Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

A fascinating look at the attempt to understand all the different kinds of life and to place them into categories. It starts back with Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who first made microscopes capable of seeing bacteria, and moves forward to recent developments in extremophile life and genetic analysis. I highly recommend it.

This is the first book I've read by someone I know - Rob's daughter is in the same preschool class as my daughter. And I found myself staggered that he had time to write at all, what with raising a child and being a full-time professor. Plus, that he had such interesting things to talk about. And interesting stories: he and his wife (a medical anthropologist) spent time in a small village in the Amazon, cataloging the medicinal uses of various plants and watching the local children's pet monkey ride on around a pet pig. Among other things.

Rob Dunn's "Every Living Thing" is an engaging read. It broadened my view of characters, both human and biological, that I thought I already knew, and it introduced me to fascinating characters, both human and biological, that I hadn't already met. More than this, the stick-to-it-iveness of Dunn's human protagonists is inspirational for any scientist engaged in a personal quest. Whether your own quest features monkeys, mites, microbes, or molecules, you'll enjoy Dunn's stories of pioneering, determined, deeply motivated scientists and the ideas that drove them on.

Depending on who you are Dunn's book is either about biology or psychology or consciousness. As a book about biology, "Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life" is a fascinating story of discovery. As a book about psychology, Dunn's book is about the dialectics of obsessing and resilience. The "protagonists" of this slow race to catalogue every living thing present as obsessives who have successfully sublimated their fixations and cognitive inflexibilities into unique scientific careers. As a book about human consciousness, Dunn's work reveals the evolutionary advantage and the existential precariousness of the human tendency to label and categorize. As a psychologist reading this book, I find it to be an amazing study of the kaleidoscopic complexity of human motives and processes that, in totality, constitute a given "living thing." Skillfully organized, with a "homeopathic" dose of dry humor (that spices up the reading just in time), replete with insights about human nature, "Every Living Thing" is an excellent mirror for every obsessing scientist (inventor/go-it-alone entrepreneur).

[...]

I'm a professional evolutionary biologist, a systematist and entomologist, so the general subject matter of this book was familiar to me. But Rob Dunn dug up so many fascinating stories and details that I couldn't put it down. I'm seriously considering using this book for a college-level course.

But perhaps the thing I appreciated the most was Dunn's sensitivity and humanity. He poetically tied attractive and accurate science writing with his existence as a human, a father, and a husband. This book could easily serve as a model for science writers interested in engaging the broader public. I will read everything this author writes, so keep them coming!

This is a book that does what great science writing is supposed to do - explain the universe while enthralling the reader. In exploring how the definitions and scope of the living world have been expanded over and over again by dedicated researchers, Rob Dunn gives us compelling portraits of biological scientists who have proposed "crazy" theories, made inconvenient observations, and otherwise risked their repuations and sometimes their lives in the pursuit of knowledge. Dunn shows that, while being laughed at by a majority of one's scientific colleagues is no guarantee of being right, it's far from a surefire indicator of being wrong.
One of the themes I push hard in my blog and my books on zoological discoveries and mysteries is that we don't know all the animals in the world, not by a long shot, and it's not just the little arthropods that are still being discovered. Dunn explores this theme and many related ones here. He anchors the book in his own experiences in the Amazon, where no one has any idea of the number of animal and plant species present, let alone what to name them. (He also passes along the intriguing story of what may be an unknown and very large type of spider monkey.) This is a profound work, not just concerning the biological sciences, but concerning science as an enterprise.

- Matt Bille
author, The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites (Texaas A&M, 2004)