| THE ZOOLOGIST'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens — and Ourselves Arik Kershenbaum New York: Penguin Press, March 2021 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-1-9848-8196-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-9848-8196-5 | 356pp. | HC/BWI | $28.00 | |
| Page 39: | "So 'survival' is usually good, because you can have lots of offspring, but if you live fast and reproduce prolifically, that's also good." |
| Maybe I'm missing something, but this looks to me like saying the same thing twice. |
| Page 85: | "Birds are, as we know, denser than air, and so sink, potentially catastrophically. But by angling their wings just right, the flow of air can generate an upwards force, 'lift', that balances their own weight. They become magically neutrally buoyant, just like fish." |
| Birds also flap their wings to stay aloft. When they glide, they are often relying on thermals. To say they have neutral buoyancy at such times confuses active measures with the mostly passive condition of neutral buoyancy in fish. And the statement contains a dangling participle. |
| Pages 104-105: | "Oftentimes signals* are created in different modalities by the same activity (perhaps, a rabbit digging a scratching in a bank)..." |
| Typo: S/B "digging and scratching". |
| Page 113: | "...consider how you can recognize the voice of your children or your friends across a crowded and loud room..." |
| Word order: S/B "a loud and crowded room". (Yes, this is opinion and may discount the link to the Rodgers & Hammerstein song "Some Enchanted Evening.") |
| Page 199: | But is it possible elsewhere in the universe that, rather than adapting our existing sensory capabilities for communicative purposes, we evolved hearing and speech specifically to be able to communicate?" |
| I'm pretty sure this S/B "aliens". |
| Page 274: | Much of this is, of course, scientifically nonsense, but science fiction authors are among the few who have taken seriously the question of the philosophical implications of a future world — or an alien world — where we have evolved spectacular and new abilities." |
| Grammar error (adverb modifying noun): S/B "scientific nonsense". Word order: S/B "new and spectacular abilities". |
| Page 299: | Like all approximations, we need to know when to use it because it is convenient, and when to discard it as misleading." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "As with all approximations". |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.