four case-studies of important controver- sies, the single or multiple origin of the arthropods (insects, spiders, crustaceans, et aZ.), the ancestry of vertebrates, the origin of fish groups and the emergence of land vertebrates, and the origin of birds and mammals. Bowler then turns to the attempts to extract some general principles from the patterns of descent reconstructed from the fossil record: evolutionary trends supposedly directed by ‘laws’ of evolution and explanations of extinction. The penulti- mate chapter is on the contribution of bio- geography and is succeeded by ‘metaphors of evolution’ that reveal the social biases of evolutionary biologists.

The whole is a considerable, if slightly uneven, work of scholarship, that deserves an audience among evolutionary biologists concerned with the history of their subject.

Alec Panchen

Picturing Knowledge. Edited by Brian Baigrie. Pp. 389. University of Toronto Press, 1996. Hardback f59.OO/lJS$80.00; paperback f18.50/US$24.95. ISBN 0 8020 2985 x/O 8020 7439 7.

Most scientists think, and certainly communicate, as much with images as with words. Without slide projectors or over- heads, blackboards or at least the backs of envelopes, they are lost souls. It is not only their popular books that are replete with illustrations, but also their presentations at conferences and their most profoundly tech- nical articles. Their images are of many kinds, ranging from the most naturalistic to the most schematic, from colour photo- graphs of natural phenomena to highly abstract diagrams that hardly claim to ‘rep- resent’ the natural world at all. All such images function in the everyday practices of science in tight conjunction with words: looking and talking at the laboratory bench, illustrations and text in scientific publications.

Until recently, these highly visual prac- tices were scarcely represented at all in the work of the historians, philosophers and sociologists who analyze science past and present. This was a result of the dominance of a philosophy of scientific knowledge that privileged verbal propositional claims, and treated images as epistemically inferior; but it also reflected the dominantly humanistic training and textual bias of most of these ‘meta-scientists’. However, in the last few years this deplorable gulf between practitioners and analysts has begun to be closed.

This book is a valuable contribution to that process. It contains ten essays, all appropriately well illustrated; each uses a specific set of related images to exemplify the varied roles of pictures and diagrams in the history of science. The studies range in time from the sixteenth century to the twen-

46 Endeavour Vol. 21(l) 1997

tieth (though the era of computer imaging is

not reached); the sciences discussed range from genetics to prehistoric archaeology, from chemistry to biological systematics, from anatomy to plate-tectonic geology; there are also essays on mathematical dia- grams and pictures of machines.

What emerges clearly from the ensemble of these essays is not only the great variety of scientific illustrations, from the most naturalistic to the most abstract, but also the sheer diversity of their functions in the con- struction of scientific knowledge. They serve not only to ‘impart information’ (in the editor’s words), but also more reveal- ingly to convey theoretical meanings, and above all to persuade their viewers to accept specific interpretations. Illustrations, no less than the texts with which they are integrated, are above all instruments of scientific rhetoric, using that word in its proper non- pejorative sense. They help to convey the empirical basis for scientific theories, and indeed the theories themselves; but they also help, often far more effectively than any words, to give those theories the power and authority to persuade and convince. As integral components of scientific practice, illustrations are themselves science; in fact the contents of this book effectively under- mine the assumption in its subtitle that they represent the use of ‘art’ in science.

Martin Rudwick

Discovering the Universe (4th Edn). By William J. Kaufmann III and Neil F: Comins. Pp. 436. W. H. Freeman & Co., 1996. f28.95. ISBN 0 7167 2646 7.

Probably the only negative criticism one can make of this book is that it is a paper- back (and apparently only available as such), albeit a a fairly hefty and well-made one. This is not really much of a negative; it’s just that the book is so useful that it will become dog-eared far too soon. This may make it look much-loved, but any book that is essentially a reference work should be able to stand up to much use, open flat and be generally comfortable to handle. At least the admirable CD that comes with it quali- fies on at least two of these counts.

The fourth edition of William Kaufmann’s well-known textbook Universe, it is an introduction to astronomy for the non- specialist: a Cambridge astronomer remarked to me ‘Oh yes, astronomy for poets...’ - not a put-down, but just that he was reminded of courses run in a number of universities by astronomers specifically for those without formal qualifications in physics or mathematics. And this is its real purpose, to take the curious reader system- atically and with great clarity through all the major areas of its subject, including such topics of intense current concern as dark matter and black holes.

