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RE: [escepticos] RE: Libros para vacaciones.
----------
> De: Eduardo Zotes Sarmiento <diotalle en jet.es>
> A: escepticos en CCDIS.dis.ulpgc.es
> Asunto: [escepticos] RE: Libros para vacaciones.
> Fecha: domingo 2 de agosto de 1998 12:21
>
> ----------
> > De: Marmitako <palenzuo en ava.bcc.orst.edu>
> > A: escepticos en CCDIS.dis.ulpgc.es
> > Asunto: Libros para vacaciones. Era: Re: [escepticos] **el color de la piel
> > Fecha: jueves 30 de julio de 1998 7:48
>
> > [ ... ]
>
> > Desde luego, no empieces por "El gen egoista (Dawkins)", cosa que hace mucha
> > gente que, con frecuencia, adquiere por ello una vision equivoca de los genes y la
> > evolucion que le dura para siempre.
>
> Como buen *librofilo compulsivo* tengo unos monton de libros esperando a ser leido,
> lo mio no es grabe solo 6, y uno de ellos es el de Dawkins. Asi que quiza espere...
>
> > Te pido un favor: si lo encuentras publicado en Castellano, te agradeceria
> > si me dijeras la editorial, el precio y, si fuera posible, el nombre del
> > traductor.
>
> Como pasa en multitud de ocasiones, me temo que todavia no esta disponible en
> español. De David Quammen aqui solo tenemos "La Configuración Zolta" (1984)
> de Bruguera. Aunque ya esta agotado.
>
> Pero para los que se apañen con el idioma de los anglos, usease el english, les
> aconsejo que se lo pillen en B&N, por el precio mas que nada (13.60$ + 12.95$,
> precio y transporte respectivamente unas 3717 pts. Eso con el Intenational
> Airmail Service que tarda entre 7 y 21 dias. Se pueden pagar solo 1.95$ pero
> el periodo de recepcion es de 4 a 10 semanas. Por 7$ (980pts) vale la pena.
> Y por 6937 pts lo teneis en casa entre 1 y 5 dias. jeje).
>
> En fin... Yo creo que me lo pedire junto con "Intelectual Impostures" de Sokal, por
> supuesto... jeje...
Otra cosa...
La critica del libro en el prestigioso magazin literario...
===========================================================
The New York Times of Book
The Rules of Extinction
Date: April 21, 1996, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Robert Kanigel
Lead:
HE SONG OF THE DODO
Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions.
By David Quammen.
Illustrated. 702 pp. New York:
Scribner. $32.50.
Slice up a fine Persian carpet into a few dozen neat rectangular pieces.
The swatches may together occupy the same area as they did before. But
your carpet no longer exists. You're left with a pile of worthless tatters
and scraps. With this beguiling thought experiment, David Quammen
begins ''The Song of the Dodo,'' his magnificent account of island
biogeography -- a science that is not only about islands but about the
whole fabric of the natural world. That fabric, the author warns, is
unraveling, as once-unbroken expanses of woods, jungle and grassland,
home to untold species of plant and animal life, are sliced up into industrial
parks, housing developments, farms, parking lots, malls, roads. And
maybe here and there a nature preserve.
Text:
But a nature preserve, Mr. Quammen shows, is not nature in miniature,
however much it might awe a human visitor, for in its isolation and limited
extent, it functions as an island. And islands consign animal and plant
species to extinction.
In 1598, Dutch explorers stopping in Mauritius, the small island 500 miles
off the east coast of Madagascar, found a profusion of large-headed,
big-butted flightless birds we call dodos and they called walckv<?>gel.
That's Dutch for ''disgusting bird,'' though they were not so disgusting that
nobody would eat them. A pair of the 30-pound creatures could feed a
whole ship's crew. ''We can imagine the shipboard menu,'' Mr. Quammen
writes in one of the madcap imaginative flights to which he sometimes
gives vent -- ''boiled dodo, roast dodo, pickled dodo, kippered dodo,
dodo hash.'' Humans, though, weren't the dodo's only enemies. Later
settlers brought pigs and monkeys to the island, and these may have
devoured the eggs of the ground-nesting birds. In any case, ''the song of
the dodo, if it had one, has been lost to human memory.'' In 1662 a
Dutchman briefly marooned on the island gave the last credible
eyewitness account of a living dodo.
The dodo is extinct. So are the tigers of Bali. And 45 species of bird on
Barro Colorado Island. And hundreds of other island species. In the case
of the dodos, humans played a major role. But that humans can be
rapacious and shortsighted is not Mr. Quammen's point, at least not here.
It's that dodos and other species met their end on islands. By one
measure, he writes, ''an island bird faces about 50 times as great a
likelihood of extinction as a mainland bird.''
Lapped by the waves, distant from the mainland, most islands are isolated
and, relatively speaking, small. Strange, wonderful things happen on them.
To Mr. Quammen, the delicious quirks of evolution on the Galpagos
Islands, with their finches, iguanas and tortoises ''familiar to anyone who
can find PBS with a remote control,'' are not unusual but, instead,
''prototypically ordinary.'' At one juncture, Mr. Quammen simply lists
bizarre creatures native only to islands, ranging from a tree-climbing
kangaroo on New Guinea to a rattle-less rattlesnake on Santa Catalina in
the Gulf of California to a carnivorous parrot that preys on sheep in New
Zealand. For two pages he goes on like that. ''Geographical isolation,'' he
writes, ''is the flywheel of evolution.'' And islands have it.
