Science News - April 24, 2010

Here Be Dragons

Dennis McCarthy

Most people believe “Here be dragons” appears on ancient maps as a warning of the dangers rife in unexplored or unfamiliar regions. But the phrase is found on no such maps and on only one small globe, McCarthy reveals in his book, which chronicles how real creatures got to be where they are and the significance of their movements. In fact, the phrase etched over Southeast Asia on that 16th century globe may be less a warning than a note about the range of the world’s largest lizard, a creature commonly known as the Komodo dragon.

In this fascinating and revelatory book, the author explains how certain species ended up in their present geographic locations and how studying this distribution has driven revolutions in earth and life sciences.

This study of where plants and animals live now and have lived in the past is formally known as biogeography,

The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our
Search for Alien Intelligence

Paul Davies

After 50 years of scanning the skies for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers have only silence to report — an eerie silence, Davies argues.

Part history of the search, part road
map for its future and (large) part
mind-stretching exercise, the book
provides Davies’ perspective on pro-
found questions that
have implications
far beyond alien
hunting. Is life inevi-
table? What about
intelligence? How
long do advanced
civilizations last?
What would happen
if alien cultures met?

Though these questions have been asked before, Davies, a cosmologist, recaps recent thinking and describes new scientific investigations. He uses the lack of clear answers to call for a shake-

and this science above all else led
Darwin to conceive the theory of evo-
lution, McCarthy writes. Biogeography
also lends strong support to the theory
of plate tectonics, which explains the
long-term drift, separation and colli-
sion of continents,
processes that time
after time have
triggered climatic
changes and stimu-
lated the evolution
of new species.

McCarthy persuasively argues that

biogeography is more than just the place where evolution, plate tectonics, oceanography and climatology meet: It is a way of looking at the world that links all of these sciences together. Earth and life have evolved together, he contends, a process that has affected the distributions of ancient fossils, modern species and even the fates of human societies. — Sid Perkins

Oxford Univ. Press, 2010, 214 p., $29.95.

up in current efforts to search for life beyond Earth. Since no one can predict the nature of other intelligence, he says, scientists from all fields should look for subtle signatures of societies rather than direct communication via radio waves or some other familiar technology.

Davies makes a good case for a broader approach, but his hypothetical examples of alien footprints seem a little wild. What if, for example, the reason scientists haven’t detected some of the subatomic particles predicted by theory is that the particles were abducted by aliens? And he suggests that some intelligence may be postbiological — a quantum computer, perhaps, lingering in the coldest reaches of the galaxy. Though his ideas seem fantastical, Davies’ tongue-in-cheek approach is entertaining and serves a grander purpose: to encourage readers to think less about life as we know it and more about life as we don’t know it. — Elizabeth Quill

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade, 2010, 288 p., $27.

50 Great Myths of
Popular Psychology
S.O. Lilienfeld, S.J.
Lynn, J. Ruscio and
B.L. Beyerstein
Psychologists team
up to debunk popular
urban legends in that field. Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010, 332 p., $26.95.

Duel at Dawn:
Heroes, Martyrs, and
the Rise of Modern
Mathematics

Amir Alexander
The Romantic Age
zeitgeist profoundly
influenced modern mathematicians,
a science historian argues. Harvard
Univ. Press, 2010, 320 p., $28.95.