| DOMINION Niles Eldredge New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8050-2982-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8050-2982-6 | 190pp. | HC/BWI | $28.00 | |
| Page 19: | "Animal life [. . .] explodes with a literal bang at the recently revised date of 530 to 535 million years ago." |
| Funny; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said it had been strangled in the gorges. But seriously, this is sheer hyperbole. Even if some disaster had been associated with the rise of animal life 530 million years ago, it would still be hyperbole. |
| Page 62: | "and there is now the added concern that vast tracks of agriculturally modified land, not to mention suburbs and large cities, lie as obstructions..." |
| Typo: S/B "vast tracts". |
| Page 121: | "No organism survives by eating its own effluvia. But earth (call it Gaia if you will)—Gaia is simply the old Greek word for 'earth' anyway) is indeed a dynamic system..." |
| Capitalization: S/B "Earth". |
| Page 133: | "Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that intelligence of the human sort would have appeared in any species—dinosaur, insect, bird, or mammal." |
| I think a number of specialists — Christopher Wills, for example — would differ with this dismissal. |
| Page 137: | "The short, quick answer is by now obvious: nothing much." |
| Obvious, perhaps; ungrammatical, certainly. |
| Page 142: | "The global dynamics of Homo sapiens hinges on this instantaneous communication..." |
| Arguable number error: S/B "hinge on this". |
| Page 171: | "As Ian Tattersall points out, there was a great expansion of utilitarian objects beginning about 30,000 years ago—and a concomitant explosive appearance of carving, painting, and musical instruments of less than obviously simple utilitarian design." |
| I find this hard to parse. Does he mean these artifacts were not just simple tools, but had a decorative or symbolic function? If so, he expresses it poorly. |
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