Paleontology: A Brief History of Life . By IanTattersall . West Conshohocken , PA : Templeton Press , 2010 . 228 pages. Softcover $19.95 .
Tattersall richly sketches the dramatic history of life from its first tentative microscopic origins to our present situation. We see complex processes and rather frail participants playing on the stage of shifting continents and changing climates. The author, a curator in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, makes the reader part of the action by opening doors on conflicting interpretations, profound questions, and coherent speculative explanations. Paleontology: A Brief History of Life ranks with the best sort of science writing for an interested public audience. Tattersall will induce many to go on a dig or join those careful hands that work fossils out of stony matrix, and, I imagine, he will incite some young readers to join him in the professional study of paleontology.
Tattersall's writing always draws the reader onward. Here is a passage about the end of the Pre‐Cambrian era, around 650 million years ago: “[F]ew Ediacaran organisms made it into the Phanerozoic Era, the age of ‘revealed life.’ In the first major extinction on record, they were replaced by the earliest members of the ‘Cambrian Explosion,’ who played the ecological and evolutionary games by entirely different rules” (p. 52). You simply must find out what the new rules are and how they differ from the old.
In his Introduction, Tattersall explains that “Science is a process rather than a product; and as it slowly inches in toward an ever‐more‐accurate description of nature, it is complementary to, rather than in conflict with, the many other ways of human knowing” (p. 6). It is with this lovely style and tone that he moves through the whole history of life. And, for me, Tattersall implicitly suggests that most human endeavors should be thought of as processes and approximations, rarely finished products, done‐and‐done; for even fossils deserve reinterpretation from time to time.
The nature of fossils and evolutionary processes occupy the first two chapters; the species concept and classification are explained in the third chapter; and the sparse fossils of the first three billion years of life are exposed in the fourth chapter. Chapters 5–8 buzz us through a dazzling parade of life concluding with whales and primates. Tattersall kindly reminds us with appropriate frequency that, for paleontologists, rapid change is measured in terms of millions of years or, at the very least, tens of thousands. Chapters 9 and 10 are titled “Walkers and Toolmakers” and “A Cognitive Revolution.” Perhaps if the book were not aiming to discuss spirituality, the concluding chapters might concentrate on insects and bacteria, the most successful of creatures. There is a very useful chapter‐by‐chapter bibliography that gives a brief introduction into further reading, as well as an index.
The ambivalences and conundra of the fossil record obviously delight Tattersall. For instance, in discussing pelycosaurs, he notes that this group had the “multiple tooth types typical of mammals. As a result of this pattern of resemblance, most paleontologists today classify pelycosaurs together with the mammals, although probably no known pelycosaur was ancestral to any later mammal” (p. 73). Here, as throughout, Tattersall is able to sum up—in a few words—numerous digs, intricate cleaning of specimens, painstaking descriptions, discriminating reconstructions, analyses of alternative interpretations, preparation of refereed papers, and inevitable (sometimes bitter) controversy. Delightful detail finds a place wherever apt: “As a result of a revelation that allegedly came to him as he was carving his Christmas turkey, Huxley [a contemporary and strong defender of Darwin] had concluded by the early 1870s that birds and dinosaurs were not only related, but that birds had evolved from dinosaurs” (p. 86).
In Tattersall's account of primates, he goes further than most writers in acknowledging the intelligence and cognitive abilities of the great apes. Nevertheless, he is at pains to distinguish human intelligence as qualitatively different. Because of his commitment to symbolic thought inherently attached to language, he cannot, apparently, credit complex symbolic or linguistic capacities to the chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and parrots who have clearly learned to use symbols to communicate with trainers and then used the symbols in novel ways to communicate about events or objects unknown, but now understandable, to their caregivers. For views more expansive than Tattersall's, the reader might explore writings by Sue Savage‐Rumbaugh.
Our ability to think symbolically was an innovation that appeared, Tattersall reasons, in Africa. Homo sapiens had been around for some two hundred thousand years as a recognizable anatomical entity—“having clearly arisen initially in an entirely nonlinguistic context” but having a “symbol‐ready brain” and the vocal apparatus to produce articulated language. He believes that between sixty and eighty thousand years ago, the population of H. sapiens had dwindled, perhaps to a few hundred individuals, because of dire climatic conditions (this would have been at the depths of the climatic effects related to the last glaciation). It was at this nadir, he reasons, that symbolic‐linguistic traits first became fixed in a small group. As the climate improved, the newly arrived at culture spread rapidly through the surviving members of H. sapiens. Their offspring spread across the globe, eventually displacing all earlier species of the genus Homo. These were the Cro‐Magnon people who entered Europe and Asia less than 40,000 years ago, people very much like us, with a culture now capable of creating extraordinary decorated tools and cave paintings “that can only have sprung from the unfathomable intricacies of the human spirit” (p. 191–96). Tattersall paints a coherent and intriguing picture of the rise of our genus and its only extant species, but this is one of several reasonable alternatives still very much a matter of research and discussion. From such symbolic‐linguistic minds come spirituality and religion according to Tattersall's carefully developed and persuasive theorizing.
Even with our symbolic‐linguistic skills, no act or scene in our contemporary drama is without its perils. Tattersall seems to follow Lynn White in his condemnation of Judaeo‐Christian traditions of “dominion” over nature as responsible for destroying the habitability of the ecosphere for many species including our own. It will be interesting to learn how Tattersall responds to recent scholarship that translates the Hebrew word in question as “care for” in a new version of the Old Testament, soon to appear from the Eerdmanns publishing house. Tattersall notes that our species appears to have a fundamental longing “for simple cause‐and‐effect chains” (p. 202). However, Stephen Gaukroger shows that this modern habit of mind arose as the result of the historical unfolding of the scientific enterprise and is not a locked‐in product of our biological evolution (Gaukroger, S. 2006. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210–1685. Oxford. ix + 563 pp).
Tattersall's description of life and spirituality is delightfully readable and discussible. His book is neither dismissive nor dogmatic. It will be useful to audiences even beyond those envisioned by the editors of the Templeton Science and Religion Series. I hope that this slim volume goes into further printings and would urge the desirability of a few more pictures and charts, if possible.