But isolation endangers, too. Just as island species are more apt to take
on bizarre, resplendent forms, they're also more apt to disappear. ''The
evolution of strange species on islands,'' Mr. Quammen writes, ''casts light
onto its dark double, which is the ultimate subject of this book: the
extinction of species in a world that has been hacked into pieces.'' On the
mainland, drought, disease or a glut of predators may kill many members
of a species, but rarely all. Large populations, widely spread, absorb the
damage. Ultimately, they bounce back. Sheer abundance gives species a
better chance of long-term survival. But on islands? Well, if something
goes wrong, it's big trouble. A new predator is introduced? A disease
takes hold? Humans arrive? An island offers little margin for error.
Numbers drop and, too frequently, the species edges into what Mr.
Quammen calls ''the precondition to extinction'' -- rarity. Then chance
takes over -- too few females in a few too many litters, an abnormally dry
rainy season, and presto, extinction.
Mr. Quammen's subtitle is ''Island Biogeography in an Age of
Extinctions.'' As the author and many scientists to whom he turns make
clear, islands are the small stage on which can be seen portents of a larger
tragedy. Islands represent what humankind is making out of the world, as
great continental masses ecologically come to resemble South Pacific
atolls, and so threaten extinction to species uncountable.
In the 16th century the Portuguese came to a 500,000-square-mile tract
of unspoiled tropical forest along the Atlantic coast of Brazil, across high
plains from the more famous Amazon rain forest. They started out by
growing sugar cane. Settlements followed, then mining towns, and cleared
fields for cattle grazing. And steel mills, which needed charcoal, which
meant cutting down more forest. Then hydroelectric dams and highways
and urban sprawl. Today only about 5 per cent of the original forest
remains -- most of it, Mr. Quammen writes, ''in small strips and patches
on hilltops, temporarily protected by inconvenience.''
Brown howler monkeys, masked titis and golden lion tamarins, among
other primate species, still live in the region. But many are now
endangered. When the Portuguese landed, perhaps 400,000 muriqui
monkeys lived there. By 1972, their numbers had dropped to about
2,000, and by 1987, in one count, to 386 -- split into 11 scattered
patches of forest. Portrayed on a map, they seem ''like a lonely little
archipelago protruding above the ghost of Atlantis.''
Another soppy environmentalist tract, reeking of snail darters and spotted
owls, earnest unto death? Well, to indulge in one of Mr. Quammen's own
writerly mannerisms, let's stop right here for a moment to correct that
misapprehension. A former Rhodes scholar, an award-winning essayist
for Outside magazine and the author of two collections of articles and
essays and of three novels, Mr. Quammen is, by trade, neither
professional environmentalist nor scientist. He is a writer. And the book
he has worked on for 10 years is intelligent, playful and refreshingly free
of cant.
Yes, he revels in his tales of exotic species, he loves rolling their Latin
names around on his tongue. Yes, he has a message. But he entertains us
all the while, serving up an epic adventure of the mind and spirit. We join
him as he gapes at giant tortoises in Mauritius, tracks komodo dragons in
Indonesia, collects ants on an island off the coast of Baja California,
surveys from the air the clear-cut rain forest of the Amazon. And we
accompany him intellectually, too, through theories, conjectures and
experiments of naturalists all the way back to Alfred Russel Wallace and
Darwin himself.
Blemishes to the performance? A few. Why, one asks, his habitual use of
four-letter words? In a thousand other contexts, such language might
sound just right. But not here. In a book that otherwise achieves such
harmony between feeling and intellect, word and idea, these small, errant
intrusions sound jarring off-notes. Then, too, perhaps Mr. Quammen
didn't have to pile up examples quite so high. Also, the book's 178
numbered sections, each a few pages long, end as cliffhangers a little too
predictably. And sometimes -- as when he tells of getting mugged in Rio
de Janeiro -- his personal adventures, however entertaining, don't quite fit
the larger story.
Still, in Mr. Quammen's hands, the bad news of species extinction
unaccountably uplifts. For it reminds us of nature's sheer, ornery diversity,
and why it needs to be preserved. We share in the excitement of a new
scientific discipline aborning. By book's end, we glean hints of hope that
the future may not be entirely bleak.
''The Song of the Dodo'' follows no straight narrative line. It loops back
on itself, develops themes, returns to them, plays them out in different
ways. Repetitious? No, not unless you call Bach repetitious. Think of it,
rather, as variations on an irresistible theme. You could, I suppose, pick it
up anywhere, read 150 pages and come away with a good grasp of its
main ideas. But then you might miss the komodo dragons tearing apart the
goat in a staged feeding for tourists.
Here, in this richly elaborated work of a literary craftsman, we find
rejoinder enough to the noisy claims of headline, hyperlink, computer icon
and sound bite. Here is what a book can be.
===========================================================
=====>
EDUARDO ZOTES SARMIENTO
SDAC Sociedad para el Desarrollo de la Actitud Cientifica
SDAC WebSite -- http://sdac.home.ml.org/
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