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The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades (A Phoenix book) (English and German Edition)
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Language Notes
Text: English, German (translation)
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Product details
Series: A Phoenix book
Paperback: 92 pages
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press (September 1, 1981)
Language: English, German
ISBN-10: 0226778959
ISBN-13: 978-0226778952
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 0.2 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
Average Customer Review:
5.0 out of 5 stars
7 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#599,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
If you love speculative evolution then this is the book for you. This is the grandfather of all speculative evolution book. First published in the 1950s the book has become famous. The idea is an series of islands in the Pacific gave raise to a new species of mammals who used their nose for walking, flying, digging, fishing and so on. Snouters. And the idea never died as museums have had exhibits on them and new members of the order have been "discovered" around the world by scientists. Are they fake or real...? They're fake but many people have kept the idea alive and it is likely the Snouters will never die.
It's amazing that nobody has yet written a review of this 55-year-old book. Not only does "Dr. Harald Stümpke" succeed in nearly convincing us that rhinogrades are real, but he also succeeds in being funny, despite an utter lack of overtly humorous content. All of the snouters are physiologically and genetically plausible, although many (the one with humanoid breasts, for example) are obviously fictitious. The text is verbose, reserved, and utterly serious-exactly in the manner of a real scientific monograph. If you are not a biologist, "The Snouters" will be uninteresting to you. If you are (particularly if you specialize in taxonomy), you will find it engrossing, and good for laughs as well. In fact, this is the only book I've ever read that doesn't seem to have any drawbacks whatsoever (for its target audience, at least).
Fabulous interpretation of evolution in action. A classic for the ages.
“The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades†by Harald Stumpke [Gerolf Steiner] originally published as “Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia,†Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag. ISBN 3-437-30083-0. OCLC 65616734 and reprinted in English by the University of Chicago Press © 1967, 92 pages softcover.While this book is fiction, it provides insight into ideas about adaptationism, the extensive rationalization of change under natural selection. As such, it could easily be used in a course on systematics and evolution to present a fun overview of how systematics is applied and to pose questions such as why do organisms in nature not demonstrate such explosive radiation. And while Steiner wrote this more in a highly intellectual April Fools perspective in 1957, it was ahead of its time in presenting a fictional scenario that would allow testing of numerical taxonomy thirty years later: Joe Camin’s “Caminalcules.â€Steiner unfolds his taxonomic hoax of the Rhinogradentia—the “snoutersâ€â€”in a small 80+ page set of subgroups. The “Introduction†describes the [fictional] South Sea Archipelago Hy-yi-yi and provides a map of the Hi-Iay Islands, along with very science-sounding references. The native language becomes extinct due to massive deaths brought in by a discoverer with a head cold. And it is such statements that almost align with actual occurrences in history that provide just enough believability that some contemporary readers considered the whole narrative to be factual.The “General†introduction to the whole group immediately details plausible muscular facial anatomy that will become the focus of most variation: the snout. A drawing of the head of a young embryo shows the “polyrrhine [multi-nose] condition.†Just as in genuine science articles, citations and footnotes are used to credit various authorities—resulting in four pages of [fake] references at the end of the book. It is the style of the writing, the newly and correctly-constructed Latin nomenclature, and the level of detail that would be boring and inscrutable to a non-scientist, that lends credence to this narrative. While one genus still walks on all four legs, others have evolved wings and stem-like appendages to make the snout variations function in different niches. And this is correctly discussed in systematics terms current to this time and fully understood today, even though Steiner is writing before the cladistics revolution in systematics. A family tree to the radiation of the Rhinogradentia is provided before launching into the “Description of the Several Groups.â€The first group described are the primitive snouters, uni-snouters and foot-walkers, all correctly rendered in classical Latin or Greek combining terms. Fossil evidence is claimed to support the modern classification, and what better combination could be invented than Archirrhinos haeckelii. The following section includes the snout-walkers, soft-nosed snouters, snail-like snouters, slime snouters, etc. One species, the “sugarmouse†secretes a super-sugary solution that attracts bees that in turn protect the critter. A footnote suggests research is underway on this secretion, a subtlety that is near genius in making fiction seem to be fact. The next group of pillar-nosed snouters, snifflers and sugartails has a drawing of snouters with faces that would be highly questioned by viewers, but the technical narrative and possible “paraphyletic†origin wording can temper suspicion.The next group or chapter describes the mud snouters, siphon snouters, ribbon snouters and trumpet snouters, with one becoming a shell-inhabiting ribbon snouter that would naturally seize this habitat opportunity. Same holds for the frothing trumpet snouter that is a filter feeder. This is adaptationism that seizes on every possible environmental opportunity. That real critters do not succeed in seizing every opportunity in nature is an excellent question to pose to real biologists, leading to discussions of limitations of the parent genome, competition from other critters already occupying the niche, etc.And what direction should evolution move next but to burrowing snouters, mole-like snouters, gut snouters wholesnouters and dwarfsnouters. Steiner’s genius lies not only in conceptualizing the evolutionary route, but also developing so many wonderful common names for his inventions. There is little doubt that some of these forms mimic somewhat similar life forms, from sea cucumbers to gut parasites, but of course they didn’t get there from