thereof, led to certain animals to become dominant at the expense of other animals. Each chapter includes one or more theses that encapsulates the author's primary arguments. Most of the chapters are also prefaced with a graph showing oxygen levels in that time period and how it compared with oxygen levels over the past 600 million years.
This book is written at a high level, and requies a good grasp of numerous branches of science, such as biology, physics, chemistry, climatology, and geology, to fully understand. One does NOT need to be an expert in science, but only to be well read. The author does a good job of presenting evidence for and against his thesis. Overall, a good book and quite insightful.
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3: Good paper; overlong book
The premise of the book is an intriguing idea that would have made a good paper but instead forms an overlong book. A previous reviewer, Mr. Keer, correctly notes the uniformly poor grammar that makes reading less than enjoyable. The book appears hastily put together perhaps to meet some publishing deadline. Illustrations would have facilitated understanding, but are little used especially in later chapters. The thesis of the book is simply that scientists underestimate the effect changing levels of oxygen have had on evolution. In fact, the author seems to believe that oxygen level is the primary driver of evolutionary change. He then picks isolated facts to support his hypothesis. Read the reviews for a summary of his opinion; otherwise, save your money.
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4: An Evolutionary Unified Field Theory?
Several previous reviewers have mentioned the awkwardness of Ward's prose, so I'll simply associate myself with their comments in that regard. What for me makes this book a "must" read in comparison to Ward's other books (and most books in the field of palaeontology, for that matter) is that while it may be weak in specific parts of its technical argument, overall the pieces fit together so well that I, like a well-known cartoon character, found myself smiting my forehead and going, "D'oh! Why didn't I ever think of that?" And I've been reading palaeontology on and off for over fifty years... The major flaw to Ward's 'unified field' theory of evolutionary development is that, as one reviewer noted, it's subject to being totally unravelled if only a few of the twenty-two major hypotheses he posits in the book are disproved by later research (and some of those whose arguments he takes on in a rather combative manner are probably not happy -- palaeontologists are always not the most even-tempered group anyway). But I strongly recommend this as a good, fairly quick read that left me making lots of connections in my own mind that had never have occured to me before.
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5: Five star science, one star lay-out and references
Since other reviewers have summarized the arguments in the book quite well, I will mostly skip that here. Yes, the book is primarily about how variations in atmospheric chemistry, primarily the level of oxygen, may have affected (and effected) the evolution of life on earth. I found the fundamental premise of the book delightful and provoking, and given the fact that Dr. Ward provides a number of more-or-less testable hypotheses, I sincerely hope that grad students in paleobiology take him up, and test his hypotheses.
The biggest hypothesis in the book is the changing chemistry of the earth's atmosphere. As Dr. Ward admits early on (and it's quite hard to find the pages again to double-check this, more below), the variation in oxygen levels that form the backbone of this book do not show up directly in the fossil record, and were deduced using models, informally calibrated against fossil evidence of anoxic sediments at various time periods. Well and good, but I know just enough about such modeling to be skeptical about the concept of Model=Truth. Rather, I applaud Dr. Ward for going out on a limb and trusting the models. If and when we find a way to measure paleoatmospheric chemistry from the fossil record, this book will either prove prophetic or totally wrong-headed. As such, it is good, testable science.
What's bad about the book? Others have mentioned Dr. Ward's prose, and I have to agree. It *is* better than a majority of the scientific papers and many scientific textbooks, but as a popular science work, it needs to be lyrical and fun to read, not journal-ish. Scientific journal prose is dense because it costs so much to publish, and here, that's not an issue. There are also a number of goofs (for instance, plants have cambia, not cambria, and in a couple of places animals breath, not breathe), that make me hope for a revised and expanded edition that is more readable. I also would like to see more explanation of the illustrations that begin each chapter. They are an important summary of the material in each chapter, but they are not captioned, nor are they referred to in any consistent manner.
What's worse about the book is the lack of complete references. Yes, there's a 22 page table of references in the back of the book, but it is notably incomplete, and it is neither organized solely alphabetically nor by chapter, but by some strange hybrid system that provides the alphabetized references for some but not all topics. I could not find several papers mentioned by name in the text referenced in the back. In a book this original, I kept trying to search out where he had come up with his ideas and data, only to be stopped cold in that frustrating reference section. Paleobiology is not my field, and I do not want to spend hours tracking down papers through Web of Knowledge. In other books (notably by Jared Diamond or Charles Mann), there are exhaustive end notes and references that let me admire their scholarship. Here, someone (either the author or the editor) apparently decided that such information was unneeded in a "popular science" book. The book suffers from that decision, particularly if Dr. Ward wants people to follow in his scholarly footsteps. I can only hope that some future "revised and expanded" version of this text will properly show the breadth of Dr. Ward's scholarship and vision.
In summary, I think this is a book worth reading, and it just may provoke a revolution in the paleo-sciences. I hope it does. However, it is hampered by the clumsy writing in places and an annoying reference section. More than any book I have read, I hope to see a "revised and expanded version" come out that corrects its flaws.
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