marjorierose:

I read a bunch of books while I was on vacation. I have written up notes on all of them, and I’m going to post most of those as one big post, but I wanted to break this one out into a post of its own. This book feels significant.

The Immense Journey, by Loren Eiseley

I picked this up based on an Internet recommendation I happened across, and when I started to read it I was startled to realize that it is nearly sixty years old. This makes some difference to how you read it, since Eiseley discusses a number of scientific controversies and left me wondering whether they have since been resolved. I don’t think we have arrived at a universally agreed-upon explanation for how life got started on earth–that is, how the planet went from being made entirely of non-living matter to having at least one living organism on it. To be honest, I hadn’t much thought about this question. I think I assumed it had something to do with electricity, perhaps a lightning bolt or something, although one moment’s thought will reveal that we have lightning today and it never animates inanimate matter. This seems like a much more basic and mysterious question than how species evolved, even though I do find that very interesting, and once you start thinking along these lines it’s funny that creationists don’t focus on it more, rather than saying things like “I’ve never seen an animal turn into another animal.”

In any case, Eiseley’s essays are a fascinating mix of in-the-weeds science writing and belle-lettristic essaying. There is some evolutionary history presented in story form–“How Flowers Changed the World” is the best example of that—-and there’s some musing about theories of human evolution. That was the least effective element for me, largely because I was so unfamiliar with the terms of the debate regarding, e.g., how long ago the last Ice Age was, or what the “man of the future” was imagined to look like. And there is some very sturdy and serious philosophical writing about the implications of the science under discussion. His sentence and paragraph construction is flawless. I have half a mind to go track down his complete works right now. Nowadays there is plenty of science journalism, some of it excellent, but this feels unique. It’s expert, lyrical, urgent, and filled with wonder, all at once. I might need to reread it.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/2bnttRB.