Customer Reviews

Body Heat: Temperature and Life on Earth

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Humans, fish, polar bears, and lizards do all the stuff animals do; it is no surprise to hear about their eating, reproducing, breathing, and so on. But there is an activity common to all animals that does not always involve behavior that can be seen, and so despite its universality, it is invisible or taken for granted. It is the need to maintain a comfortable body temperature, and it is one of the great strivings of animals. In _Body Heat: Temperature and Life on Earth_ (Harvard), Mark S. Blumberg demonstrates just how important regulating temperature is, showing that it is directly connected to anatomy, behavior, human history, language, and much more. A reader may come away from this book feeling that the drive to stay warm or stay cool explains many of the mysteries of animal and human behavior.

Temperature regulation is intimately connected, for instance, with animal size. Small animals lose heat disproportionately faster than large ones, and so are more likely to have fur, active lives and metabolic rates, and shorter lives. Birds and mammals make their own heat, but in a way, reptiles do, too, as if they have the chance to wander to different temperature zones, they will keep themselves within narrow boundaries of temperature. Even lice and nematodes will do so. Temperature has plenty to do with sex. (Blumberg repeatedly demonstrates in this sphere and others that our language reflects a basic interest in matters Fahrenheit. English is not the only language to refer to such things as "the heat of passion" or "I've got the hots for you.") There is literal heating of different body parts during sexual stimulation. Not only during sex, but at all other times, different parts of the body take on different temperatures. This is often done with a remarkable mechanism called "countercurrent heat exchange" which shows up all over the animal kingdom. Basically it involves sending blood through a pool that can pre-warm or pre-cool it, as is needed by its final destination. There is an important chapter on fever. It took a surprisingly long time for people to realize that fever is a good thing, a response of the body that helps in healing, rather than a symptom that has to be cured. Such a finding was first reliably sparked by experiments on iguanas, of all things.

This is a wide-ranging and informative book. Blumberg explains the many different experiments that have brought us to our understanding of body heat, and draws from many examples in natural history. He has written a diverting and lucid book, which has good humor throughout. It is a perfect introduction for the general reader to a vital topic.

In Body Heat : Temperature And Life On Earth, biophysicist Mark Blumberg's exploration of temperature in the world considers the many ways temperature rules the lives of animals, from how penguins survive Antarctic winters to why people survive drowning accidents in winter, but not in summer. Packed with important scientific insights and a lively style which lends to leisure browsing, Body Heat is a remarkable survey and a highly recommended selection for Environmental Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.

Get ready to embark on a truly exciting and entertaining round-the-world voyage of discovery. And it won't take 80 days, either. In just 215 pages and in beautiful prose, Mark Blumberg explains the vitally important connection between temperature and life on Earth.

Body Heat not only answers questions that I've always wondered about but also answers questions that I've never even thought to ask. For example, before I read this book, I didn't know how Antarctic fish survive (answer: antifreeze in their blood) or how male penguins manage to incubate eggs while enduring temperatures of -76 degrees F (answer: I won't spoil it for you). On the opposite end of the thermometer-at 185 degrees F-is the bacterium that thrives within hydrothermal vents more than one mile below the surface of the ocean. As the author so rightly puts it, "These are the true athletes of the extreme." And then there are the enlightening discussions about those aspects of our lives that are much closer to home - thermostats, peppers, sleep, fevers, dogs, obesity, anorexia, language, behavior, and babies, just to name a few. It's amazing how much information can be shared when the language is clear and purposeful.

As told in this treasure of a book - with humor ("Pluto is cold; Chicago in January is merely inconvenient"), a passion for his subject, and a marvelous ability to draw on diverse subjects as well as personal experiences to tell this story - the tale of temperature and life on Earth is fascinating indeed.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable book. The publisher's weekly reviewer's criticism is misdirected. I guarantee that you will enjoy this book, and annoy the hell out of your friends/family quoting them little tidbits. I particularly enjoyed the author's discussion of the design of experiments, in his lab and in the lab's of other scientists, for various purposes. Highly recommended.

The author writes in a clear manner and fits a lot of interesting information into a fairly small book (about 50,000 words in 215 5X7 inch pages). He gets slightly technical -- about the right amount for a tyro like me.
I found his defense of evolution in chapter 3 to be particularly thought provoking. The author makes the point that there is no single cause, no essence, and no blue print for some complex processes -- "There are only the parts and their interactions". The mathematically inclined may wish to see a half-million word expansion of this theme in S. Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".
I noticed a couple of errors:

- Latitude and longitude get swapped from page 65 to page 67.

- Page 30 states that dogs breathe at 30-40 breaths/minute or pant at 300-400 breaths/minute, and they do not breathe at any in between rate. I timed my dog panting at about 180 breaths per minute.

I'm so glad that I decided to take this exciting journey with Mark Blumberg. Now, after having read this lively book, it will be impossible for me to look at a baby's fingers wrapped around mine, a huddle of penguins, or an elephant's ears in quite the same way. By explaining the vital role that temperature plays in the creation and perpetuity of all living things, Blumberg has enriched my understanding of and appreciation for life on Earth. From fevers, fire walkers, fish, and flowers to panting, pelicans, penguins, and polar bears, the information is shared in a clear and entertaining fashion.

