Zoological Physics: Quantitative Models of Body Design, Actions, and Physical Limitations of Animals , Boye K. Ahlborn Springer-Verlag, New York, 2004. $79.95 (430 pp.). ISBN 3-540-20846-1
When I was asked to review Boye Ahlborn’s Zoological Physics: Quantitative Models of Body Design, Actions, and Physical Limitations of Animals , I was tremendously excited. I have taught courses in biomechanics for the past 25 years and have long been captivated by the yin and yang complementarity of biology and physics. Physics has clearly constrained biological evolution, but organisms have also repeatedly come up with bizarre and wondrous ways to exploit physical effects. As Daniel Dennett observed in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Simon and Schuster, 1995), natural selection has explored more of “design space” than humans are likely to get to in the near future. Biology is particularly adept at highlighting the obscure but useful among physical phenomena.
Ahlborn has chosen to restrict his attention to a macroscopic, largely Newtonian world that spans classical mechanics, thermodynamics, and wave phenomena (light and sound), the context in which most of the familiar plants and animals evolved. Unfortunately, his treatment is largely one of a physicist looking at biology rather than explicating it. Numerous models of biological phenomena are derived from basic physics, but rarely are they compared with actual biological data. I was surprised that the presentation of aerodynamic lift lacked any mention of circulation, much less the clever ways animals augment circulation to increase instantaneous lift. The description of osmosis is also inaccurate. For a book of this size, the reference section is tiny (four pages), and many of the citations are to secondary sources such as Scientific American, Discover, and Physics Today, rather than to the primary literature.
Although the physics presented is generally sound, the biology is not to be trusted, and a naive physics major could be led badly astray. What is called the cell wall throughout the book is actually the cell membrane, “gates” are ion channels, and what is called co-evolution is actually evolutionary convergence, a very different phenomenon. The following examples illustrate the spectrum of misstatements I found in the book: the collagen fibers in a nematode cuticle are not muscles (page 101); pterodactyls were not birds (page 122); capillaries are not polished by red blood cells (page 146); dogs cannot retract their claws (page 199); IR is not a useful way for snakes to find worms (page 265), which are at the same temperature as their surroundings; the magnetic sense of pigeons and honeybees is not due to symbiotic bacteria (page 381); and bacteria do not extract metabolic energy from the heat of deep sea vents (page 405).
Some of Ahlborn’s misstatements may be due to poor writing, but some clearly imply lack of scholarship. For example, the flat statement that insects “can never be homeotherms” is contradicted by 50 years of careful work (reported in virtually every textbook on animal physiology) on the thermal biology of bees, moths, and beetles. Most distressing to the biologist, however, is Ahlborn’s apparent misunderstanding of both the evolutionary process and evolutionary history. The book repeatedly speaks of animals “learning” to do some function in the evolutionary process; natural selection is virtually invisible in this volume. Progressive evolution and a scala natura (for example, mammals are “better” than reptiles) are not only assumed, they become explicit elements in some of the arguments presented. The true richness and contingent nature of evolutionary biology is lost in Ahlborn’s book, and it is significantly poorer because of that loss.
The publisher should be chided for the clear lack of any editorial investment. Reviewers would have caught most of the worst mistakes, but there is no evidence that the manuscript was ever sent out for review. It would appear that it was never even copy-edited: Abbreviations in the text often disagree with those in the figures and in the lists at the ends of chapters; “physics” and “zoology” are treated as proper nouns; commas are scattered at random; and paragraph breaks occur with no apparent logic. Had the text been run through a spell checker, gems like “blue wale,” “yelly fish,” “throtteling,” and “platybus” would not be so common. In the second half of the book, presentations become highly repetitive, with nearly identical arguments offered within a few pages of each other. References cited in the text often do not appear in the “References” section, and about 10% of the citations that do appear in the section are incorrect.
Sadly, what could have been a unique and useful addition to the literature on the interface between biology and physics is rendered nearly useless by the publisher’s neglect. For someone interested in intelligent introductions to the topic, Howard Berg’s charming Random Walks in Biology (Princeton U. Press, 1983), which was expanded in 1993; Mark Denny’s Air and Water: The Biology and Physics of Life’s Media (Princeton U. Press, 1993); Steven Vogel’s Cat’s Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People (W. W. Norton, 1998); and his Comparative Biomechanics: Life’s Physical World (Princeton U. Press, 2003) would be better investments of time.
