The Ghosts of Evolution, Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms

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This new area of evolutionary research shows how the effects of long-extinct animals can still be seen all around us in the Americas. In this scientific but intensely personal book, Barlow explains how fruiting plants such as the Osage orange and the honey locust are still waiting, after all these years, for their partners, the great beasts -- mammoths, giant ground sloths, early horses, and even camels -- that once dominated the American landscape. The plants had evolved their large, tasty fruits to entice the mammals to carry their seeds to some (hopefully) auspicious new location. The book is illustrated with poignant photographs of the plants with the fossilized remains of their long-departed partners.

Peter S. White

The Ghosts of Evolution will enrich your understanding of our time and place in nature.

Carl Zimmer

Carries readers back to those glorious Pleistocene days, not with fossils but with the fruits and beetles and other organisms that coexisted with them and still bear their evolutionary marks today.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In 1982, respected ecologists Dan Janzen and Paul Martin published a short, provocative paper in the journal Science, asserting that many fruits found in Central American forests "are adapted primarily for animals that have been extinct for thirteen thousand years." As those species went the way of the dodo, the fruits lost their initial means of dispersal, but continued to eke out a system of procreation, Janzen and Martin explained. Their insight led to the methodological realization that to fully understand the evolutionary forces shaping these fruits, scientists must first determine the behavior of the extinct animals. Science writer Barlow (From Gaia to Selfish Genes) extends this compelling idea into a narrative stretching from the Pleistocene era up through the inception, rejection and gradual, partial acceptance of this theory by the ecological science community. The large, pendulous seedpods of a honey locust, Barlow shows, evoke the ghosts of mammoths that used to disperse the seeds. Although there are some beautiful passages, too often the writing is precious and repetitive. Barlow details her own rather simplistic observations of certain plants e.g., persimmon, osage orange and ginkgo whose anachronistic existence is similar to the Central American fruits, but she does not contribute significantly to the underlying theory. Janzen and Martin explained their ideas in nine pages. Barlow, with 20 years of hindsight and 25 times as many pages, embellishes the story convincingly but doesn't add much new information. Photos not seen by PW. (May 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

The world is always a better place for having people in it who ask "Why?" This child-like inquiry often can poke a hole through the wall of ignorance and open up whole realms of study. Ecologist Dan Janzen saw that many large tropical fruits simply fell and rotted, "going nowhere." There were no animals large enough to eat and consequently disperse them through normal means. Why? Were the animals that evolved along with these trees long gone? What animals were they and why did they vanish? How did the trees survive without them—and what flora went extinct with the animals? Dan Janzen wrote a surprisingly controversial article with Paul Martin (writer of this book's foreword) that led, 20 years later, to Connie Barlow's expanded investigation. "The Age of Great Mammals has indeed ended everywhere except southern Africa and patches of tropical Asia... in Europe and non-tropical regions of Asia, it petered out in steps between 50,000 and 15,000 years ago, when the straight tusked elephants, woolly mammoths, rhinos and other great beasts of the Pleistocene epoch vanished... North America lost 68 percent of its genetic richness..." Barlow goes on to list the "missing partners" of many fruit, including most notably the avocado and the honey locust (with its large, sweet-tasting pods) and makes us almost long for repletion of what was once an American Serengeti. In fact (in a gear shift present in the book), there are those who would like to "restart the evolution of an extinct order, the proboscideans: the elephants, the mammoths, the mastodons." Russian scientist Sergei Zimov is hoping to bring Canadian wood bison, reindeer and moose back to Siberia after 2,000 years, creating their ownPleistocene Park. This is heady stuff, but fascinating. It is startling to realize that just 200 years ago "Western humans had no awareness of extinction." Thomas Jefferson truly thought and hoped that Lewis and Clark would discover mammoths. "Such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of animals to become extinct..." Jefferson was unfortunately wrong, but one can't fault him for the dream. There are several dreamers—backed by scientific observation—in The Ghosts of Evolution. It will be interesting to see where their dreams take us. Recommended for all libraries. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Perseus, Basic Books, 291p. illus. bibliog. index., Gillen

Booknews

Scientists have long realized that some inherited traits were evolved for conditions that no longer exist, but American science writer Barlow looks at a particular set of cases: fruit in the Americas that were designed to be eaten, so dispersing seeds, by animals that are long extinct. In particular, she looks at such trees as the avocado, honey locust, and ginkgo whose partners were large mammals<-- >elephants, ground sloths, and others<-->that died out suddenly about 13,000 years ago. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)