Author: inquisitivebiologist

Craving books and passionate about the communication of scientific knowledge, The Inquisitive Biologist is a blog where I review fascinating academic books on biology and related disciplines.

Book review – End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World

6-minute read

If the end of the world is something that keeps you up at night you might want to skip this book. Some might snigger at the “rogue robots” in the book’s subtitle, but End Times is a serious look at so-called existential risks. Former foreign correspondent, reporter, and editor with TIME magazine Bryan Walsh takes an unflinching look at the various disasters that could wipe out humanity, the people whose jobs it is to seriously think through catastrophic threats, and how, if at all, we can prepare ourselves.

(more…)

Book review – The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future

6-minute read

Like Antarctica, Greenland is one of those places that exerts an irresistible pull on my imagination. As journalist, historian and The New York Times Magazine feature writer Jon Gertner makes clear in The Ice at the End of the World, I am not alone. This solidly researched reportage chronicles both the early explorers venturing onto Greenland’s ice sheet and shows the reasons it plays a starring role in research on climate change. Some books ought to come with a warning about how binge-read-worthy they are. This is one of them.

(more…)

Book review – Visions of Lost Worlds: The Paleoart of Jay Matternes

7-minute read
keywords: art, paleontology

If you ever visited the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. sometime before 2015 and visited their fossil hall, you will have come face to face with a series of six large murals by palaeoartist Jay Matternes, showing different stages in the evolution of mammals. For nearly five decades, these were part of various exhibits until they were dismantled in 2014–2015. Unfortunately, I have never had the opportunity to visit the museum. But, luckily for me, Smithsonian Books has now published Visions of Lost Worlds, a beautifully produced love letter to Matternes’s palaeoart. Written by the museum’s Curator of Dinosauria Matthew T. Carano and director Kirk R. Johnson, in close collaboration with Matternes himself, this large-format art book offers an unparalleled look at these murals and the artistic process of making them.

(more…)

Book review – The Invertebrate Tree of Life

6-minute read

To outsiders, phylogenetics, the study of the evolutionary relationships between organisms, must seem like quicksand: the landscape is ever-changing and what you thought was solid ground can turn into contested and unstable territory overnight. Even so, we are getting an ever-clearer picture. In no small part this is due to new methods: the rapid technological progress in DNA sequencing has now made it both feasible and affordable to sequence whole genomes (all of a cell’s DNA) instead of selected genes for many taxa. And when you can bring multiple lines of evidence – morphological, developmental, genetic, and palaeontological – to bear on the question of evolutionary relationships, the resulting family trees become better supported and more credible. That is exactly what Gonzalo Giribet and Gregory Edgecombe, both experts in invertebrate biology and palaeontology, have done here in The Invertebrate Tree of Life – a work of dizzying scope since 96% of all known species are invertebrates. They have synthesized a truly monstrous amount of research to give an overview of our current thinking on invertebrate phylogeny, writing a new benchmark reference work for students of invertebrates.

(more…)

Book review – The Story of the Dinosaurs in 25 Discoveries: Amazing Fossils and the People Who Found Them

6-minute read

What is better than a good dinosaur story? How about 25 of them? Geologist and palaeontologist Donald R. Prothero returns to Columbia University Press for the third book in this format. Having covered fossils and rocks, he now serves up 25 fascinating vignettes of famous dinosaurs and the people who discovered them.

(more…)

Book review – Dance of the Dung Beetles: Their Role in Our Changing World

6-minute read

Having just reviewed The Mosquito, I am continuing the theme of small things running the world. Here is another overlooked insect that literally moves mountains, doing the dirty job that nobody wants to do: the dung beetle. Entomologist Marcus Byrne has teamed up with popular science writer Helen Lunn for Dance of the Dung Beetles, a captivating and charming introduction to their cultural history, their role in the history of biology as a discipline, and some really funky contemporary research.

(more…)

Book review – The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

6-minute read

Ours is the latest generation to be engaged in a blood-soaked conflict that has lasted millennia. The quote “we have met the enemy, and he is us” might come to mind, but no. Rather, as E.O. Wilson once wrote: “It is the little things that run the world“. Historian Timothy C. Winegard here offers a sweeping history of major turning points in human history observed through the compound lens of the mosquito. With an estimated compound death toll of 52 billion an insect that is truly worthy of the title “destroyer of worlds”.

(more…)

Book review – Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

7-minute read

I guess it was inevitable that in my wider reading on subjects such as astronomy and physics I would eventually bump into quantum mechanics. Where I have encountered it so far, I have admitted it went straight over my head. It might thus seem foolhardy for a biologist to try and tackle a book like this. Then again, the hallmark of good communicators is that they make complex topics understandable. And theoretical physicist Sean Carroll’s previous books have been lauded, some even winning prizes. Are you ready to get down and dirty with quantum mechanics?

(more…)

Year list – The Inquisitive Biologist’s top 5 reads of 2019

2-minute read

Let me first welcome all my readers to 2020. Casting my gaze back over last year, 2019 was an exceptionally productive year where I managed to read and review 107 books. Although I fully intend to bring you many more book reviews this year, I am not sure whether I will match that output again.

For those who do not feel like trawling through that many reviews, here is my personal top 5 of the most impactful, most beautiful and most thought-provoking books I read during 2019.

(more…)

Book review – Industry of Anonymity: Inside the Business of Cybercrime

6-minute read

I have written on this blog before that the Internet is not everything it is cracked up to be. Here I will add another string to that bow: crime. Spam, scams, malware, keyloggers, viruses, hacking, identity theft, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, stolen credit card details… the list goes on. Just as its offline counterpart, cybercrime encompasses a diverse array of misdeeds. But where its victims, both personal and corporate, regularly make headlines, the perpetrators remain a mysterious bunch. Based on a huge number of interviews, sociologist Jonathan Lusthaus here provides a peek behind that veil of anonymity. Next to showing that cybercrime has become an industry like any other, he also explores the paradox at its heart: how did this growth happen in an environment of mistrust and anonymity?

(more…)