by Mark V. Lomolino, Brett R. Riddle, Robert J. Whittaker, and James ...

Biogeography by Mark V. Lomolino, Brett R. Riddle, Robert J. Whittaker, and James H.BrownBiogeography by Mark V. Lomolino; Brett R. Riddle; Robert J. Whittaker; James H. BrownReview by: Rafe M. BrownThe Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 87, No. 2 (June 2012), pp. 153-154Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/665420 .Accessed: 27/06/2012 07:17Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org..The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheQuarterly Review of Biology.http://www.jstor.org

June 2012 NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKS153research program misleadingly named the Censusof Marine Life. Not a census but rather a muchgrander global ocean exploration in space andtime, the recently completed initiative included 17different international projects with names such asHistory of Marine Animal Populations and TopPredators, engaging roughly 2,700 researchers,launching more than 500 expeditions, producingthousands of scientific publications, adding over1000 species to scientific awareness and, I dare say,having some great fun.That is not conjecture. Over the course of severalbooks (as an independent writer), I workedwith some of the researchers studying tuna, seaturtles, and albatrosses, and the intellectual interestwas matched by camaraderie, adventure, andphysical and conceptual beauty. They were learningthings both fundamental and entirely new.Where the animals go. How fast they travel. Whatcorridors they use. Where they stop. Things likethat. Our ignorance is so basic and pervasive, thatalmost anything could widen a scientist’s eyes. Indeepwater samples that Snelgrove’s team dredgedup off eastern Canada, half of the worm specieshad never been named. Other teams found livingblack corals that were already 1000 years old whenAristotle and Buddha were born.The Census pushed back the curtains of theunknown, and the view was magnificent. And althoughthe Census has concluded, the quest—andthe romance—continue.Carl Safina, School of Marine & Atmospheric Sciences,Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New YorkBiogeography. Fourth Edition.By Mark V. Lomolino, Brett R. Riddle, Robert J. Whittaker,and James H. Brown. Sunderland (Massachusetts):Sinauer Associates. $102.95. xiv 878 p.; ill.; index.ISBN: 978-0-87893-494-2. 2010.Recently my graduate students were teasing me forbeing old fashioned, subscribing to paper copyjournals, not owning a Web-enabled cell phone,and preferring not to communicate through socialnetworks. When I responded that I still enjoyedreading the printed word and that there wouldalways be a place in my heart for journals andtextbooks, one student quipped, “What’s a journal?”,while another joked, “What’s a textbook?”As I pondered the possibility of a world withouthardcopy teaching resources, I began writing thisreview, and soon became convinced that I had onmy desk a perfect model of all that I value in atextbook. The fourth edition of Lomolino et al.’ssensationally successful Biogeography provides anideal example of the heuristic value of a comprehensiveand synthetic summary of the disciplineswe now collectively call “biogeography.”Like the last edition, this volume is organizedinto six units, each with two or three chapters andeach representing major themes or subdisciplinesof biogeography. These range from the severalchapters on the geographic and ecological foundationsof the field, a set of chapters on biogeographyprocesses and Earth history, three chapterson evolutionary history of lineages and biotas, andchapters that address the fundamentals of ecologicalbiogeography. The book begins with an introductionto the discipline and excellent historicalreview, and concludes with two chapters (condenseddown from three in the last edition) onconservation biogeography, the geography of humanity,and future frontiers of the discipline. Thisvolume has it all.A major improvement in the fourth edition hasbeen the addition of color throughout. This hasresulted in beautiful color photography, vibrantchapter front pieces, colorful maps, and graphs, andnew, reworked line-art figures. Particularly welcomedis the addition of photographic portraits of mostspecies incorporated into their distribution mapsand the addition of satellite imagery insets, showingthe position of close-up maps in the context of a viewof Earth from space. Not only does the addition ofcolor make for a better appreciation of the organismalbiology in biogeography, but also it makes forenhanced reader understanding of several key seminalworks. For example, a student is much morelikely to appreciate the intricate detail in C. HartMerriam’s depiction of North American life zones orWilliam Smith’s delineation of the strata of Englandand Wales (“the map that changed the world”) if heor she sees these masterpieces, now reproduced intheir original color, in this edition.One thing that impresses me most with this workhas been the authors’ ability to stay current andincorporate the latest technological and conceptualadvances in the many subfields that contribute to thediscipline. This results in new, state-of-the-art materialadded to nearly all chapters. Examples includeenhanced information on GIS tools for distributionmapping, niche modeling, species’ range prediction,paleoreconstruction, and novel uses of remote sensingtechnology for new applications such as the study ofdispersal. Similarly, the authors have stayed abreast ofadvances in systematics, population genetics, and phylogeography,and have done a fine job of describing,for example, the significance of the recent revolutionin statistical phylogeography, the power of multilocusdatasets, advantages of incorporation of uncertaintydue to individual gene histories, and coalescent-basedapproaches to phylogeny estimation inbiogeography.Teaching a course as conceptually broad as biogeographyhas been challenging—one wants to

