Amazon.com Review
For centuries, biological scientists have been using the Linnean system of classification, organizing hierarchies of life forms by their perceived similarities and differences. In the late 20th century, some scientists have taken to using an alternative system called
cladistics, which bases taxonomic classifications on ecological relationships. Under the first system, all algae fall into a single large category, which is then subdivided into various genera and species; under the second, green algae are grouped with plants, chromophyte algae with waterborne fungi, and so forth to account for the environments in which they live. Under the first system, dogs and wolves and coyotes are separated; under the second, they are united, for, the thinking goes, similarities of behavior and provenance are more important than mere lines of evolutionary descent, which can only be guessed at.
The debate over cladistics has largely been confined to seminar rooms and laboratories. Henry Gee brings it to the general public in this spirited look at how the science of paleontology, that grand tour of what Gee calls Deep Time, is conducted. Replacing old family trees with "cladograms," Gee challenges long-accepted notions about the past (for example, the classification of Archaeopteryx, which walks like a duck and quacks like a duck but is accounted for as a dinosaur) and argues for a return to rigor in testing hypotheses. His book, although about difficult issues, is immediately accessible, and readers seeking to learn something about cladistics--which Gee believes is "a revolution in thought as profound as that of Darwinian evolution by natural selection"--are off to a fine start in these pages. --Gregory McNamee
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Deep Time, according to John McPhee, who coined the term, refers to the millions of years in the geologic record, as opposed to our everyday sense of time in which centuries and millennia seem endless. In this eloquent treatise, Gee, a senior science writer for Nature, asserts that the dramatically different scales on which deep and ordinary time are measured have significant implications for evolutionary biology and paleontology. He takes the provocative and perhaps extreme view that scientists will never be able to successfully answer evolutionary questions about the origins of species, or about the pressures leading to various adaptations, because events that occurred in deep time are not accessible to experimentation. Indeed, he argues, such questions should be considered outside the realm of science. In the place of traditional biology, Gee offers the field of cladistics, "a way of looking at the world in terms of the pattern that evolution creates, rather than the process that creates the pattern." By using statistical techniques to group anatomically similar organisms, both extant and extinct, cladists assert that they are able to demonstrate testable evolutionary relationships. While Gee does a superb job of explaining the basics of cladistics and of revealing its use in the controversies swirling around the origins of birds and of humans, more cautious thinkers may find that he exaggerates both its power as a tool and its acceptance by the scientific community. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
