The Riddle of the Dinosaur, by John Noble Wilford

We all have our little things we're interested in. For some people, it's dinosaurs.

I happened to read -- or, honestly, skim through -- John Noble Wilford's The Riddle of the Dinosaur at about the same time I was also glancing through a beautiful coffee table book called Universe: A Journey from Earth to the Edge of the Cosmos by Nicolas Cheetham. The lesson I couldn't help but pull from both books, filled with facts about the most fantastic animals that have ever lived, or with pictures of the most mind-bogglingly distant and gigantic space phenomena known, is that none of this information really means much except that people know it.

Which is fine. I am not a friend to the idea that all human endeavor must have practical applications. Still, simply as an objective thing, I would think even scientists would recognize that only our knowing it gives meaning to the fact that Tyrannosaurus rex once roamed Montana. Only our knowing gives meaning to a picture of NGC 4622, a spiral galaxy gleaming in delicate gold and silver, one hundred and eleven million light years away. For us, the reality of it is not even that far away; it's a photograph, about ten inches by ten inches, sitting on the breakfast table within reach. Knowing about it, looking at it, gives pleasure.

(I'm reminded here of a superb quote from Renoir, as recorded by his son Jean in the biography My Father. " 'That fool Galileo,' " the great painter scoffed across the centuries at the great astronomer, " 'tells us we are no longer at the center of the universe, and yet no one behaves as if it were true.' ")

I wonder if there is a sort of pecking order among scientists, if some laugh up their sleeves at others, depending on whose subject matter is more heroically outlandish, or more popular, or more useful to mankind, or more difficult to master. Midway through The Riddle of the Dinosaur, as if he too were groping with the problem of science as rich inner life, Wilford tries to take it to a higher (more practical?) level (p. 184). What most frustrates paleontologists, he says, is that so much about dinosaurs can never be known. What makes the search worthwhile?

It is reassuringly human of scientists that, when it comes to dinosaurs, they can be just as stricken with puzzlement as the next person and find themselves with little more to work with than their imaginations. Yet they persist in their search for solutions to the riddle, knowing they will never fully succeed but believing they will learn something about the greater mysteries of life. This is the wonder of humans, their faith that there is much about dinosaurs that is worth knowing.

I'm not sure dinosaurs will teach us much about the greater mysteries of life. The sentence could be simplified, a la Renoir perhaps: "this is the wonder of humans, their faith that there is much that is worth knowing." The Riddle of the Dinosaur's most interesting chapters, after all, tell the human story of the great beasts' discovery, beginning in the early 1800s, and of the way those discoveries, the unearthing of giant bones which belonged to no creature any one had ever seen, forced mankind to confront and almost to make mysteries -- wonders -- where before there had been certainty. He was forced, abruptly, to rethink time and his own place on earth. Not that he behaved as though things were any different.

The book also tells the story of how the basic notions about dinosaurs which have seeped into popular culture arrived there. Originally, today's commonplaces -- that some of them were fast-moving predators, that some may have tended their young with an un-reptilian concern, that in the end birds may have evolved from them -- were scandals when they were broached and argued over by sober professionals in the field. The same is true for the last topic dealt with, the dinosaurs' mysterious and likely very sudden extinction. Here again Wilford retraces the arguments and evidence for a scandalous idea about it that has since seeped into the popular consciousness, namely that the dinosaurs died off because an asteroid hit the earth and sent up a cloud of debris thick enough to block sunlight, stunt plant growth, and so for a lethal while -- three years? three months? -- break the entire food chain.

Mass extinction left room on the planet for the dinosaurs' timid prey, the mammals, to emerge from the night and the undergrowth and begin evolving into everything else, including us. Sometimes, science writers take their "popularization" duties a bit far:

The little hoofed animals took to the unpopulated grasslands and grazed where the ceratopsians used to roam. Other mammals developed a taste for meat, initiating new predator-prey relationships in nature. Some took to the trees, and this led to monkeys. Some took to the sea, and this led to whales and porpoises. Some took to the air, and so there are bats today.

In time, no doubt. All this wrapping up leads Wilford to the standard last chapter theme in a science book meant for John Q. Public: isn't it sobering to think we, now, mammals with consciousness and the ability to wonder about our planet and its past, also have the power to cause the kind of catastrophe which ended the dinosaurs' ... yes, yes. (He's talking about the danger of man-made cataclysms, nuclear war, overpopulation, or maybe "nuclear winter," also suddenly destroying the food chain and all life on earth. Global warming had not yet become the dernier cri in 1984.) To paraphrase Wilford: "We've traveled back in time to the fossil fields of Montana and Mongolia, and come face to face with ourselves." Well, yes and no. If in any course of study or pursuit of pleasure or knowledge, we come face to face with ourselves, it seems to be because, in the ways that matter, we were always there.



