Almost like a whale pdf

It will catch the millennial mood and tell all those for whom Darwin is merely a familiar name what he really meant. It exposes the Darwinian delusions which try and fail to explain human behaviour in evolutionary terms, and, while giving an up-to-date account of our own past, shows how humans are the first species to step beyond the constraints of biology. Before The Origin, biology was a set of unconnected facts, but Darwin made it into a science, linked by the theory of evolution the grammar of the living world.

Darwin used the biology of the nineteenth century to prove his theory. Now, using the astonishing advances of the twentieth century, Steve Jones reargues the case. His "new version" of The Origin is a bold and fascinating tour of evolution's wonders, revealing ties between cancer and the genetics of fish, between brewing beer and inheriting disease, between the sex lives of crocodiles and the politics of Brazil.

Pages: Are we all descended from a real-life Adam and Eve? Are some—or all—of us marked with the molecular equivalent of original sin, and if so what can we do about it? Was the Bible's great flood a memory of the end of the Ice Age?

And what can science tell us of the mystical experiences reported by the faithful, or of the origin of faith itself? Some people deny the power of religious belief, others the findings of science. In this groundbreaking work from one of our great science writers, Steve Jones explores how these mysteries often overlap. He steps aside from the noisy debate between believers and non-believers to show how the questions that preoccupy us today are those of biblical times—and that science offers many of the answers.

At once brilliantly erudite and highly readable, The Serpent's Promise is a witty and thoughtful account of the greatest scientific story ever told. Two of the young men live in , and the other two are alive in the s. Both stories have meaningful and thought-provoking information for young people! College students Reggie and his friend Tom have signed on as research assistants for the summer.

The research project is tagging humpback whales and tracking their travels. The boys are spending the summer on the Pacific Ocea. The city was saturated in scientists; many had an astonishing breadth of talents. But there is a second reason, one that quietly insists on its own validity all the way through this book.

To the Creationists, Darwin is the great Satan. All they have to do is demonstrate that Darwin is unproven, or fundamentally flawed, or that he had delivered "only a theory". That is why so many of them keep producing arguments that Darwin, with the evidence available to him at the time, could not satisfactorily address. Almost Like a Whale addresses them, and it does so with a cool assurance that should persuade the open-minded, and thrill the already converted.

The latter, of course, will read it for the headlong pleasure of the accumulated biological intricacies and subtleties and unresolved questions that exist within the confirmation of Darwin's great idea; and for the clever parallels within the exposition of the human-imposed notion of species and variety what, for example, is a German?

Who fits the definition of "German blood? This is a subject that can choose its instances and analogies from all history and geography, and marvels appear on almost every page.

The humpback whale can carry 1, lbs of barnacles: to challenge these tiny parasites its skin grows at a rate times faster than human hide. Poppies can leave 30, seeds in a square yard of soil: of course they began to bloom when grazing stopped and the Flanders Fields were cultivated by swords, shells and blood after A bomb that hit the Natural History Museum caused a fire that was quelled by hoses and in the warmth and the flood a mimosa seed collected in China in germinated and began to flower: a strange awakening that illustrates life's tenacity, and at the same time its fragility.

Jones is terrific, too, on the geological record and its caprices. The rocks have yielded species of extinct elephant; only two species roam the planet today. Nine billion passenger pigeons once blackened the skies of America; the last perished in , but fossil evidence for the creature's existence has never been found.

Without a written record, no one now would ever know it had been there. The whole story is told with the focus, energy and occasional droll asides that might be the Jones trademark.

I wanted to hear just a little more about his own youthful collecting mania cheese labels? I began by suggesting that Jones's tribute is in some ways more far-reaching than Darwin's Origin, and with a better view of its subject: but that too is less treasonable than it might sound.

Not only does Jones stand, to play with Newton's metaphor, on a giant's shoulders; the real reward of this book is to remind us, once again, what a colossus Charles Darwin really was. In Steven Weinberg put the case for an American particle accelerator that would never be completed, to answer questions about the ultimate nature of matter and energy that might instead be resolved in a tunnel under Geneva. Almost Like a Whale by Steve Jones — book review.