Worst book of 2008: Evolution (Baxter)

This is probably the worst book I'll read this year. Just in case, I've put off the Eragon series until '09, because if I read another book this bad in the near future, I will stab out my eyes.

That would be bad.

Ken and Ingrid passed this book along to me, because I "like evolution". I hadn't really examined my feelings towards evolution- upon reflection I think it's messy, brutal, and pretty cool. (also depressing when applied to me) My emotional investment with Darwin's four laws is apparently exactly the wrong one for reading a novel- really a collection of short stories- about significant evolutionary events in mankind's past and future.

So, the science is not bad. I found a couple of solid points I disagree on, but that's probably because we're in different fields. He's still clinging to the type-specimen paleontology crap, and several of my teachers were kind enough to beat that out of me, and then I read Wallace. And he had an animal that violated the r r^2 r^3 principle to make a point. (Most of the fossils we see are from low moist areas, not the fossils of mountain species.)

Actually, that one bugged me. It was a giant pteradon- 100 m wingspan!- that lived in the stratosphere, eating stuff that had blown up there. It made me want to yell: That is REALLY BIG! There is NOT ENOUGH AIR in the stratosphere! Something that big cannot live on WAYWARD MIDGE SWARMS! Having them mate and nest on mountaintops doesn't work: the tallest mountains in the world now barely scrape the BOTTOM of the stratosphere, and the Indian subcontinent HAD NO HIMALAYAS when this was going down. I did yell, actually. Quite a lot. That's how we met the neighbors. They agreed it was a very bad book.

The sex bugged me. It's a book about evolution, so sex is important. But there was a disturbing subtheme of more human males and their attraction to less intelligent, helpless, much younger females. It was uncomfortable hearing about arousal while freeing a monkey-girl from a snare, or offering tools to a poor lonely Homo erectus or watching your orphaned sister mature. Ew, Mr. Baxter. Those are things I didn't want to know about you.

There were the toolmaking language using raptors. I aknowledge that there might have been sentient animals before humans- I'd like to hope that there are some now. The feud between the raptors and the sentient brachiosaurs was a little bit Land Before Time.

Then there was the "missing link" story. It's about a tribe of functionally modern homonids- they have fire and trade, but lack a real language. It's the end of the era of ten thousand homonid subspecies- these happy few are the ten or so people we are all descended from. They're in the Rift Valley. They are the source of all of human diversity. One of them is called Sunset because he's a redhead.

I bet you could shove a shitload of dried peas into his skull.

Yes, ducklings, the forebearers of humanity already had a gene that today is found only in the descendants of the Celts. That extra special pigment that we see only in descendants of Northern Europeans and Spaniards. However, the effects of said gene are only visible if you also have very little melanin. (Otherwise, you look like Señor C.) Which means that according to Mr. Baxter, the ancestors of all humanity were white. Props on the hardcore racism, dude. Too bad it's wrong. I had three paragraphs on how it was wrong, but I started to rant. I'm going to go eat, rather than edit it. Don't read this book.