Review by Choice Review
Historical biogeography is the study of how organisms' distributions have changed through time. Since plate tectonics was accepted in the 1960s, this field has been dominated by vicariance biogeography, which explains distributions by landmass fragmentation via continental drift. However, many recent molecular clock studies have not supported such scenarios, with branching points for many organisms postdating the breakup of the landmasses on which they are found. These cases support dispersal scenarios that often involve long-distance (chance) dispersal across major barriers, including oceans. In his study, evolutionary biologist de Queiroz (Univ. of Nevada, Reno) expected to find more evidence of vicariance, but instead found many recent analyses supporting long-distance overwater dispersal via rafting or island hopping; these ocean crossings appeared to be much more common than expected. This finding led to the goal of this fascinating book, in which the author explains how the field transitioned from an extreme vicariance perspective to being more balanced in acknowledging the significance of long-distance dispersal across oceans. The four-section book covers the history of the field, molecular clock studies, examples of long-distance dispersal/ocean crossings that led to the transition in the field, and broader implications of the new, balanced view. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above in biology; general readers. E. J. Sargis Yale University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THIS BOOK BEGINS with a small struggle in an arroyo near the southern tip of Baja California. It's June 2000, and the author and his girlfriend, Tara, are trying to pull a snake from a hole. She's gripping it by the neck. He's reaching down the snake's body trying to gain purchase. "The process is exhausting," Alan de Queiroz writes, "not because it's physically difficult, but because we're fighting against the will of another being; with each pull I feel the snake resisting." Out comes a huge black garter snake, three and a half feet long. They pop her into a pillowcase, and de Queiroz takes her home to study. (He's an evolutionary biologist who teaches at the University of Nevada.) De Queiroz knows that this particular species is found only at the southern tip of the peninsula and on mainland Mexico, which is 120 miles away across the Sea of Cortez. The question that intrigues him is this: How did that snake's ancestors get across all that water? De Queiroz and Tara are married now. Recently he hung a big map on their wall, "The World of Wild Animals." Ostensibly, it's for their children, he says, but he's the only one who keeps looking at it. There's a rhea in South America and an ostrich in Africa, staring at each other across the Atlantic. There's also a mandrill in Central Africa and a South American capuchin doing the same. These birds are cousins; so are the monkeys, and so are tens of thousands of other species of animals and plants that are now separated by the world's oceans. How did that happen? All of them have been forced apart at some point in the past by a process as implacable and incomprehensible as Alan and Tara must have seemed to that snake in the hole. When I picked up this entertaining book, I thought I knew the answers to these questions. Charles Darwin did a beautiful if funky series of experiments at his country house in Kent, to explain how plants and animals might have crossed the oceans. In his day, the reigning explanation was supernatural: God put them there. Darwin's thinking was more mundane. In the mid-1850s, he filled bottles with salt water, and added seeds and plants to find out how long they'd float, and whether they could soak in brine for months and still germinate. The seeds proved to be hardy and so did Darwin. "It is quite surprising that the Radishes shd have grown," he wrote to a friend, "for the salt water was putrid to an extent, which I cd not have thought credible had I not smelt it myself." Darwin concluded that seeds could have floated across large bodies of water on the rafts and mats of vegetation that often drift out of the mouths of the world's great rivers, and animals could have traveled with them on Darwin's arks. In other smelly experiments he demonstrated that seeds could also have traveled across water in the gizzards of seabirds. Hatchling freshwater snails could have made the crossing clinging to the webs of ducks' feet. And so on. One generation after Darwin, a young explorer and meteorologist named Alfred Wegener reduced these mysteries still further. "Please look at a map of the world!" he wrote to his fiancée. "Does not the east coast of South America fit exactly with the west coast of Africa as if they had formerly been joined?" Other people had noticed that before, but Wegener made a study of it. He concluded, correctly, that our present continents must all once have been part of a single supercontinent, which has since come to be called Pangaea. When