Discovering the Universe is blessedly free

of exclamation marks and the breathless- ness of the ‘isn’t it amazing’ kind that bedevil some more popular science writing. Of course it is all wonderful and amazing or whatever, and this book’s refreshing cool- ness and thoroughness does nothing to detract from that, apart maybe from one small lapse of taste: the reproduction (p. 381) of a rather trite painting called DNA Embraces the Planets. If scientists will include art to illustrate a thesis then they should use the real thing.

The advance over earlier editions of the book is twofold: firstly, in the greater clar- ity of its arrangement and in the wealth of well-chosen diagrams and other illus- trations; secondly, in its inclusion of a CD- ROM containing the whole book and more (watch the moon-buggy careering over the lunar surface; see the granulation of the solar photosphere; fly over the Martian vol- canoes, and so on). Although the previous edition is claimed as the first multimedia science textbook, the fourth takes it a much- needed stage further by fully integrating to the Internet. Provided the reader’s computer has a suitable Internet browser it will answer precisely the criticism that some of the information in such a work may too soon become out-of-date. This is especially true of a dynamic area like astronomy, where instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope have whetted the appetite for the latest images and for speculation about their meaning. Click on the correct URL (many suitable links are on the CD as well as much information about how to navigate) and you are more or less on the space telescope, with the rest of the Net at your fingertips. And all on the the little silver disc pocketed rather insecurely inside the back cover..

To conclude: anyone with more than a passing interest in astronomy should get hold of the book as soon as possible. There really is nothing else so good at this level.

Richard Sword

Paleoclimate and Evolution, with Emphasis on Human Origins. Edited by E.S. Vrba et al. Pp. 547. Yale University Press, 1996. f 60.00. ISBN 0 300 06348 2.

It is a decade or so now since weather and climate escalated from the realms of polite small talk to a matter of concern for the developed world. For the vast majority of people in the Third World, climate has never been off the agenda, it has always been a matter of at least hunger if not life and death. And equally for our hominid ances- tors, the atmospheric forces must have been a matter of constant concern.

We will never know what they felt or understood about climate but we should make every effort to find out how climate change of the geologically recent past impacted upon hominid evolution in order to help understand how it is going to effect

Copyright 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All right resewed. 0160-9327/97/$17.00.

the future. Also, as Elisabeth Vrba writes in her perceptive chapter ‘On the Connections between Paleoclimate and Evolution’, we need to be able to answer that ‘fundamental question on how the physical world relates to evolution . is physical change the necess- ary pacemaker . or do living entities drive themselves to evolve and disappear?‘. Our best chance of answering this must lie within the relatively well preserved record of the recent past. However, the business of unravelling the many factors which drive climate change is proving to be enormously difficult. One area of scientific investigation which should provide considerable insight into long term change, is the rock and fossil record. Beyond the ice core record of the past 100000 years or so, the only evidence we have of long term historical climate change is through the ‘intermedium’ of sedi- ments, rocks and fossils.

This geological evidence adds another whole layer of complexity to the problem because of the difficulty of interpreting the record. The best information in the sense of continuity comes from deep sea sediments and their abundant microfossils but this is at several removes from changes within the atmosphere. The terrestrial record is a bit closer but suffers from a multitude of diffi- culties. Tectonic uplift, volcanism and con- tinental fragmentation have led to problems of incompleteness and relative dating and correlation within any major landmass let alone between different continents.

Originating from a conference held in Airlie, Virginia in 1993, this collection of essays provides invaluable multidisciplinary insights into the issues of the paleoclimatol- ogy of the last 20 million or so years. Whilst the hominids tend to grab the headlines in the popular press, here it is the abundant fossils of plant pollen and four-legged mammalian her- bivores that provides the really useful data. But inevitably in here, our self interest brings the focus of the book, as its title indicates, around to our own history. If this concern results in the continued development of our understanding of climate on all organisms then so much the better. The volume contains something for everyone with an interest in the impact of climate change on the path of evolution.

Douglas Palmer

Great Ape Societies. Edited by W.C. McGrew et al. Pp. 328. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hardback f55.OO/US$64.95; paperback f 19.95/US$24.95. ISBN 0 521 55495 2/ 0 52155536 1.

