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Sep. 22nd, 2019 12:20 amI've been trying to learn more about natural history, especially deep time, and I've been trying to read general books on the subject. I have a pretty decent grasp of the time scales now - that took awhile to grasp, since we're not great at really understanding the difference between 5 million, 50 million, and 500 million years, not to mention 5 billion. I also read a couple pretty good general popular science books on the subject.
I took a lot of science in high school but although the curriculum very good, we never did cover biological classification, taxonomy, etc. So I tried to find textbooks about cladistics, specifically. I am so interested in this reconstruction of the tree of life - and staggered at how much I don't know (and frankly what the field doesn't know) about the species that populate it. Even leaving aside most the tree, which is bacteria and archaea, where I know almost nothing, even the animal branch is very very full of things I still know nothing about, even when considering phylum level classifications. Cnidaria, I know they're sea dwelling and often jelly, but what are the defining characteristics? My god there are so many worm phyla! (At least I recognize Annelida). I think I've confused brachiopods and bryozoa. I can't deal with the number of species described in Arthropoda - it dwarfs every other animal phyla. And phylum is one step down from kingdom. On the tiniest branch! There is just so much detail that you could drown in.
I don't have access to an academic library anymore - I could get an alumni pass by paying money but I don't even live in the same country anymore - so I turned to ILL, which is one of the best things in the world. The site's kinda finicky to use so I just sorta guessed and ordered a few books. I ended up with Biogeography: an Ecological and Evolutionary Approach by Cox, and Species & Speciation in the Fossil Record edited by Allmon & Yacobucci. Unfortunately I ran out of time to actually read cover to cover but I did enormously enjoy both. I mentioned to someone at work how much I enjoy reading them, and it made me think of the difference in difficulty. Work isn't difficult. There is definitely work to be done, there can be challenges in figuring out how best to do it with the resources available, how we can optimize our processes, and of course lots and lots of detail to absorb, the firm handles billions in assets so risk & control etc blah blah blah, but it's certainly not a challenge in the same intellectual way that thinking about these problems are.
( It was so interesting to read. )
I'd still like to get a good general grasp of the tree of life, as neither of these books actually had a good list. I kind of fear that a real list would just be too much information unconnected to anything - despite all of this, I'm not into this in order to memorize hundreds of phylum names or anything, that's not the point. But they were very interesting reading.
Back to ILL!
I took a lot of science in high school but although the curriculum very good, we never did cover biological classification, taxonomy, etc. So I tried to find textbooks about cladistics, specifically. I am so interested in this reconstruction of the tree of life - and staggered at how much I don't know (and frankly what the field doesn't know) about the species that populate it. Even leaving aside most the tree, which is bacteria and archaea, where I know almost nothing, even the animal branch is very very full of things I still know nothing about, even when considering phylum level classifications. Cnidaria, I know they're sea dwelling and often jelly, but what are the defining characteristics? My god there are so many worm phyla! (At least I recognize Annelida). I think I've confused brachiopods and bryozoa. I can't deal with the number of species described in Arthropoda - it dwarfs every other animal phyla. And phylum is one step down from kingdom. On the tiniest branch! There is just so much detail that you could drown in.
I don't have access to an academic library anymore - I could get an alumni pass by paying money but I don't even live in the same country anymore - so I turned to ILL, which is one of the best things in the world. The site's kinda finicky to use so I just sorta guessed and ordered a few books. I ended up with Biogeography: an Ecological and Evolutionary Approach by Cox, and Species & Speciation in the Fossil Record edited by Allmon & Yacobucci. Unfortunately I ran out of time to actually read cover to cover but I did enormously enjoy both. I mentioned to someone at work how much I enjoy reading them, and it made me think of the difference in difficulty. Work isn't difficult. There is definitely work to be done, there can be challenges in figuring out how best to do it with the resources available, how we can optimize our processes, and of course lots and lots of detail to absorb, the firm handles billions in assets so risk & control etc blah blah blah, but it's certainly not a challenge in the same intellectual way that thinking about these problems are.
( It was so interesting to read. )
I'd still like to get a good general grasp of the tree of life, as neither of these books actually had a good list. I kind of fear that a real list would just be too much information unconnected to anything - despite all of this, I'm not into this in order to memorize hundreds of phylum names or anything, that's not the point. But they were very interesting reading.
Back to ILL!
