Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? by Susannah Gibson

This is a book about what happened when science discovered the creatures inbetween the kingdoms of life, and inbetween life and death: polyps, Venus flytraps, and fossils. It's really about fitting nature with words, and what happens when the words are old wineskins that cannot contain new wine. Yet the author's focus is on nature, not on the human minds observing nature, which are far more interesting. The human-mind debates about God's action and nature of creation are so simplified as to almost evaporate away. I enjoyed the descriptions of the experiments the scientists did, but the author takes an Epicurean view of "what it all means"* as such a foregone conclusion that the history ends up as static as the old fossils described in Chapter 4. Just as the old experiments challenged the old scientists, the new experiments of the unity underlying the different kingdoms should challenge us in the opposite direction: polyps, Venus flytraps, and fossils all use essentially the same amino acids, sugars, and genetic code. That means something. But this book is all description and no challenge or extension. It assumes an opposition between God and matter that isn't necessary, and then assumes because we know a lot about matter that we have no need for God. That's fine for Laplace but I'd like to think about what it means for us today. It means so much more than this book gives it a chance to mean.

*Greenblatt's The Swerve is quoted admirably. See my review of that book for what I think of that!