Pruners in Hand

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Scope Correspondent

A review of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Henry Holt and Co, 2014
336 pages

Plectostoma sciaphilum was always hard to find. The pea-sized microsnail lived only in one place, atop a limestone hill in Eastern Malaysia. It spent its days chewing on leaf litter and toting around a shell that, in photos, resembles a soft-serve ice cream cone lit from the inside. Photos are all we have, because P. sciaphilum is gone now—the last of its kind was recently blasted to smithereens, along with the hill it lived on, by a cement conglomerate intent on the limestone within. Full Review »

A Penny for Your Thoughts

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Scope Correspondent

A review of Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures, by Virginia Morell

Crown, 2013

304 pages

 

One fateful day in March 1838, a twenty-nine-year-old Charles Darwin met a female named Jenny. Observing her in her exhibit in the London Zoological Garden, Darwin noted that Jenny, a young orangutan recently acquired by the zoo, “kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child” when a keeper teased her with an apple. Having never met an ape face to face before, Darwin wrote furiously and excitedly in his notebooks, speculating on the thoughts and feelings of Jenny the orangutan over multiple visits. “Let man visit Ouranoutang in domestication,” Darwin wrote, “hear its expressive whine, see its intelligence when spoken (to); as if it understands every word said—see its affection—to those it knew—see its passion & rage, sulkiness, & very actions of despair.” Darwin found such instances enough to convince him that animals (the “higher” ones, at least) are intelligent, that they can feel pain, jealousy, happiness, and boredom.

But Darwin had been criticized for using stories like Jenny’s as scientific evidence. They are anthropomorphic, other scientists said; they bestow non-human animals with human emotions that we cannot prove they feel. This anti-animal-mind mindset ruled psychological science for decades, and its grasp is still felt today. Full Review »

A Science Book that’s Easy to Stomach

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A review of Gulp, by Mary Roach
W.W. Norton & Co., 2013
352 pages

You probably never wanted to know what raw whale skin tastes like (slightly nutty). Or, for that matter, the history of enemas in convents (the nuns rather enjoyed them). The beauty of Mary Roach’s new book Gulp is that she doesn’t really care what you want to know. Her newest endeavor was to research the digestive system and she has gleefully brought us a long for the ride. Her curiosity about gross-out subjects like feces, vomit, and entrails is infectiously delightful. You’ll find yourself laughing out loud and sharing her fascinating anecdotes over dinner—though you may lose sight of what is considered polite mealtime conversation. Full Review »

Of Birds and Brains

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Scope Correspondent

A review of Alex & Me, by Irene M. Pepperberg
232 pages
MJF Books, 2008

 

“He’d sometimes say ‘You tickle,’ and bend his head so I could scratch his face. As I did, the white area around his eyes turned a subtle pink, blushing as Greys do when being intimate. His eyes would squint almost closed.”

How often pet owners must fantasize that their cat or dog will tell them, in speech, to initiate a favorite belly rub. But Alex the African Grey Parrot was not a pet. He was a science experiment. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Alex packed plenty of personality into a pound of feathers. Upon his death in 2007, he was mourned not only as a television star but as a scientific icon. Irene Pepperberg, an associate research professor at Brandeis University who teaches animal cognition at Harvard University, had worked with Alex for thirty years, teaching him a limited vocabulary of English words, which he used to interact with humans and his surroundings. She chronicles their journey in her book Alex & Me, first published in 2008. Full Review »

Should Your Cat Glow?

by
Scope Correspondent

A review of Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts by Emily Anthes
256 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

An unusual cat lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Named Mr. Green Genes, he looks like your average orange tabby. But under dark light, he has a neat parlor trick: his eyes, nose, and ears glow green, Rudolph-the-reindeer style. This is because scientists tinkered with his DNA to include a jellyfish gene for fluorescence. Although a silly outcome, it was a serious study monitoring how the glow gene would express itself in foreign species.

In recent decades, other house cats have been subject to seemingly strange science experiments. They have been cloned, surgically altered to include microphone implants, and given pirate-peg-leg-looking prosthetics limbs. These feline Frankensteins offer a taste of the wild things people are doing to animals these days in the name of science, wildlife conservation, medicine, national security, consumerism, and animal love. In her riveting first book, Frankenstein’s Cat, Emily Anthes explores these colorful cats and a menagerie of other animals—from dogs to goldfish, dolphins to seabirds, goats to grizzly bears—at the forefront of this animal biotechnology explosion. Full Review »

You, the Reader, Will Die

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Scope Correspondent

A review of The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers – How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death by Dick Teresi
368 pages. Random House, 2012

Dick Teresi will hold your hand, incite you to argument, and dare you to contradict him. But first, he needs to be perfectly blunt. “You, the reader, will die,” he proclaims within the first five pages. He wants you to think about death as much as he does, which is quite a lot, according to his therapist who declares him not so much clinically depressed as exceptionally morbid. But for Teresi, it’s not so interesting that you’ll die but rather, how we’ll know you’re dead.

