At the Water's Edge : Macroevolution and the Transformation of Life (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Macroevolution is the interesting part of evolution: the rise and fall of major groups like dinosaurs or horses, the development of whole new organs (like eyes) and ways of life (like pollination). Such changes are difficult to study, and harder still to prove. Carl Zimmer looks at metamorphoses across the boundary between land and sea: how fish learned to walk on land, and how whales went back to the ocean. "The story of each of these transformations hides its own unexpected details, as startling as the skyward eyes that sat on top of our ancestors' heads or the delicate toes that turned up in the equation of a whale." Zimmer's account is accurate yet lively, covering recent discoveries in taxonomy and dolphin intelligence, embryology and eight-toed fossil fish. --Mary Ellen Curtin

From Publishers Weekly

One of the hallmarks of life is change. In his first book, Zimmer, a senior editor and feature writer at Discover magazine, has chosen to explicate two of the biggest examples of organic evolution the Earth has ever seen. He starts by describing how fish, beginning between 350 and 400 million years ago, evolved into creatures who crawled out of the water and, eventually, into terrestrial mammals able to breathe air, withstand the pressures of gravity and move about without the aid of water. He then turns his attention to how, 40-50 million years ago, some well-adapted terrestrial mammals went back into the sea and, over time, gave rise to whales, porpoises and their marine relatives. Zimmer shows that the transformation back to aquatic life?without the luxury of gills, fins and the host of additional adaptations that make fish so successful?was an amazing evolutionary feat. Zimmer treats the controversy surrounding the mechanism of macroevolution only cursorily: he opts not to take a position in the conflict between the proponents of punctuated equilibrium and the advocates of gradualism. But he makes up for that lack with his gripping account of how scientists work. By accompanying scientists into the field, visiting them in their laboratories and conducting extensive interviews with them, Zimmer communicates the excitement of cutting-edge scientific research and fieldwork. More than just an informative book about macroevolution itself, this is an entertaining history of ideas written with literary flair and technical rigor. Line drawings and diagrams throughout.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (April 13, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684834901
• ISBN-13: 978-0684834900
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #546,858 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good on the main points and history, low on detail, February 19, 1999

By A Customer

There seem to be a number of really big macroevolutionary events in natural history, and Zimmer does well in explaining what happened and why with the fish-tetrapod event, the blind alleys, and people involved. I would have liked more detail in anatomy, DNA relationships, and the like, but that probably would have bored most people. The land animal-whale transition feels closer to home, but seems to be to be a side-show to the major events in evolutionary history. Zimmer writes well but it would be good to have a technical volume to go with it. Footnotes / endnotes would also be pleasant addition for the reader that wants to follow up, but they are missing.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome!!!!, August 2, 2001

By	John McGinn "[e-mail]" (Broomfield, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This book does a remarkable job of covering two major transitions in evolution. First the transition from fish to the first terrestrial tetrapods and secondly from terrestrial mammals to whales. A kind of out of the water and back in scenario.

The book covers the transitional specimens that have been found to date very well and goes over most of the difficulties of changing from one extreme environment to the other.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in evolution.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complete Failure as a sedative - could not put it down, May 23, 2001

By	Don (Medford, OR United States) - See all my reviews

Informative, well written. This book is a delight to read.