Mutants

Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body by Armand Marie Leroi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Near the end of this book the author pulls out the quote per molto variare la natur e bella--Nature's beauty is its variety--and it could be a motto for the book itself. Given that most of the book is about the human body developing dramatically abnormalities, usually during development, beauty is an odd word. I found some accounts difficult to read. But the ability for human biology to survive and sometimes prosper in so many different forms was just amazinga.

The book is a discussion of various conditions that have very visible effects--dwarfism, giantism, Siamese twins, people with no hands or feet, people with hands and feet but no arms and legs, people covered with more hair than Chewbacca, and so on. Some are fatal at birth, some at a young age, but most are not. A surprising (to me) number of people founded lines still prospering today--so a Chinese sailor missing the top his skull and clavicles founded a line that has several hundred descendants with the same symptoms.

If the existence of a whole family sharing such an unusual trait makes you wonder if scientists can do some sort of genetic analysis and figure something out about how genes interact with the body, well, answering that is the book's main concern. (Spoiler alert: Yes.) Most of the discussion is on gene expression and signalling pathways, in more detail than I expected. I'd call it roughly a Scientific American level of discussion. I'm not well qualified to judge the scientific soundness but in the small number of cases I knew anything at all Leroi seems to have done a good job presenting both conclusions and uncertainty.

The title--presumably picked by the publisher--is misleading though, as many problems are teratogenic or even nutritional and hove nothing to do with genetics. (Thalidomide and iodine deficiency induced issues, for example.) I don't begrudge "Mutant" for eye catching value but throwing in "genetic" in the subhead continues the annoying trend in popular science writing of implying everything biological is genetic.

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary by Caspar Henderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was not the book I expected when I ordered it, but I completely loved it.

I thought I was getting a coffee table book about biology with lots of pictures, instead turns out it's mostly words. (The hardcover is beautifully laid out, though.) The book is twenty-six essays titled around different, often weird, animals. Only some are primarily about their nominal subject. Some are riffs on biological features specific to the animals, others move into more general ruminations about folklore or philosophy or environmental hazards.

To take a couple examples, the opening essay is on the axolotl and spends around half the essay on medieval tales about salamanders dancing in fire and other interpretations of those amphibians--before describing a bit about evolution of the first land animals and how the tiny guys were doing cute little push ups back in the day, before getting around to saying something about the creature itself. Or, for humans, the distinctive feature he picks out is our feet--we're a two legged creature that walks instead of hopping and a lot follows from our bodies need to accommodate that. Chapters on octopuses, Gonodactylus smithii, dolphins and pterosaurs, on the other hand, are more straightforward zoology. (A few bits don't work that well, hence the book narrowly avoiding a 5-star rating.)

Since I have a visceral dislike for the sort of essay that starts with quantum entanglement and ends with the 'interconnectedness of the universe' or something, it took me a while to figure why the barely-science essays didn't bother me. (Beyond the fact that they often quite interesting on their own.) I think it's because Henderson clearly was fascinated by and respected the science; he knew the difference between when he was saying "This is what we've learned from science" and "This bit of science puts me in mind of this story I heard" and doesn't confuse the two.

In closing, here's a picture of a Yeti crab: .

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How could you not love someone with a smile like this?

I'm like six book reviews behind, but it's easier to post a picture of a paddlefish:



And this isn't one of your foreign exotic beauties, either--lives in the heartland of the USA.

But near extinction, dammit.

via PZ Myers.