Image from Hubblesite Newscenter

The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana, 2007

It seems appropriate this summer, while we all either marvel at or are revolted by the return of the 17-year cicadas, to dip into a classic of nature writing that is all about bugs. The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre (translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, compiled by Edwin Way Teale), is the kind of book to be dipped into, not read straight through, and probably not read while eating lunch: descriptions of the parasitic midge larvae Microgaster glomeratus feeding on the yellow blood of the cabbage caterpillar do not lend relish to our own meal.

However, it is always pleasant to contemplate the career of a man who loved what he did. J. Henri Fabre was an impoverished nineteenth-century French schoolteacher who spent his summer vacations studying "my dear insects." He lived on a small piece of barren land in southern France, surrounded by a loving and helpful family but a near-recluse to local villagers. Observing insects in the open air and fields of his property, and not in a lab, Fabre was proud of watching and setting down "the exact narrative of facts observed." His great work was the Souvenirs Entomologiques -- The Insect World is a compendium -- which ran to ten volumes and 850,000 words.

Fabre was no mere backyard enthusiast. Although he did for the most part observe his quarry going about their daily businesses, he interfered with their flights and crawlings, and captured them and brought them indoors, when more controlled experiments were needed to learn the truth about their behavior. His patience and ingenuity were infinite. He was willing to sit all day at a sand bank, watching "my beloved Wasps" hunt grasshoppers and bury them in the sand to feed their young; he tried pinning a dung beetle's precious ball of dung to the ground, to see what the creature would do when it could no longer roll its prize away for safekeeping.

His writing has the leisurely elegance of another era. When he says, "If it is in your power to set up your observatory under a meagre olive tree that pretends to protect you from the rays of a pitiless sun, you may bless the fate that treats you as a sybarite," he means Luckily I worked under a shade tree. And his writing helps create in the reader a new respect for insects. He handled bees, wasps, moths, their prey and eggs and egg cases, without fear, and chronicled the female praying mantis' eating of her mate's head, while mating, with amazement but no disgust.

Fabre perhaps did not know about our 17-year cicadas, but one summer day he had cannon fired under his trees to test ordinary cicadas' hearing. Since the bugs did not stop singing, he concluded they were deaf. Who knows how thrilled he would have been, and what trials he could have invented, for our variety?

A Scientist at the Seashore by James S. Trefil

Originally published in the Times of Northwest Indiana

Those of us who enter a library or bookstore only to rush to the fiction or biography sections may be astonished to learn that whole shelves in these places are set aside for science. (It’s the 500s in the Dewey decimal system.) Once having taken the plunge, though, a little browsing will lead the liberal arts major to something meant for him: a science book that is informative but non-technical, written to open up an entirely new universe to those readers who have only ever liked reading about people.

Physics professor James Trefil’s A Scientist at the Seashore is that kind of book. Looking at the beach as a physicist, he gets fourteen chapters out of the existence of water itself, out of the salt and tides in the oceans, gravity, wave action, what bubbles are, what sand is, why torque and lift explain the formation of dunes as well as the flight of jets and baseballs, and what sorts of electrical charges hold sand castles together.

What makes this information so difficult for the unscientific mind to grasp is (for lack of a better word) its unbelievability. Of course we know the information is true. In his conversational but not condescending prose, and in his everyday examples, Trefil does an excellent job proving how fundamental principles, such as those governing wave action or the properties of bubbles, remain the same from the subatomic to the galaxy-sized level of matter. The problem is that the information – the structure and laws of the universe, really – is so fantastic that it doesn’t look true. Anyone browsing the fiction or history stacks can believe that men and women fall in love or that knights slay dragons. I understand that frost is bad for the garden (gardening books are in the 600s). But it’s utterly fantastic that the earth’s gravity should cause tides on the moon, or that I can cause a gravitational pull on the Andromeda galaxy when I walk across the kitchen (see page 39, "The Search for Planet X"). Yet it’s true, at least in principle.

But the sciences are, of course, among the liberal arts, so really there should not be this separation between the "scientific" and "unscientific" mind. There should be no inevitable barrier to the new universes a liberal arts major may explore. The complaint that the exact sciences have no relation to daily life, and that’s why they are so difficult and dry, won’t work either. Trefil explains MRIs before they were called MRIs, and notes how useful they may one day be in diagnosing illness.

It may be that the predictable, one-dimensional messiness of fiction and biography is poor preparation for approaching science, whose laws simply govern everything, without blather. If the liberal arts major remains perplexed and intrigued, the good news is that James Trefil has written thirty other books, all telling remarkable new truths.