Dino Gangs, Josh Young

Based on the work of Philip J. Currie, the man who helped to found the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller (a very worthwhile visit if you find yourself in Alberta), this book goes into various aspects of dinosaur life, mostly focusing on the tyrannosaurid Tarbosaurus. The main theme is Currie’s theory that they hunted as a pack, based on several lines of evidence such as finding articulated skeletons apparently buried at the same time, the high proportion of predators in the landscape, etc.

Unfortunately, there are two problems with this book. One is the repetition. The other is the fact that evidence contradicting Currie’s theories is presented several times, and then ignored — like the fact that the bonebeds might show a high proportion of Tarbosaurus, but their trackways comprise only 5% of the estimated population. And the fact that Komodo dragons devour their prey whole, which would lead to deposition of more predator remains than prey, even though prey are actually more abundant. Or the fact that the geologists aren’t at all sure the bodies were deposited at the same time.

I have no problem with the idea of dinosaurs as pack animals, but there seem to be some serious objections to Currie’s reasoning, which this book rather skims past as if they don’t matter. The way Young portrays Currie, it’s as though he pounces on things that confirm his ideas, and dismisses other things because they don’t fit with his ideas — the marks of a terrible scientist. Currie is widely respected, so that may well not be true, but that was definitely the impression I got here.

There are interesting more general bits of info about palaeontology, other aspects of Tarbosaurus, the realities of fieldwork… but mostly I’d stick with The Tyrannosaur Chronicles for something that feels a bit more solid.

Rating: 3/5

Words and Rules, Steven Pinker

If you’ve read The Language Instinct, you don’t really need to read this book. It’s very much the same theory, with perhaps some different examples, maybe a slightly different slant. Reading it, there was nothing new to me, and I think that it isn’t new because it was all covered in The Language Instinct (though it may be some other books have filled in some gaps in my knowledge before this, in the interim).

Pinker’s work is reasonably easy to read and well-illustrated with examples; he’s very convincing in the way he sets forth his ideas, which does make me rather tempted to find someone who disagrees with him equally convincingly and see what I think after that. Any ideas, friends?

Rating: 3/5

How We Live and Why We Die, Lewis Wolpert

The front of the book blurbs this as ‘a layperson’s guide to the world within us’, and that’s exactly what this is: it’s an accessible, easy to read, whistle-stop tour of cells in the human body, and some of the history surrounding how we’ve come to understand them. If you’ve read almost anything else on the topic, there’s probably nothing new here — but if you’re revising for an exam, you could do worse than spending some time with it. Wolpert manages to explain some complex things very cogently: for example, how enzymes work in breaking bonds, changing molecules, etc.

For me, this was a bit too much of a skimming of the surface — this is stuff I know to the point where I don’t even have to look it up anymore. But for someone not that experienced in biology, or trying to refresh their memory, it’d be perfect.

Rating: 3/5