FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
PLAYING GOD, MIMICKING DARWIN, COLORING YOUR WORLD, AND GAIA
SIMEARTH-THE LIVING PLANET
*
Maxis Software, Two Theatre
Square, Suite 230, Orinda, CA
94563.
$69.95
PLUSES: Unspeakable power.
MINUSES: Unfathomable responsibilities.
THE VERDICT:
Addictive.
Prepare for a shock. Booting up SimEarth makes the user a God. And God has a
lot of complex responsibilities when it comes to managing a planet. If you
don't regulate
the amount of toxins spewed into the air by mammalian
civilizations, monitor ocean salinity
and temperature, and foster areas that
reoxygenate the atmosphere, your planet will fail
and its life forms will
perish.
This game, this simulation, this problem makes George Bush's
job look like a
Caribbean holiday.
Illustration
GAIAN SCIENCE
*
For Geophysiology Researchers
and Teachers.
Newsletter. Box 1115, Chadds Ford, PA 19317.
$35 for 12 issues.
PLUSES:
Up-to-date.
MINUSES: Home-brewed taste.
THE VERDICT: Earnest.
The earth, like any living
thing, has a physiology, according to the fledgling
Gaia theory. And like anything
fledgling, the theory is full of energy, is
somewhat naive, and occasionally has trouble
sustaining flight.
The casual reader finds tiny, gemlike resources, such as simplifications
of
complex papers, bibliographies arranged by topic, book reviews, lesson plans,
and the
whole nine yards.
A TRAVELER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAPAGOS ISLANDS
*
Bruce Boyce. Galapagos
Travel, 1990. $14.25
PLUSES: No visa necessary.
MINUSES: Sea legs required.
THE VERDICT:
Whiners stay home.
Darwin found several elegant examples of natural selection flying,
swimming, and
crawling around the Galapagos Islands. Today about 60,000 hearty humans a
year
come to gander.
And almost everybody sleeps on boats. Some boats are big (100 berths)
and some
are small (six berths). Daytime is for exploring; nighttime is spent tooling to
your next destination. Idyllic? Not quite: Those unacquainted with the Third
World should
heed Boyce's travel tips. And those who haven't slept on a boat
should bring Dramamine.
Photo
THE HUMAN EVOLUTION COLORING BOOK
*
Adrienne L. Zihlman. Harper and Row, 1982. $10.95
PLUSES: Nary a stone left unturned.
MINUSES: Textbookish.
THE VERDICT: Sizable concentration
required.
Although this is a coloring book, don't expect children to be scrambling for
their
crayons. The author admits in the preface that he "had trouble getting
across certain
technical concepts" in his "Introduction to Human Evolution"
class and that the coloring
book idea arose to help fill the gap.
And it works. Seeking out the images, coloring them
in, and then reading about
their relevance packages the material for easy withdrawal from
the memory bank,
The approach works especially well for the detailed technical sections on
DNA
and Mendelian genetics.
Lay people with a burning desire to plumb the depths of the
evolution question
will find themselves in seventh heaven. Ordinary Joes and Josephines
won't.
But the book is still in print after nine years, and that speaks for itself.