Flaws of Nature, Andy Dobson
Flaws of Nature is about the weird stuff that happens due to evolution — the famous cases where an organism is far from perfectly designed, like the long nerve in the necks of giraffes, or the fact that dolphins and whales can’t actually breathe underwater (which seems like a bit of a drawback, even if they have a workaround and things seem to work out for them). It’s not just a litany of interesting facts, though: instead Dobson’s interested in why and how this stuff might evolve this way.
For the most part, this is explained accessibly, through examples and a little bit of math. Nothing I struggled with, and I’m not great with figures, so definitely still accessible to a layperson. And there are some interesting random facts among all of those examples (the multiple jaws of fish were new to me; I thought that was unique to morays).
One thing that irritated me quite a bit was the constant footnotes, and the format of them. *** and **** aren’t sufficiently different to make it swiftly obvious which footnote I want to look at: numbers would be much, much better.
Overall, it seemed pretty solid to me, if obviously sometimes rather simplifying matters. It has a bibliography which looks fairly thorough, albeit not numbered references. I found it interesting.
Argh, yes, if Dobson or his editor don’t know how to use proper footnote symbols, then numbers would be better. The correct order of symbols is *, †, ‡, §, ‖, ¶ and then you can double them in that order. Unless this was an e-book, in which case all bets are off since HTML still doesn’t have a good way to handle footnotes (it can handle the symbols, but since the linking is a mess, numbers are better anyway).
Faranae recently posted…A book involving algorithms, formulas, or spells
Physical book. It was suuuuch a mess to read, it was infuriating.