When The Marine Biological Laboratory set out to publish, through The University of Chicago Press, a series of books that would make available to the wider reading public examples of the types of research undertaken at the institution, as well as portraits of how such research is undertaken there, giving the series the title Convening Science was clearly the most logical choice.
From platypuses and possums, through wombats, echidnas, devils, and kangaroos, to quolls, dibblers, dunnarts, and kowaris, Jack Ashby knows them all; and in his recently published “Platypus Matters; The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals,” he guides his readers on a tour of their lives, their evolutionary stories, and the challenges they face in the modern world.
A very problematic biography of Charles Darwin I received many years ago for review has long left me nervous about taking up any biography of him published since; however Dr. J. David Archibald’s new “Critical Lives: Charles Darwin” is well supported by the high integrity and scholastic history of its author, its publishers, and those who have already made early assessments of the book.
For most naturalists today, Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” published in 1859, is a cornerstone work. It is also one that, while its propositions caused considerable stir in Darwin’s own time as well as in the decades following his death, now only seems to trouble those outside of natural history circles. His 1871 work “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” is another matter indeed.