here.Steiner then makes the big jump (pun intended) to snout leapers, leaf leapers, lilysnouters, etc.by extending the snout and giving it a knee-jumping ability. This provides by far the most fascinating critter for the front cover illustration. He then evolves off various forms that inhabit trees, etc. This is followed by the next pseudo-taxa of multi-snouters, four-snouters, predacious snouters and brethren. The life history stories provided are reasonable, and there are diagrams of their skeletal structures too. Then the group evolves multi-snouts to resemble land squid, and this in turn evolves in to flower-headed snouters: six-snouters, ribbon snouters, six-flowered snouters flower-faced snouters, etc. The diagram of a garden of real flowers intermixed with snouters on their stem-like base mimicking flowers is delightful. The final short chapter deals with long-nosed snouters and tasselsnouter-like snouters. These structures grew into harp-like devices and when the fictional Skamtkvist did succeed in capturing and taming it, he was “...able to teach it two of Bach’s organ fugues that he knew by heart, so that it could perform them perfectly. Only its inability to produce long-held notes caused any difficulty.†You would expect that any naive reader who had not caught on to the snouters being fictional would by now have suspicions.The epilogue allows Steiner to commit these critters to oblivion by losing the island archipelago to recent “...secret tests of atomic explosions†a reasonable story line considering that his original book had been written in 1957 near the end of our Pacific atomic bomb tests and our “duck and cover†era.While Gerolf Steiner was a German zoologist with expertise in reptiles and amphibians, he was not apparently deeply knowledgeable about the major revolution in systematics that occurred during his retirement years (he died 14 August 2009). He did write a few other articles under pseudonyms as well, but the reasoning behind his invented critters and their evolutionary pathway was not known. Therefore, the snouters were not as useful as a hypothetical evolved system on which new systematics methods could be tested.After ten years of teaching high school biology, I returned to college to pursue a doctorate in entomology at the University of Kansas. I was scheduled to take medical entomology under a Professor Joe Camin, but he had just been diagnosed with cancer and I had a graduate instructor instead. Camin died in 1979. But Dr. Camin had invented a similar set of imaginary squid-shaped critters that came to be called Caminalcules. Only he knew what pathway of evolution these critters had taken in his mind, a family tree or phylogeny that he considered logical and likely. He made up 29 extant (supposedly “currently-livingâ€) varieties and provided an additional 48 fossil forms. There was a battle going on in the 1970s and 1980s over using numerical systems to classify organisms. Camin proposed to evaluate the subsequently-produced family trees to see how close they came to his program of divergent evolution. Camin never published his Caminalcules but Robert R. Sokal, the father of numerical taxonomy did publish them in several issues of the journal Systematic Zoology without revealing Camin’s god-like solution.Nevertheless, his mythical tale of adaptationism lives on, providing biologists with potential mischief on April Fool’s Day. And it has potential in getting biology students to think. Indeed, several new species of real mammals that are somewhat snouter-like have been named after this author, under both Steiner and his pseudonym, Stumpke.These snouter fairy-tales could have provided the hypothetical test model attempted by the Caminalcules, but Steiner was not in the right time and place to help that happen. And “snouters†are such a better name than Caminalcules. Indeed, I don’t think that you can say the word “snouter†without smiling.
This is a marvelous spoof book, written in very formal prose, about totally imaginary creatures. (I found a very nice copy at a garage sale selling for a dollar, 50 cents after a bit of bargaining).This was reprinted by The University of Chicago Press with the following legend: "The Snouters was originally published in Germany, under the title Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia, by Gustav Fischer Verlag Stuttgart in 1957. Copyright � 1964 by Gustav Fischer Verlag Stuttgart. Portions of the book appeared in Natural History magazine in April 1967 and is reprinted here with permission. The 15 plates and 12 text figures in this volume were drawn by Gerolf Steiner. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London.Maggie Koerth-Baker recently wrote a blog post about the book; the picture she refers to can be found by googling Maggie Koerth-Baker imaginary animals."In this dusty display box at the University of Maine sits the carefully preserved skeleton of a small, shrew-like rodent which, lacking hind legs, propelled itself along with the help of a long, jointed nose-foot. If that seems a bit too whimsical to be true, well, it is. The creature belongs to the mammalian order Rhinogradentia – an entirely made-up class of animals. Like this specimen, which belongs to UMaine professor Irving Kornfield, the rhinogrades are all rodents and they all have some sort of fantastic nasal appendage ... and, most importantly, none of them actually exist."Now, there are plenty of imaginary animals in the world and, some of them – like the jackalope, for instance – exist in taxidermy and skeletal form despite not existing as living beings. But most of those are folk-crafts, their origins steeped in tall tales or intentionally profitable efforts to mislead, and their inventors lost to time. Rhinogradentia, on the other hand, is relatively new. It was created in 1961 by a real German zoologist named Gerolf Steiner who wanted to illustrate the way evolution can create diversity in isolated populations. In order to do that, Steiner created a fake German zoologist called Harald Stümpke, a fake island chain called Hy-yi-yi, and a fake order of mammals with funny noses. And then he wrote a book about it." Published under Stümpke's name, The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, is meant to read like a totally serious zoology handbook of the time period. It's a parody that absolutely refuses to wink at you, and it's become a bit of an in-joke among biologists. This particular specimen was actually built by Kornfield, himself, using real animal bones and illustrations from Stümpke/Steiner's book."I enjoyed reading the book, and enjoyed reading both Maggie Koerth-Baker's description and the marvelous Reviews here on Amazon even more. My only problem is how to dispose of the book, now that I am down sizing my life.Robert C. RossMarch 2015
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