Pangaea broke up, innumerable species of plants and animals were slowly rafted apart by continental drift. In the 1960s, Wegener's radical vision of the earth's history was vindicated by the new science of plate tectonics. By that time, what with Darwin's arks and Wegener's jigsaw puzzles, most scientists thought they understood the essential principles of biogeography, which is the study of the distributions of the world's animals and plants. That's the way I thought things stood to this day, until I read "The Monkey's Voyage." But there was a peculiar episode in biogeography back in the 1950s and '60s, a sort of mutiny on the Beagle. De Queiroz makes quite a tale of it. It seems a little gang of Young Turks in biogeography got so excited by plate tectonics that they concluded that continental drift explains everything. They threw Darwin overboard, and his stinking radishes with him. It was a '60s thing. One of the revolutionaries, a passionate Italian botanist named Léon Croizat, wrote that Darwin was "a very unhappy thinker," "congenitally not a thinker," "essentially not a thinker," "not born a thinker," "anything but a thinker" (italics Croizat's). Another hothead, a Swedish entomologist named Lars Brundin, an expert on midges, railed against the "negative, sterile and superficial" thinking of Darwin's followers, "troubled biogeographers." Biogeography was in turmoil. Fortunately, in the 1980s, DNA evidence resolved the controversy. Consider that black garter snake from the tip of Baja, for instance. Its DNA reveals that it parted from its family on the coast of the Mexican mainland a few hundred thousand years ago. But geologists know that the Sea of Cortez began forming millions of years ago. So the snakes couldn't have been pulled apart because of plate tectonics. They must have drifted across the sea on one of Darwin's arks. IT SEEMS DARWIN and Wegener were both right after all. DNA evidence proves that an amazing number of species got where they are today on precarious rides across bodies of water. The book's centerpiece is the incredible journey of the New World monkeys. According to the best DNA estimates, monkeys crossed the Atlantic from Africa to South America roughly 40 million years ago. At that time, the continents were only about half as far apart as they are today. The shortest distance between them was probably only 900 miles. It's likely that there were also a number of islands, now submerged, that might have offered a chance rest stop or two along the way. Given favorable winds and currents, a big raft of vegetation with trees growing out of it could have crossed the Atlantic in just a couple of weeks. "A raft from Africa reaches the South American shore, some exhausted monkeys amble off and, over millions of years, give rise to squirrel monkeys, howlers and capuchins, owl-eyed night monkeys, and baldheaded uakaris," de Queiroz writes. It's a wonderful story to contemplate, very high up on the ladder of unlikelihood, but it probably happened. De Queiroz writes in a pleasant, relaxed style. If anything, his book's organization is a little too relaxed for my taste, with charts, maps, photographs and sidebars defining technical terms scattered throughout, and big blocks of anecdotes in italics tacked on at the end of each chapter. It reads like an eclectic scrapbook, full of interesting bits from hither and yon. But then, that's life. 'A raft from Africa reaches the South American shore; some exhausted monkeys amble off.' JONATHAN WEINER is the author, most recently, of "Long for This World." He teaches at Columbia Journalism School.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 5, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Even Darwin thought it far-fetched that is, his proposal that ocean-crossing is why similar species that can't swim or fly are found on oceanic islands and both sides of great oceans. But ocean-crossing how? On what? So when plate tectonics was accepted, some of his successor scientists leaped upon it, arguing that the splitting up of the supercontinent Gondwanaland was how terrestrial cousins wound up on widely separated dry lands. Problem is, molecular dating indicates that the big breakup occurred tens of millions of years before those specific cousins or even their common ancestors evolved. Hence, for the better part of the last hundred years, debate has raged between dispersalists (ocean-crossing advocates) and vicariance biogeographers (continental-drift advocates). Evolutionary biologist de Queiroz is unapologetically dispersalist but hardly triumphalist about it. As he tells the story, which is as much about the discipline of biogeography as about the dispute, there is no reason for either side to ever proclaim victory. The earth's animals and plants consist of both Gondwanan relics and plenty indeed, a preponderance of species that have developed ever since the present continents and islands formed. Deciding which are which constitutes a story full of intriguing discoveries that de Queiroz, a fluent and spellbinding popular-science writer, agglomerates into the narrative spine of a book brimming with fascination.