I enthusiastically recommend this book to anyone who regulates heat internally.

Blumberg's book is about thermal regulation...about hot and cold, about temperature and life on earth. Yeah, this could be a really boring read, but not so. I will confess, however, that I picked it up at the book store just because of the sprawled-out bear on the cover. But hey, this book works. It's a science book that doesn't induce instant REM sleep. I became intrigued with stories of wading birds and how they keep their feet warm, about chili peppers and sexual-thermal language metaphors--she's too hot to handle, he gave me the cold shoulder, etc. Don't miss the "Heat of Passion" chapter.

Body Heat is an introduction to how living things regulate their internal temperature in the face of changing external circumstances. It is aimed at a general readership and written in a non-technical style. Although published by the Harvard University Press and handsomely presented, this is not as rigorously scientific as one might like.

First of all there are no footnotes so that some of University of Iowa psychology Professor Mark Blumberg's assertions are without reference. In a work aimed at the general public this is perhaps acceptable, even preferable; however when some of the assertions are a bit puzzling, it would be agreeable to have some attribution.

For example, Blumberg claims that the ancestors of the Pima Indians of southern Arizona (whom he is writing about because they have low levels of leptin which "predisposes them to fat storage") "have lived in North America for 30,000 years." (p. 182) From everything I know about the settlements in North America, there are none that go back 30,000 years. Perhaps this is a very recent discovery. If so, he should cite the source.

Or, consider Figure 8 on page 179. This is a black and white photo of two mice, "one bred for obesity (left) and the other a normal mouse..." On the facing page 178 the obese "mouse" is identified as a db/db (for diabetes) mouse, yet the text suggests that it is more likely a ob/ob (for obese) mouse. Maybe I have this wrong, but what REALLY bothers me about the photo is that I think those white mice are really white RATS and the wrong picture (or text) was used!

Or, on page 175 Blumberg writes that "a pound of fat holds twice as much energy as does a pound of sugar or protein." Actually it holds more like 2.25 times as much energy. There are nine calories in a gram of fat and four in either a gram of sugar or protein. Since I'm sure Blumberg knows this I can only attribute his expression to either a desire on the part of his publisher to "keep it simple" and avoid fractions, or because in the metabolism of fat some energy is lost. If the former is the reason, he should have insisted in the interest of accuracy on the more precise expression; and if the latter, he should have told us so. In either case, we are left wondering if we are being "dumbed down."

This simplistic approach, a kind of creeping casualness about what is and what isn't so, may lead the reader to wonder about the strict accuracy of other statements in the book. For example, on page 158 we learn that the psychologist Craig Anderson asserts that in high heat conditions (hot days) there is an increase in human violence and aggression. This seems reasonable enough. However Blumberg then cites Anderson as suggesting that "if global warming trends continue, an increase in average temperature by" two degrees fahrenheit "will result in 24,000 additional murders each year in the United States." This is startling, so much so I would like to have some of the evidence and the reasoning leading to his conclusion. But Blumberg does not provide any. He does however cite a research paper by Anderson in the bibliography.

Another example of Blumberg really needing to tell us more than he does is from page 188 where he writes that on a "practical level" leptin is not likely to help the average overweight person because "leptin costs nearly $200 per milligram." Problem here is, how much leptin would one need--a milligram a month or perhaps a milligram a day? Again Blumberg doesn't say.

This casualness of expression is really a shame because in perhaps the most interesting part of the book, in the chapter entitled "Livin' Off the Fat," Blumberg presents some evidence that anorexia nervosa may to some degree be a disease caused by a thermoregulatory dysfunction. (pp. 191-196) Unfortunately before he presents this argument he writes that the "discrepancy between the physical realities faced by most women and the messages portrayed by a minority of women who are so thin that many of them no longer have menstrual cycles has helped to generate a steady increase in the incidence of anorexia nervosa over the last twenty years." (p. 188)

I'm not sure what this means, except it sounds a lot like the usual lament about how the fashion media is in some sense responsible for anorexia. Yet, he doesn't exactly say that, does he? What he really says is that some "women" have "helped to... increase" anorexia!

Finally on page 204 Blumberg notes that there are "many theories, some of them silly and some of them intriguing" as to why we behave as we do in REM sleep. However, he just leaves it at that without mentioning any of them except to say that temperature is a factor.

On the plus side, there is a lot of interesting information in the book about how heat and cold affect us and other animals, and plants. I was surprised to learn that plants can heat themselves, that the skunk cabbage, for example, can melt snow (p. 92), and that some plants may be using heat instead of aroma or color to attract pollinating insects (p. 93). Also interesting is the little known fact that the skin of polar bears is actually black (to absorb as much of the sun's heat as possible) while its fur of course appears white to match the snow and ice of its environment.

Bottom line: this is definitely worth reading; however I think the decision to avoid being technical and explanatory work against the value of the book.

...

Blumberg lays down the news on thermoregulation with searing, triple-x precision, all the while maintaining a totally readable vibe. Whew, someone turn down the HEAT!

A seminal work in thermoregulation, probing the depths of the field with both vigor and sensitivity. Totally HOT.