Book Review by Kip Hansen — 11 June 2023
If you are interested in a book that will explain to you, your family or your friends that, “No, polar bears are not endangered by so-called climate change”, then this book is not the one you want. If that’s your interest and your purpose, then you’d be better off with one of Susan Crockford’s other books:
Polar Bears: Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change
The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened
or
Polar Bear Facts & Myths: A science summary for all ages
or maybe, for a fictional tale, her science thriller:
Her latest book, Polar Bear Evolution: A Model for How New Species Arise, is not that simple explainer, but rather a deep science book delving into the question: How did the Brown Bear turn into the Polar Bear? Let me warn you – Susan Crockford does not give the usual evolutionist “Just So” story in reply.
You know what a “Just So” story is, right? :
“In science and philosophy, a just-so story is an untestable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. The pejorative nature of the expression is an implicit criticism that reminds the listener of the fictional and unprovable nature of such an explanation.” [ source: wiki ]
How brown bears turned into polar bears, in a geologically-short time period, cannot be reduced to the usually-relied-on “then something happened”. As she says “However, without an explanation for precisely how and why such changes occurred, we are no further ahead than we were with the myth. “Something happened” is simply not good enough.”
Dr. Crockford is a “bone whisperer” — she works at her company, Pacific IDentification, which “offers biologists and archaeologists the most complete analysis of bone and shell from western North America. The identification of whole or fragmentary skeletal elements (both cranial and postcranial) from marine and freshwater fish, land and sea mammals and birds from western North America are our specialty.” For us, that means she knows her behind from her elbow when it comes to identifying and dating bones including the fossil remains of brown bears and polar bears.
In reading this book you’ll discover that the polar bear is not just a grizzly-bear-with-a-new-white-winter-coat – there are far too many physical, physiological and behavioral differences between the two species to think that. Crockford leads readers through the fossil record of world’s bears, a record that has brought us to the present situation in which we have brown bears (grizzlies), black bears (like those that appear in my backyard) and the iconic polar bear – the color-names don’t do justice to the differences, they are just easier to remember. That path may sound easy, but it’s no walk in the park.
More importantly, Susan Crockford returns to the subject of her doctorate thesis, Animal Domestication and Vertebrate Speciation: A Paradigm for the Origin Of Species (1976) [pdf], and her first book, Rhythms of Life: Thyroid Hormone & the Origin of Species(2006). Further illuminating and expanding her hypothesis concerning the effects of thyroid hormone rhythms on development and growth of nearly all animals and the effects that these rhythms, and their changes, can have on a species, including both domestication and the creation of a new species over rather short periods of time.
Dr. Crockford writes:
“Thyroid rhythm theory assumes that individually unique thyroid rhythm variants exist within species-specific patterns for animal populations and that these thyroid rhythm variants are the actual characteristics targeted by natural selection for adaptation and colonization.”
and
“…that daily rhythmic thyroid hormone secretion profiles in any vertebrate species are individually variable and that these variations between individuals can be correlated with discernible physical, reproductive, or behavioral differences, which are the thyroid rhythm phenotypes.”
I have been simultaneously reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and find that Crockford’s thyroid rhythm hypothesis is not in conflict with Darwin, but supplies the possible physiological explanation which is lacking in Darwin. The biologists who are stuck with nothing but the gene theory – all variation is caused by gene mutation and expression – will just have to hold their ire in check — many of their colleagues are speaking out about that view’s deficiencies. The battle is currently carried on in the “new” field of epigenetics — “Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.” Crockford’s thyroid rhythm theory may supply one of the missing pieces in epigenetics as well.
Crockford offers a series of possible tests for her hypothesis — and it is testable. The tests are not easy, and may require some advances in biological testing of living animals, but they are at least feasible.
In the end, whether her thyroid rhythm hypothesis is correct as she has laid it out, or if it is found to be mostly correct with caveats and corrections, readers will find the evidence compelling if not convincing. In either case, it is fascinating.
This is not a book for the “only mildly curious” who wish to learn it all by a quick leaf-through. It is a serious book of serious science presenting a novel concept.
If you are interested in evolution, speciation, domestication or the biological history of polar bears: Then this is the book for you.
Bottom Line:
I liked this book – it made me think, re-think and think again. It made me do the type of intellectual work that refreshes the mind and brings new understandings. It just can’t get better than that!
Highly recommended for the brighter and more open minds wishing to get a new perspective on evolution. Information on ordering available here.
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Author’s Comment:
Susan Crockford was kind enough to send me a digital, pre-publication nearly-final proof copy of this, her tenth (I believe) book. It was a good thing I got it early – this is the second book I have reviewed recently that challenged me to really THINK. The first was Judith Curry’s Uncertainty which I reviewed here. With Curry’s book, I was already deeply familiar with the general topic – one which about which I write extensively as a journalist.