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Biogeography, the study of the geographical distribution of living things, has been of interest since at least the time of the Greeks. In his entertaining and enlightening book, evolutionary biologist de Queiroz demonstrates that despite this longstanding interest in the subject, the discipline has resisted an organizing paradigm. De Queiroz comprehensively describes the shift, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, from Darwin's belief that long-distance dispersal was the dominant explanation for biogeographic patterns to the rise of those promoting vicariance-the belief that environmental fragmentation is responsible for observed patterns-and back again to promoting long distance dispersal. He cogently describes the science underlying these ideas, the nature of continental drift, the complexity of molecular clocks, and the mathematics of cladistics, explaining why he believes the only reasonable interpretation for current data is an acceptance of rare, long-distance dispersal events that can only be called "mysterious" and "miraculous," including the book's eponymous monkeys accidentally crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Beyond the actual science, de Queiroz brings insight into the nature of scientific discourse itself. B&w figures throughout. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Evolutionary biologist de Queiroz (adjunct faculty, Univ. of Nevada, Reno) presents a fascinating exploration of the field of biogeography-the study of the distribution of living things-and one of its most fundamental concerns: What explains the presence of closely related lineages on land masses separated by oceans or seas? According to de Queiroz, two schools of thought have battled for decades about the answer, one claiming that these species are ancient "relicts" of the breakup of the Mesozoic supercontinent Gondwana and the other arguing that all sorts of plants and animals have actually crossed ocean barriers, in some cases floating on mats of vegetation. He concludes with a discussion of how such chance events as ocean crossings can have massive effects on the diversification of life forms. An excellent storyteller, de Queiroz dramatically weaves the historical development of various scientific tropes-continental drift, plate tectonics, molecular dating, and mass extinctions-together with his own research interests and details of his far-flung travels. VERDICT This provocative book will appeal to fans of the late paleontologist and evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould's writing (e.g., Wonderful Life) and to non-specialists interested in the long history of life on Earth.-Cynthia Lee Knight, formerly with Hunterdon Cty. Lib., Flemington, NJ (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An evolutionary biologist disputes the hegemonic theory of how animals have populated the planet, challenging prevailing assumptions about the time frame in which species separations necessarily occurred. De Queiroz suggests that in many instances, species, migration has occurred much more recently than has been commonly accepted. He and his associates have taken advantage of modern methods of genetic sequencing to improve on previous estimates. They have refined the notion of a molecular clock--previously dependent on retrieving DNA from fossils and correlating this with geological evidence--to determine the evolution of new species more accurately by estimating the rate of mutation separating the genomes of presently related species. He cites his own studies of related species of garter snakes and similar research on monkeys, which indicate that they evolved over a much shorter time span. At the time, when these land-based species began to evolve independently (presumably because their habitats had diverged), there were no continental connections, such as land bridges, to account for their migrations. The author collected garter snakes from two species found on opposite sides of the wide Sea of Cortez. After sequencing their mitochondrial genes, he determined that they would have separated approximately a few hundred thousand years ago rather than the generally accepted estimate of 4 million years ago. Therefore, he suggests--judging by ocean currents and winds--that one or more snakes must have traveled from the mainland over a 120-mile sea by clinging to a naturally formed raft. Other recent genetic studies of two similar monkey species lend credibility to the author's unlikely hypothesis that such ocean crossings can account for long-distance colonization, despite the statistical improbability. De Queiroz disputes scientific theories based on outdated evidence and offers an in-depth critique of intelligent design. An intriguing window into the ongoing academic debate about evolution.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