154 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGYVolume 87teach such an important class particularly well. Myclass is typically comprised of 25–30 students, andapproximately one-half are upper-division undergraduates,while the other half are first- andsecond-year graduate students. Interestingly, forseveral years now, half of my class has selfidentifiedthemselves as ecologists and the otherhalf systematists. As a systematist myself, a challengefor me has been to stay conceptually broad,with equal lecture and class time devoted to theecological side of biogeography. Lomolino et al.’stextbook provides the perfect structure, the rightbalance of topics, sufficient historical review, andan eloquent synthetic summary of recent advancesin the field. It makes for a great teaching tool, andalso a great reference for more advanced readers.It is also a perfect one-word answer for my smartaleckstudents.Rafe M. Brown, Ecology & Evolution and BiodiversityInstitute, University of Kansas, Lawrence,KansasEVOLUTIONIn the Light of Evolution. Volume IV: The HumanCondition. Based on a colloquium held in Irvine,California, 11-12 December 2009.Edited by John C. Avise and Francisco J. Ayala. Washington(DC): National Academies Press. $59.00.xvi 411 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-0-309-10405-0. 2010.This book is the fourth in a series initiated by theeditors, John Avise and Francisco Ayala, to exploreaspects of evolutionary biology, with particular referenceto areas that have a bearing on societal issuesand problems. It is based on a symposium held inDecember 2009 as part of the Darwin bicentennialcelebrations. The volume contains 16 papers by 42contributors, including geneticists, paleontologists,anthropologists, psychologists, and linguists. Mostof the papers are reviews or syntheses, but a fewpresent original research, such as Hancock et al.’spaper on genomic evidence for recent adaptation todiet and climate or Bryc et al.’s contribution ongenetic admixture in the founding of modern LatinAmerican populations.As with most symposium volumes, the contributionsvary widely. Jablonski and Chaplin have a fine review ofthe adaptiveness of skin pigmentation to UV radiation.Avise, in a paper directed against intelligent designcreationism, applies to the human genome a favoriteDarwinian argument: the presence of poor designshows the trace of history in an organism’s body orgenome. Avise argues that the frequency of deleteriousmutations in mtDNA challenges the notion ofoptimal design, but surely the sharper evolutionaryargument is that mitochondria show every sign ofhaving arisen by the merger into the cytoplasm ofanother organism. Less compellingly, he argues thatnonoptimal design somehow solves the problem oftheodicy for what he calls “mainstream religions.”In the final chapter, Ayala takes on the question ofthe origin of the moral sense and, in doing so, some ofthe other contributors. Arguing, rightly it seems to me,that the moral sense is a generalized, evolved capacity,and that specific norms are culturally determined, hecounters Cosmides et al. who argue for specificallyevolved capabilities for the detection of “cheaters.” Hefurther argues that the moral sense is uniquely human,and does not occur even incipiently in other animals.This would probably surprise Goodman and Sterner,who state that the human brain is “different by degreeand not kind” (p. 59), and Pinker, who in other contextshas discussed what he calls the rudimentary moralsentiments. Indeed, Ayala’s claim would surprise anyoneacquainted with the behavior of vertebrate animals,especially a phylogenetically diverse group ofthem. The incipient stages of the development of themoral sense, and the gradations in the complexity offamilial and social behavior in animals, have long beenknown and documented, but they are also pretty evidentto anyone who has ever owned a dog.The volume is attractively produced but, in a fewpapers, color figures are reproduced in grayscalemaking them difficult, if not impossible, to interpret.Gregory C. Mayer, Biological Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin-Parkside, Kenosha, WisconsinThe Evolution of Anisogamy: A FundamentalPhenomenon Underlying Sexual Selection.Edited by Tatsuya Togashi and Paul Alan Cox. Cambridgeand New York: Cambridge University Press.$75.00. xi 250 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-0-521-88095-4. 2011.Where do boys and girls come from? Anisogamy,the production of gametes of two different sizes, isthe source of several fundamentally important biologicalphenomena. The sexes are defined viadifferences in gamete size and, therefore, withoutanisogamy, separate genders would not exist. Theevolution of separate sexes leads to sexual selectionand sexual conflict, both major drivers of evolution.The divergence of gamete sizes is also behind theevolution of immotile eggs and internal fertilization.It is surprising that a book devoted to the evolutionof anisogamy has not existed until now, even thoughwell-formulated theories to account for its origindate back to the 1930s. The Evolution of Anisogamy fillsthis gap. It comprises seven chapters, which discuss