Known for his journalistic musings on the God Particle and our understanding of the number zero, in his humorous and extensively researched third book, The Undead, Teresi tackles how modern society and its past counterparts have decided when people are dead. As it turns out, it’s not nearly as straightforward as it sounds and most people can’t tell the difference between a dead guy and a plate of jello (really, they have similar brain scan readings). While he states at the beginning of the book, “My job as a journalist is to reveal data. You can do with that information what you wish,” it is clear he has strong opinions on the matter. Full Review »

Bringing Up Baboon

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A review of A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons By Robert Sapolsky.
304 pages. New York: Touchstone, 2002.

Acting nonchalant in front of a baboon is not an art many scientists have to contemplate while going about their jobs. Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist cum primatologist and long-time professor at Stanford, is faced with that very challenge on most days that he spends in the field with his tribe of baboons in Kenya. Sapolsky took over twelve years to assemble and write the stories that makes up A Primate’s Memoir, and what results is a riveting account of the decidedly unusual setting in which Sapolsky’s science takes place. Full Review »

Seeing Evolution is Believing

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A review of The Beak of the Finch, by Jonathan Weiner. 332 pp. New York: Knopf, 1994.

To many of us, the idea of watching evolution sounds like watching mountain ranges rise out of the earth or witnessing a glacier wear down a landscape. How can we possibly observe such a slow-moving phenomenon? Even Charles Darwin himself was convinced of the unwatchability of evolutionary events: “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages,” he wrote. And if it can’t be seen, how can evolution be measured? How can it be proven?

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner shows us that this conception of evolution—as a slow-moving, immeasurable process—is far removed from reality. He builds his compelling narrative around one research project: the pivotal study by British biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant, who spent decades examining birds and their beaks in the Galápagos.

The Galápagos Islands are home to a genus of thirteen finch species, known today as Darwin’s finches. There are two species of cactus finch, a vegetarian finch, three species of ground finches, a woodpecker finch, a vampire finch, and others. They differ in the size and shape of their beaks, and each beak is suited to a particular food source.

Full Review »

Misunderstanding Gone Viral

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In a small, sleepy corner of Arizona in August 1994, a child who seemed wholly ordinary was born. Her parents named her Michelle. At sixteen months, the toddler was hit with a 106-degree fever. Soon afterwards, she began talking noticeably less. By her third birthday, hundreds of quiet days later, Michelle’s physician suspected she might have a cognitive disorder. Visits to a neurologist and a developmental psychologist confirmed this suspicion: Michelle was diagnosed with severe autism. Thinking back on her medical history, searching for signs and grasping for causes, her parents remembered the fever. Michelle had burned up shortly after the day she received her first measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

Today, one in 110 children has an autism spectrum disorder, a ten-fold increase from the 1980s. Scientists usually credit this rise to a growing awareness of autism, with more cases today being recognized and labeled as such. Autism’s causes are still not thoroughly understood, but the idea that vaccines are to blame has recently seeped into society: the MMR vaccine has been widely used in the United States since the 1970s, making its rise coincide with the autism toll.

In his fast-paced non-fiction account, Seth Mnookin confronts the debate over whether or not childhood vaccines, specifically MMR, can cause autism. He develops Michelle’s story as a main example of the misunderstanding that has resulted. Despite a growing body of reliable studies that have found no relation between the two, a quarter of American parents cling onto the idea that vaccinating their children is the wrong choice. With more families electing not to vaccinate, we are seeing the re-emergence of viruses, such as like pertussis, that had very nearly been eradicated. Full Review »

The Animal/Human Connection

by
Scope Correspondent

What do animals experience that humans don’t? What experiences do we share with the feathered, furred, shelled, and scaly? These questions aren’t easy ones to answer, if they are answerable at all. But in their book Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals’ Inner Lives, neuropsychologist Karen Shanor and neuroethologist Jagmeet Kanwal provide a compendium of scientific research to help shed light on what the world looks, smells, sounds, and feels like to just about everyone.

While much of the research that spills out into popular media regarding animal senses and cognition involves dogs, primates, dolphins and (especially) humans, Shanor and Kanwal draw from a much more expansive pool of sensory science. Both authors have dedicated much of their own research to the study of animals’ inner lives; Shanor, a former Stanford University researcher, spent a good deal of time trying to understand how rats learn and what cats dream about. Kanwal, who teaches at Georgetown University, has done his own fair share of research, with a clear fondness for bats (which we see in personal accounts throughout several chapters). His field—neuroethology—studies the neurological relationship to nonhuman animal behavior, and his expertise lends a particularly authoritative voice to Bats Sing, Mice Giggle.

From cockroaches to primates—and just about every critter in between—the two authors construct a straightforward portrait of the complexity of experience across the Animalian spectrum. The results are sometimes surprising, even for someone who presumes to be well read on the subject. Full Review »

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