Superlative: The Biology of Extremes
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About this ebook
Welcome to the biggest, fastest, deadliest science book you'll ever read.
The world's largest land mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is showing us how to solve a century-old engineering mystery. The oldest tree is giving us insights into climate change. The loudest whale is offering clues about the impact of solar storms.
For a long time, scientists ignored superlative life forms as outliers. Increasingly, though, researchers are coming to see great value in studying plants and animals that exist on the outermost edges of the bell curve.
As it turns out, there's a lot of value in paying close attention to the "oddballs" nature has to offer.
Go for a swim with a ghost shark, the slowest-evolving creature known to humankind, which is teaching us new ways to think about immunity. Get to know the axolotl, which has the longest-known genome and may hold the secret to cellular regeneration. Learn about Monorhaphis chuni, the oldest discovered animal, which is providing insights into the connection between our terrestrial and aquatic worlds.
Superlative is the story of extreme evolution, and what we can learn from it about ourselves, our planet, and the cosmos. It's a tale of crazy-fast cheetahs and super-strong beetles, of microbacteria and enormous plants, of whip-smart dolphins and killer snakes.
This book will inspire you to change the way you think about the world and your relationship to everything in it.
MATTHEW D. LAPLANTE
Matthew D. LaPlante is an associate professor of journalism at Utah State University, where he teaches news reporting, narrative non-fiction writing and crisis reporting. He has reported from more than a dozen nations, including Iraq, Cuba, Ethiopia and El Salvador, and his work has appeared in Washington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, CNN.com, and numerous other publications. He is the coauthor of two books on the intersection of scientific discovery and society, Inheritance with Sharon Moalem and Longevity Plan with John Day, and is currently working with Harvard geneticist David Sinclair on a book about anti-aging research. Superlative is his first solo book.
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Reviews for Superlative
8 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Matthew LaPlante’s Superlative is an homage to the Guinness Book of Records, natural edition. He admits everyone loves record setters, including if not especially him. And he is a lover of things natural. As a journalist, he says he pestered his editor until he was allowed to cover the zoo. The book is a best of, featuring what animals and plants do that Man can only drool over.LaPlante has put a lot of passion into the book. He seems to have met pretty much every animal and plant he describes, from his visits with scientists and their labs, to field trips all over the planet. It is a labor of love as much as appreciation and awe. The most interesting aspects are the whys. Why is this the loudest, the biggest, the tallest, the smallest, the fastest runner/swimmer/flier? What is its advantage? Why does this being have this ability at all?Elephants rank very highly in his schema. Elephants and Man share a cancer-fighting gene called p53. In Man it surrounds the mutated and mutating cancer cells, and fails to stop them. In elephants, which have 20 copies of p53, it tells the cells to die. So elephants are not cancer-prone. This commanded cell death is called apoptosis, and we see it in Man when the brain tells mitochondria to die when the energy they produce is no longer needed by aging bodies. Not a helpful option. Elephants are also emotional animals, traumatized for life by Man’s killing of their mothers in order to capture them for zoos. And true to the myth, they have phenomenal memories, which LaPlante proves.The world’s largest tree is also its largest living thing. It’s a 107-acre Quaking Aspen in Utah. Quaking aspens spread underground, and all the shoots – what look to be a simple forest – are all attached to the same root, and are of course genetically identical. Now called Pando, the tree has 47,000 shoots. And it might be 800,000 years old (though some say “only” 80,000), making it by far the oldest living being as well. It’s a very interesting survival strategy: no flowers, no seeds, no fruit. Just root expansion. Very risky, but on planet Earth, there is no end to lifeforms and strategies.Possibly the toughest beast on Earth is the tardigrade, aka water bear. It is a millimeter and a half sort of caterpillar with eight feet. It can be frozen, boiled, dehydrated and irradiated and still come back for more. We have only begun to classify the varieties of tardigrade we see worldwide. He says they are found from the highest mountains to the deepest ocean trenches. They’re the toughest, most resilient life we know of. They not only have impressive genes, they lack the genes that cause inflammation and pain. Their genes have the potential to change our lives forever.Appropriating genes might mean Man could travel between planets without suffering the effects of unfiltered radiation bombardment. Or even just surviving the expected new temperature ranges up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit on Earth. LaPlante teases us with the genetic uniqueness of numerous superlative performers throughout the book and what it could mean for Man. The octopus is the first/oldest intelligent being. Able to analyze its environment, measure up other beings in the area, strategize, escape, learn and make intelligent decisions, it has just two years of life to maximize its abilities. This once shell-protected smart snail is totally unprotected and vulnerable, and must live by its wits alone. The central brain acts as a quarterback, LaPlante says, and the remote brains controlling each of the eight arms do whatever they need to do to execute, which is why they seem to be all over the place, never moving in co-ordination. This distributed hierarchy system is now being applied to co-coordinating thousands of drones at a time.The slowest animal in the world is the three toed sloth, which burns all of a hundred calories a day – a teaspoon of peanut butter would sustain it.There are moths that can hear up to 300khz (humans stop at about 20, dogs at 40), far above the echolocation of today’s bats that seek them out.Of interest is LaPlante’s frustration in doing research for this book. There is hardly any. Many of the animals he profiles were the subject of no scientific studies whatsoever. On others, the research is, to be polite, thin. In the meantime, they are disappearing, and we haven’t even figured out why they are so good at what they do, or how we could benefit from them. Doesn’t seem to stop anyone.David Wineberg