Frustrating. Andrew Parker’s thesis is the development of vision initiated the “Cambrian Explosion” by making predators much more effective and requiring the equivalent adaptation in prey. The problem is, Parker has gone to such lengths to make In The Blink of an Eye accessible to lay audiences that it’s almost inaccessible to those – even laymen – with more than a casual interest. For example, Parker insists on using “common” names for many of the organisms he’s dealing with – thus, we get “seed shrimp” instead of “ostracode” and “bristle worm” instead of “polychaete”. Nobody uses those terms – if you have even a slight interest in marine biology, you’ll know what ostracodes and polychaetes are. It gets even more absurd when Parker gets into taxonomic details – rather than use a family name, “Myodocopa”, to describe a particular group of ostracodes, we get “the lightweight notched seed shrimp group”.


To make matters worse, although Parker drops lots of interesting facts – male “lightweight notched seed shrimp” have a tiny diffraction grating on their antennae that they use to attract females by “flashing” them, for example – there is not one reference, either in footnotes or in text, or even a list of suggested reading. Thus there’s no way to do any sort of further research. I wonder if these were Parker’s ideas, or if his editor insisted on them? Puzzlingly, there are a lot of detailed anatomical drawings, which I would expect also would have been eliminated by an overcautious editor.


Being dumbed down so much, it’s any easy enough read; it takes a long time to get through all the details and anecdotes to the critical argument but the details and anecdotes are fairly entertaining. The best I can say for it, though, is that it might be useful for an intelligent pre-teen with a biological bent. ( )

This book will open your eyes. (pun intended). Parker makes a compelling case for the reason for the "Cambrian explosion"--the development of sight by animals. ( )

The most rational and easily defended explanation for the Cambrian explosion I have ever read (although rationality and defensibility do not make it true). It seems so simple now... ( )

Interesting thesis, but poorly presented. The idea - that the Cambrian Explosion was the arms race that followed the evolution of vision - is plausible, and strong enough to transcend its somewhat jumbled presentation here.

Some 'first-book' troubles: an idiosyncratic writing style, for one; but, more seriously, Parker seems to want to shovel in all of paleontology - and maybe everything he knows about everything* - to support the idea; fully half of this book could be cut.

A book on this topic, for this intended audience, really should be footnoted. The photos and illustrations should be credited.

*Why does he spend more than a page talking about facial reconstruction of a human skeleton from biblical Palestine?

Howlers:
p.5: A die has only six possibilities, not eight. (Somebody should have caught this.)
p. 94: Bats do not use radar. (Radar is NOT sonar.) ( )

Interesting, but ultimately frustrating.

Parker's thesis is that what triggered the Cambrian Explosion was the evolution of decent eyes, most likely initially in trilobites. The idea is that with effective vision came effective predation which in turn led to
(a) a period of much more aggressive selection than usual (hence the explosion) and
(b) strong pressure to evolve claws and teeth (to attack) and spikes and shells (to defend) hence visible evidence of the explosion.
To justify this thesis, the bulk of the book discusses general issues of vision and predation, both in modern life and from the paleontological record.
The last few pages put everything together to make the claim.

There are two real problems with the book.
The first is that it's written as a polemic, and as is usually the case, the polemical aspects are of substantially less interest to the audience than they are to the author. This is book designed not just to tell the public what is known, but to enlist them as allies in an academic controversy, and, as an uneducated reader, one's immediate reaction should be to wonder what is being left out because it would dilute the argument.

The second problem is that the author, while perhaps a fine paleontologist (I really don't know) is not at all inclined to math or physics and it shows.
There are frequent little errors of math or physics scattered throughout the book, but that's not the real problem.
The real problem comes in the last few pages where he tries to convince us that the selective pressures to evolve better eyes and to evolve better defence against predators were unlike anything that happened before or since. This may well be true, but it cries out for numbers and quantitative modelling and all we get is plaintive word pictures of how it must have been so.

I assume other paleontologists will study this scenario, and I do hope they will do a decent job of fleshing out the mathematics. ( )