Our closest relatives, the great apes, exhibit a striking range of social organization. Orangutans are mostly solitary, gorillas live in close-knit harems dominated by silver- back males, and chimpanzees and bonobos both live in multi-male communities. Although bonobos were only recently dis-

tinguished as a separate species from chim- panzees, their social relations differ remark- ably. While male chimpanzees stalk and kill members of neighbouring communities, bonobo communities seem to coexist peacefully.

The diversity of social relations in these different species has only come to light with prolonged, detailed field studies. In the past 20 years, advances in theory and a growing body of data from field and captive studies have provided and tested explanations for why apes live in such different groups. Great Ape Societies provides an excellent summary and synthesis of what scientists have learned about how and why apes live with one another.

This book, with contributions from 40 eminent primatologists from North America, Europe, Japan and Africa, devel- oped from the 1994 Wenner-Gren confer- ence, ‘Great Apes Revisited’. The book focuses on field studies of the African apes (gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos), exploring social ecology, social relations, cognition and communication. The single chapter devoted to Asia’s orangutans dis- cusses the significance of social relations in this mostly solitary species. Several chap- ters describe captive studies, including chapters by researchers who combine lab- oratory and field work. Two chapters dis- cuss the implications of great ape studies for the evolution of a fifth great ape, Homo sapiens.

Much has been learned in the years since the first Wenner-Gren conference devoted to great apes in 1974, which resulted in the book The Great Apes (Hamburg and McCown, 1979). Continued data collection at key long-term sites has led to a better understanding of rare events, such as infan- ticide and intergroup aggression, and the accumulating wealth of natural history information has made possible the emer- gence of problem-oriented, theory-driven research. The addition of crucial new sites, particularly sites focusing on species, sub- species and habitats not represented in the 1974 conference, has made possible the rich comparative perspective seen throughout the book.

In 1974, almost nothing was known about the behaviour of wild bonobos. Almost everything known about gorillas and chim- panzees came from a few scattered sites at the eastern fringes of their range. Most gorillas live in lowland rainforest, but in 1974, the only gorilla study site was high in the Virunga mountains. Nothing was known about how behaviour varied among differ- ent habitats, subspecies and populations. It turns out that all of these differences matter greatly, and this volume admirably docu- ments the variation. Unlike mountain goril- las, lowland gorillas climb trees frequently and eat significant amounts of fruit. Different chimpanzee populations vary enough in their behaviours, especially tool use, that researchers seriously discuss chim- panzee ‘cultures.’ Moreover, in 1974,

Copyright 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All right reserved. 0160-9327/97/$17.00.

nobody knew how chimpanzees and gorillas interact in the wild; as it turns out, they coexist peacefully, even though they eat many of the same foods.

This handsomely illustrated volume rep- resents hundreds of hours of dedicated labour in remote parts of the world. This book will serve as a welcome synthesis and useful reference for many years to come.

Margo Wilson

Elements of the Theory of Structures. By J. Heyman. Pp. 137. Cambridge University Press, 1996. f35.OO/US$59.95. ISBN 0 521 55065 3.

At some stage of their career most scientists and engineers brush up against the concept of structure. Physicists, for instance, often focus on the structure of atoms and sub- atomic species while chemists tend to be more concerned with molecules. Biologists have as their fiefdom macromolecular struc- tures and the structures of living organisms. Man-made objects such as houses and bridges, however, are usually assigned to the realm of the civil or structural engineer.

It is this latter kind of structure that forms the subject matter of the present work. Although the book affords a mathematical description of such structures and consists primarily of a compilation of approaches adopted in structural analysis and the design of buildings, the issue of structure as a generic concept is also addressed. Structure is defined herein quite simply as ‘anything built’ which a moment’s reflection reveals to be far too restrictive. The concept of structure is far more comprehensive and subtle than this. All sorts of highly interest- ing structures, including such natural objects as trees, caverns and even galaxies, were not built and should have been men- tioned in this work. Moreover, of the limited kinds of structures that are considered, not one is illustrated. How much more exciting this book might have been if the author had illustrated in colour some of the magnificent cathedrals for which he serves as an engin- eering consultant! I can’t help feeling that a challenging and vital subject has been given rather short shrift here and that a wonderful opportunity to make it come alive has been lost. As it stands, with its tedious litany of mathematical formulas, this work is virtu- ally guaranteed to induce somnolence in even the most ardent enthusiast for the the- ory of structures.

Dennis Rouvray

Endeavour Vol. 21(i) 1997 47