Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys [Hardcover]

Rob Dunn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2008

In a series of vivid portraits of determined - even obsessed - scientists, Rob Dunn shows that we are not even close to knowing all life on earth. We are not close to naming it, studying it, not even close to knowing the basic kinds of organisms. How much is left to know? If history is a lesson, there is more left to know than we have yet discovered. And yet, biologists and lay people alike have repeatedly through history claimed victory over life. A thousand years ago we thought we knew almost everything; a hundred years ago too. But, even today we are unable to see what is beyond our immediate radar. Discoveries we can't yet imagine still await.The narrative telescopes from a scientist's attempt to find one single thing (a rare ant-emulating beetle species) to a scientist's attempt to find everything (all the insects living in a section of the Smoky Mountains). His scientific heroes include: Lynn Margulis, who explained how our cells gained the ability to make energy; Carl Woese, who defined a new kingdom of life in 1977; and, Carl Sagan, who pioneered the search for life in space.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Dunn, a biologist at North Carolina State University, does an admirable job of exploring the human drive to find and understand the manifold forms of life that surround them. With his light and enjoyable style, he also provides fascinating character sketches of some of the scientists (often obsessive, usually brilliant, occasionally half-mad) who made the most important discoveries, with enough scientific context for readers to understand their significance. Dunn ranges from Antoine van Leeuwenhoek's amazing microscopic discoveries in the scientific backwater of 17th-century Delft to a major 20th-century undertaking to explore life near deep sea vents where the ocean floor is expanding. But Dunn has a deeper message: life is more diverse and less like us than we had imagined. Indeed, he says, humans are far from central in the story of life's evolution on Earth; most life is microscopic, living in and deeply below the soil and likely comprising at least half of the planet's biomass. Finally, Dunn writes about scientific hubris: virtually every scientific prediction about conditions limiting life have been proven incorrect. (Jan.)
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Review

“His writing is concise and entertaining. So entertaining that I found myself laughing out loud and following my husband around saying, “Listen to this!” over and over again as I read.” (Internet Review of Books )

“If you have any interest in life beyond your own, you should read this book...Between the covers of EVERY LIVING THING you’ll learn both about life’s amazing diversity and that process of their discovery. Savor this fascinating volume and then help to preserve life’s wonders.” (Paul R. Ehrlich, author of THE DOMINANT ANIMAL: HUMAN EVOLUTION AND THE ENVIRONMENT )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Smithsonian; 1 edition (December 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061430307
• ISBN-13: 978-0061430305
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #410,599 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent stories of scientific discovery, December 19, 2008

By 

Andrew M. Latimer "amlatimer" (Davis, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys (Hardcover)

This is a very entertaining story of how, since Linnaeus and Leuwenhoek, scientists have discovered vast new unknown realms of life: single-celled life, bacteria, archaea, insects of the tropical forest canopy, and more. What is stunning is how much of the world has been hidden "in plain sight" waiting for someone with the imagination just to stop and look, and the drive to keep looking. One remarkable fact: microscopes had been invented and were available for a century or so before cells and micro-organisms were even noticed. How many more major discoveries are out there still waiting to be made? Probably more than a few.

I highly recommend this to anyone who likes good popular science reading (scientists included!). It's an entertaining narrative that introduces you to fascinating characters who have made major biological discoveries, many of whom you've probably heard of and some likely not. By bringing the reader into the moment of discovery and the personal real life of the discoverers, this book captures the perspective of the explorer and the struggle that's often involved in getting answers and convincing the world they're true.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Lots of detail, not always warranted, June 28, 2010

By 

D. Becker (Poughkeepsie, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys (Hardcover)

I agree with much of what is said in Goska's review. In particular, I too had some criticisms of how thorough Dunn was in researching for this book. As with matters of basic biology, there's quite a bit of historical fact that could have been double-checked. I'm no expert in history, but there were quite a few moments in the first half of the book, as the more historical section, that made me sigh.

