30-Second Zoology - Mark Fellowes (Ed.) ***

Zoology (as distinct from biology) was one of those sciences that was always most in danger of suffering from Rutherford's old taunt along the lines of 'all science is either physics or stamp collecting' - consisting as it largely seemed to do for a number of centuries of simply cataloguing animals and their behaviour. However, like all the sciences it has evolved, and as someone with very little background in zoology apart from visiting the odd zoo, it was interesting to get this overview of what today's zoology entails.

Inevitably the introductory section (origin and evolution) has a fair amount that is more generally biological in feel (for example, with spreads on genes and natural selection). We then move on to separate sections on invertebrates and vertebrates, handling quite broad groups (mammals, for example, get a single entry), then broader topics of physiology and behaviour, before moving onto perhaps the most interesting sections on ecology and on conservation and extinction. I was interested in the 'ecology' section to find an article on keystone species, which elsewhere I'd recently read was a rather outdated concept - but interesting nonetheless.

I'll be honest, the format is one I've never really understood. I like words with the odd picture to explain something that words struggle to highlight - but in this series half the pages are taken up with large illustrations, more decorative than informative, and even the text is broken into tight, bite-sized chunks. This makes it a handy kind of book to read on the train, perhaps (though the large format mitigates against this). I'm also not overly fond of multi-author books, though Mark Fellowes, the editor has done a good job of pulling together the various articles and making them feel like a whole.

Interesting, then, and something I might browse through in a library or bookshop... but not my favourite style of book. Although not addressed to children, perhaps ideal for a teenager who is developing a first interest in the subject.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Search This Blog