The Garden of Ediacara [Hardcover]

Mark A. S. McMenamin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231105584 | ISBN-13: 978-0231105583 | Publication Date: May 15, 1998 0

-- Tree

Editorial Reviews

Review

[A] thought-provoking personal exploration of what the Ediacaran fossils represent. -- Tree

[A] thought-provoking personal exploration of what the Ediacaran fossils represent. -- Review

About the Author

Mark A. S. McMenamin is professor of geology at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of a number of groundbreaking books on paleobiology and evolution, including The Emergence of Animals: The Cambrian Breakthrough and Hypersea: Life on Land (with Dianna L. S. McMenamin), both published by Columbia. He edited and annotated the English translation of Vladimir Vernadsky's The Biosphere, and is also the coeditor (with Lynn Margulis) of the English translation of L. Khakhina's Concepts of Symbiogenesis.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (May 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231105584
• ISBN-13: 978-0231105583
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,493,695 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The First Complex Life Forms Plus Way Too Much Autobiography, February 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Garden of Ediacara (Hardcover)

The first forms of multicellular, complex life formed about 600 million years ago and left fossils first discovered near the Ediacaran Hills in Australia. Hence they are called the Ediacarans. Since their discovery in 1946 little has been written for the lay reader about these early forms of life. Mark McMenamin's Garden of Ediacaria is one of the few books to cover the subject. For that reason alone the reader interested in the history of early life on earth should read it. The scientific facts are presented and the history of their discovery is explained. No other source of this information is readily available to the non-scientist.

The book is, however, both pedantic and annoying. McMenamin's personal role in the discoveries and the importance of his work is explained in intrusive detail. The book is almost a diary that should have been titled "Ediacarans: My Success In The Science Of Paleobiology." For example, to understand the Ediacarans we really don't need to see photos of McMenamin's identification card or hotel in Namibia or read about his travel plans on fossil hunting expeditions.

Worst of all McMenamin's basic theses about the Ediacarans begin to get lost in the somewhat confused narrative of his personal history. Ultimately the book leaves the reader with the impression that the real story of the Ediacarans is only about 100 pages long, but McMenamin needed 250 pages to satisfy his publisher, so he filled in with a lot of unnecessary "history."

Cut to half its length this book could tell a clear and fascinating story of the earliest multicelled life and their discovery. I suggest that the reader quickly skim the protracted personal stories and concentrate on the sections describing the Ediacaran biota. Read that way, the book is interesting and well worthwhile.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Needs work, but still worth reading, April 16, 2005

By 

T. Morse (Newport, Oregon USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Garden of Ediacara (Paperback)

Although I've only given it two stars (I decided to be more charitable and give it three stars), I'm not sorry I bought the book (used), because it is the only popular book available on this fascinating subject.

The "travelogue" or biographical information didn't bother me much. It's fairly standard in popular science writing, because the non-scientific challenges of field work in remote and exotic (to Western readers, anyway) locations is interesting to the lay public. (See, for example, Peter Ward's book Gorgon, which I think strikes a better balance between personal detail and the scientific story.) However, I agree with some of the critics in thinking that McMennamin overdoes it with his extended digressions on Namibian history and the evolution of German aircraft. Some of his diary entries are overlong and could have been summarized in a few sentences. The space taken up by these digressions and diary entries could have been devoted to more photos and high-quality illustrations, and to a more detailed discussion of the evidence supporting his conclusions. The author does a better job focusing on the science in the second half of the book.

What most bothered me in this book was the author's 9th inning invocation of neovitalism to explain parallel or convergent evolution, which seemed to come out of left field (to continue the baseball metaphor). It appears to me to be based on rather thin evidence: the very termite-like social organization of naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber), and the similar adaptations of distantly related desert plants. The naked mole rat example seems exceptional and coincidental. If vitalism was at work in evolution, I'd expect more widespread termite-like eusociality in fossorial vertebrates and the close but non-fossorial relatives of naked mole rats. The example of convergence in desert plants seems to me adequately explained by the extremity of the environment limiting the range of possible adaptations that will work. Only those organisms that come up with successful adaptations will survive in the desert, another form of contingency. McMennamin should consider writing another book more fully making the case that natural selection cum evo-devo cum self-organizing criticality (call it neo-neo-Darwinism) needs help from any sort of vitalism.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Needs proper editing, October 9, 2001

By 

Scott Zasadil (Pittsburgh, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Garden of Ediacara (Hardcover)

The Ediacaran fossils are an interesting chapter in the history of life. They are also an interesting chapter in "The Garden Of Ediacara." Unfortunately, this book appears to have more material in it about Mark McMenamin than it does about the subject matter. Is it truly necessary to show a photograph of a hotel in Namibia or the author's official Mexican fieldwork badge in order to discuss the first complex life forms? I don't think so. The reader truly has to pick and choose what paragraphs to read in order to learn about Ediacaran fossils as opposed to the author's travelogues. Much of the material is simply extraneous. Proper editing would have made this book much more interesting and pleasurable.