Call number
Publication
New York: Touchstone, 1999.
Pages
290
Description
Everybody Out of the Pond At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us. We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago. In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.… (more)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1998
Physical description
290 p.; 8.7 inches
ISBN
0684856239 / 9780684856230
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User reviews
LibraryThing member yapete
Great science journalism and writing. Highly recommended.
Just a few years ago one of the Intelligent Design people (Behe) claimed that they will never find an intermediary between land animals and wales. Read this book and see what a bunch of losers the ID creationists really are. They can only
Just a few years ago one of the Intelligent Design people (Behe) claimed that they will never find an intermediary between land animals and wales. Read this book and see what a bunch of losers the ID creationists really are. They can only
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thrive on denying the progress of science. Show Less
LibraryThing member co_coyote
If Zimmer would write books with shorter titles and larger print, he might well become my new favorite author. I don't know how many times I stopped reading and shouted out to my wife, "Hey, did you know this?," but it was a lot. (Of course, she did already know it, since she is a biology teacher,
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but it made me feel better about myself that now I knew it, too.) This is a fascinating book about how life dragged itself out of the oceans, got started in God knows how many different directions, and eventually how mammals found their way back to the sea as whales and dolphins. It is a complicated story of fossils and genetic evidence, still not completely pieced together, but Zimmer tells it with a storyteller's gift. If you spurned biology for physics classes like I did, here is a book you really don't want to miss reading. Show Less
LibraryThing member amandrake
Intelligent, precise, and explains the Sonic the Hedgehog gene. Also very good on intermediate forms.
LibraryThing member Devil_llama
The author doesn't disappoint, but delivers his usual high quality explanation of the evolution of species.
LibraryThing member satyridae
Fabulous. This explication of macroevolution is dense but very clear. There are passages that simply sing. Zimmer is getting to be one of my very favorite science writers. If you have any interest in cetaceans, you should read this book. Highly recommended.
Here's a bit I loved:
"The seeds of a more
Here's a bit I loved:
"The seeds of a more
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surprising redemption of some of Haeckel's ideas came from the work of a mathematician named Alan Turing. Scientists who live on the harsh, lifeless plains of the physical sciences sometimes look at biology as a vacation spot - a lush green island they can visit, make a few groundbreaking discoveries, then head back to the quantum steppes. After all, they say to themselves, if you know the laws of electrons and protons, if you can solve differential equations, you already know how Life works. Most of these scientists barely get off the plane before they discover that they were wrong - that biology's island paradise is a sweet-smelling swamp - and they either sink out of sight or catch the next flight out. But a few, such as Alan Turing, have managed to discover some original biological principles." Show Less
LibraryThing member MarkBeronte
At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got
We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago.
In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.
Show More
here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us.We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago.
In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.
Show Less
LibraryThing member MartinBodek
This was a man's first book? Now that's impressive. However, this is most decidedly not for the layman, a lesson the author learned because his books that followed are much more readable. He's brave too, selecting as a salvo the one topic most murky with incompleteness and conjecture. It's as if he
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was saying with his endeavor: "Here's a subject with the most gaps in the field. I'll start with this, write several more interesting books, and see where we stand after I establish an interesting career." It's quite possible he could soon offer a followup version that is more fossil-y complete. After all, there are dozens more dinosaurs roaming the earth now than there were when I was a child. Show Less
LibraryThing member Cheryl_in_CC_NV
Too much about the history of the investigations, including all the dead ends of thought, biographies of the authors of discredited theories, and so too confusing for me. All I want is a focus on the science, not a story. Tell me what has been figured out. Of course, given that this
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references work that is going on two (at least) decades old and is an active field of study, I'm better off looking for something newer anyway. Show Less