The Book of Animal Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong
by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
You Can't Mate with Heavy Artillery
A review by Doug Brown
Several years ago Lloyd and Mitchinson entertained readers with The Book of General Ignorance. Now they are back with this fun overview of the animal world. Unlike many factoid-ish general overviews, The Book of Animal Ignorance isn't dumbed down for beginners. Scientific names are almost always given in addition to common names, and interesting etymologies are commonly provided. I have a master's degree in zoology, and I learned quite a few new things.
The book is laid out as an alphabetic bestiary, from aardvarks to worms. Each critter gets a couple of pages, allowing more than just a cursory glance. Lloyd and Mitchinson have good eyes for entertaining tidbits and present them with dry British humor. For instance, we learn that Adelie penguins excrete with a rectal pressure about four times that of humans, or looked at another way, "the same as a keg of lager." We also learn that a quarter pound of bat guano "contains more proteins and minerals than a Big Mac." One of my favorite bits of wry humor, from the cat entry:
Right up until the seventeenth century it amused people to stuff wicker effigies of the pope with live cats and then burn the lot. This produced sound effects that pleased Puritans but not cats; they have exceptionally sensitive hearing and can even hear bats.
Or this one about cicadas:
The nineteenth–century French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre tried to demonstrate that cicadas were deaf by firing a cannon toward a tree full of them. The songs didn't change, but not because they were deaf. The sound of the cannon was meaningless to them: you can't mate with heavy artillery.
Lloyd and Mitchinson avoid anthropomorphism, and often point out how it blinds us to how amazing nature really is. Here's the opening of the section on dolphins:
We haven't done dolphins any favors. The wilder shores of hippie speculation they have inspired -- their brains are more complex than ours; their language is more sophisticated; they have a society dedicated to peace and free love; they are extraterrestrials with fins -- reveal more about us than them. This is not to undermine their utter fabulousness, just to remind us that they are wild animals, with their own agendas and priorities.
There are a couple of incorrect bits here and there, as is usually the case in popular science books written by non-scientists. They say the basilisk "has large webbed hind feet, enabling it to stand up and walk on water." Basilisks don't have webbed feet, just really long toes with specialized scales to disperse their body weight as they run across short expanses of water. If they slow to a walk they sink into the water, and standing is right out. The snake section begins with the statement, "No one is born with a fear of snakes: it has to be learned." As far as I know, the jury is actually still out on that one. All we can say with confidence is most people aren't born with a fear of snakes. Some monkeys have an innate avoidance of brightly colored snakes, so there are primate precedents for ophidiophobia being inherited.
The Book of Animal Ignorance is an entertaining overview of the critters whose planet we're sharing. Given the "everything you think you know is wrong" subtitle, I was rather surprised at the omission of lemmings (they aren't suicidal, and will only enter water if they can see the far shore). Oh, well, you can't have everything. In sidebars you'll learn interesting things such as termites can burrow through concrete, or that Boeing used to have ferrets run cables through hard-to-reach parts of airplanes. The format makes it perfect to just dip into the book anywhere. Fun reading no matter your knowledge level, this is a welcome opportunity to learn your way through the animal kingdom.
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