Leeuwenhoek didn't discover the microscope. The first microscopes were fashioned in the end of the 16th century. Robert Hooke's "Micrographia" wasn't just "a picture book," but an important and widely disseminated document and the first-published microscope manual. Leeuwenhoek certainly was the first person to see microorganisms, but there were also less-know, but similarly non-scientists such as Athanasius Kircher, who, for instance, used microscopes to observe the blood of plague victims only to find "invisible" worms.

In general though, my main issue in "Every Living Thing" was more a matter of engagement with the reader. Much of the content was new to me, and in this I learned a good deal. But I really couldn't stand Dunn's prose. It was repetitive, tried too hard to be "easy" or "humorous," etc. When one paragraph uses the same key nouns over and over, I wish the author could have looked into a thesaurus. When he ends one sentence with a certain word and begins the next sentence with that same word, I feel frustrated. Maybe Goska is right that Dunn spent more time in creative writing class than basic biology, I don't know, but he clearly missed some things from that angle as well.

Dunn's book has details, and lots of them, but they're often superficial; the author only scratches the surface of so much. I understand that his book is broad, Dunn is trying to cover a lot, and as a piece of popular science, it is trying to please as wide an audience as possible. But the reader don't need to know all the intimate details of Linneaus's life or his personality traits. I found that such things seemed to dominate attention over the details that were actually important, which were biological and historical in nature.

And do we really need to keep starting natural history books with the practices of Amazonian tribes? That sort of romanticism was expected in the travelogues of many of the early field taxonomists Dunn writes about, but I'd expect better today from a modern biologist and "up and coming" science popularizer.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Strange Things, June 18, 2010

By 

J. A. Goska - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys (Hardcover)

In this history of the discovery and study of new life-forms, author Ron Dunn is at his best recounting the triumphs and foibles of earlier investigators like Leeuwenhoek (credited with invention of the microscope), Linnaeus (credited with invention of taxonomy) and Wallace (credited as co-originator of the theory of evolution). His book loses a lot of momentum once Dunn is up to the present day and dealing with investigators who are still alive and, if they are Lynn Margulis or Carl Woese, taking themselves very, very seriously. Professional courtesy apparently demands a respectful, rather worshipful tone when dealing with these ambulatory colleagues, and no mention of any hint of foible or foolishness, so reading becomes a lot less fun. But not every tale of moderns is stilted. Dunn gives us the story of Dan Janzen, a naturalist so in touch with nature, and so out of touch with civilization that, after collecting twenty million dollars to fund a complete survey of species in a national park, he gives the money to a Central American government to administer. The Central American government administers the twenty million out of sight in less time than it takes a magician to make a silver dollar disappear, and the survey is never done. Dunn also provides a sympathetic treatment of the much-scorned Olavi Kajander, but more or less credits him with the discovery of nanobacteria, ignoring Robert Folk (it probably never occurred to Dunn to google "nannobacteria" as well as "nanobacteria").

Sometimes Dunn ends his stories too soon. Tullis Onstott reports finding, 2.8 miles down in the earth, bacteria that are living on the "energy produced by the radioactive decay of rocks." What?? Are they living on alpha rays, beta rays, gamma rays? Are they living on the heat like little Stirling engines or doing photosynthesis powered by scintillation or Cherenkov radiation? How did Onstott arrive at his conclusion? You won't find answers here.

Dunn annoyed me with multiple bloopers on matters of basic biology. An example: "Bacteria and archaea have the same structure inside their cells, mitochondria, cytoplasm, ribosomes, and the like." No, Rob, bacteria, archaea, they don't have mitochondria in their cells. Anyone who stayed awake for Bio-101 should know this. Perhaps at that time Dunn was focused on the cute chick he met in creative writing class. In "Acknowledgments" Dunn thanks a whole list of people who read the manuscript. Maybe they are all creative writing majors. The thing is, if Dunn is careless about the basics, can I trust him about the more esoteric stuff, like when he says that Linnaeus believed in the existence of Simia sapiens, a species of ape that played chess, worshipped God and sang in choirs? Actually, in this one case, it doesn't matter. Just learning about the possibility that Linnaeus believed in these and other marvelous creatures was worth the price of admission for me.