DO ELEPHANTS HAVE KNEES?: And Other Stories of Darwinian Origins, whimsical explainer of Darwin's famous theory

DO ELEPHANTS HAVE KNEES?: And Other Stories of Darwinian Origins
CHARLES R. AULT, JR.
Cornell University Press
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Thinking whimsically makes serious science accessible. That's a message that should be taken to heart by all readers who want to learn about evolution. Do Elephants Have Knees? invites readers into serious appreciation of Darwinian histories by deploying the playful thinking found in children's books. Charles R. Ault Jr. weds children's literature to recent research in paleontology and evolutionary biology. Inquiring into the origin of origins stories, Ault presents three portraits of Charles Darwin curious child, twentysomething adventurer, and elderly worm scientist. Essays focusing on the origins of tetrapods, elephants, whales, and birds explain fundamental Darwinian concepts (natural selection, for example) with examples of fossil history and comparative anatomy.

The imagery of the children's story offers a way to remember and recreate scientific discoveries. By juxtaposing Darwin's science with tales for children, Do Elephants Have Knees? underscores the importance of whimsical storytelling to the accomplishment of serious thinking. Charles Darwin mused about duck beaks and swimming bears as he imagined a pathway for the origin of baleen. A "bearduck" chimera may be a stretch, but the science linking not just cows but also whales to moose through shared ancestry has great merit. Teaching about shared ancestry may begin with attention to Bernard Wiseman's Morris the Moose. Morris believes that cows and deer are fine examples of moose because they all have four legs and things on their heads. No whale antlers are known, but fossils of four-legged whales are. By calling attention to surprising and serendipitous echoes between children's stories and challenging science, Ault demonstrates how playful thinking opens the doors to an understanding of evolutionary thought.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: One third concise, accessible potted biography of Charles Darwin, two-thirds essays offering new, if odd, pathways to contextualizing Darwin's famous Theory of Evolution by means of natural selection. It's enjoyably presented, contains enough illustrative figures to give the reader a sense of what they're reading about, and makes its science plain.

I really don't get the inclusion of quotes from kidlit. It's not always apt, at least it wasn't so to me, but it really didn't ever detract from my reading of Dr. Ault's stories. If you, like I did, think this book is aimed at younger audiences, get that misconception out of your head now. Maybe a high-school senior at the youngest, more likely a not-very-science-oriented twentysomething is at the sweet spot. The older reader whose science education is behind the curve will get a lot out of the read because it's packed with reasonably current science. Really good analogies and examples bring meaning to often abstract concepts. The vocabulary pulls no punches, so have your preferred reference source handy. There are endnotes aplenty, and the index actually functioned as an index...it was, after all, published by a university press. All of this, on top of the popular-science tone of the author's presentation, gave me a very enjoyable reading experience.

This review was written in 2017 and posted to my Science, Dinosaurs, & Environmental Issues tab. I've moved it to facilitate my indexing project.