With Susan Crockford’s Polar Bear Evolution: A Model for How New Species Arise, I mentioned above, several months ago, something prompted me to re-read Darwin. Reading the two books, simultaneously, has been quite a ride.
And, yes, Crockford talks about Climate, Climate Change, and the connection between climate change and polar bears in her new book. As she says “The story of polar bear evolution could not be told without discussing climate change”.
Get Crockford’s new book — open that door in your mind dedicated to letting in new ideas — open to the first page and let’er rip!
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Polar bear evolution is marked by rapid changes in gene copy number in response to dietary shift
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1901093116
Divergence and interbreeding:
https://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2022/06/005.html
100 Ka interbreeding
https://news.ucsc.edu/2022/06/polar-bear-bruno.html
Divegence time
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/polar-bear-origins-revised-theyre-older-and-more-distinct-than-we-thought
Thanks for that Milo. My book shows that all of those explanations, amoung others, can’t be true because they don’t take the fossil record and glacial cycles into account, and they give undue credit to the role of genes in the speciation process. Read the book for a more plausible and satisfying explanation. I think you’ll like it.
all the best,
Susan
Indeed. If I have it right, evolution is rather slow but survival of the fittest can be rapid.
It seems that the genes that permit white skin originated in Africa. link On the other hand, it wasn’t until a massive migration of Yamnavian herders about 4500 years ago that Europeans gained their white skin.
As far as I can tell, the Yamnavians didn’t displace the other populations per se, The result is better explained by interbreeding and selection of the fittest.
Given that bears hibernate, I can imagine that black bears could have survived in the early, warmer, but still seasonally dark, holocene, and previous interglacial periods. So, the question is, did polar bears displace an earlier population, or did they explode into an unfilled ecological niche?
Polar bears evolved from brown bears, not black bears.
That doesn’t matter. The question I raised was:
The earlier population, if any, didn’t even have to be bears. It could have been any population capable of filling the niche now filled by polar bears, but not able to compete with them.
Polar bears survive by pulling 200 pound seals up through the small breathing holes the seals maintain in the ice. That’s a pretty specialized niche.
Rare proto-polar bear fossil from the last interglacial of Svalbard:
https://www.science.org/content/article/early-polar-bear-discovered-arctic-tundra#:~:text=Digging%20in%20the%20frozen%20tundra,were%20also%20roaming%20the%20land.
I never actually saw a copy of your book, but my cousin Larry said polar bears are the same color as marshmallows so you must be dumb.
(sarc)
It’s made me think just reading the review, however Im still sceptical about this version of Lamarckism
Who knows how it will pan out
That’s probably a mis-characterisation.
link
You can’t just accuse Dr. Crockford of Lamrckianism, you have to give reasons. Otherwise, you’re indistinguishable from a common garden variety troll.
Duker ==> Come back and comment again when you’ve read the book.
No one ‘needs’ to read the book to comment. Im open to the general idea but still sceptical as random chance has survived these sorts of challenges before.
After all they are already brown bears (grizzly) which is the largest alongside the polar bear. Not a lot genetically needs to change between the two and they have a mixed genome anyway
‘100,000-year-old polar bear genome reveals ancient hybridization with brown bears’
maybe this novel mechanism suggested by Dr Crockford does this too. Its too early to say ‘for sure’
If animals can modify their RNA, then they might be able to modify their DNA… and Lamarckism might not be so far fetched…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/11/masters-of-acclimation-octopuses-adjust-to-cold-by-editing-their-rna/
Saving others like me a trip to Google: “Lamarckism, a theory of evolution based on the principle that physical changes in organisms during their lifetime—such as greater development of an organ or a part through increased use—could be transmitted to their offspring.”
Sounds like he is claiming that if I exercise a lot, then my kids will also have big muscles.
If you exercise a lot it probably increases the chance that your kids will exercise a lot. 🙂
It never ceases to appall me when someone comes up with a sophisticated theory to explain something that is otherwise bleeding obvious.
Some have characterized EvoDevo as Neo-Lamarckism.
It took a century of environmental change to make a English moth change to a dark colour, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36424768
You think tens of thousands of years of ice age cant turn a bear white?
Polar bears mate with brown bears, and have young, they are that close still.
look at all the breeds of dogs and I think it hasn’t taken a vast amount of time for them to develop- I’m not a biologist or dog expert- just thought I’d mention this 🙂
Joseph ==> Dr. Crockford ia lso an expert on dogs and how there came to be so many. Read her book and find out what she thinks. Its in there.
zzebowa ==> If you read the book, you’ll find out why that view is a Just So story. The color of snow does not change the color of fur….”and that’s how the tiger got its stripes!…Just so…” is not evolutionary biology.
You have misinterpreted the moth story. That is a story of selective predation.
You can’t blame ‘zzebowa’ – he’s getting his info from the BBC, where everything is caused by the weather.
Well, yes. Of course it’s selective predation, or to be a bit more specific. it’s evolution of camouflage as a defence against predation. It’s one of what you might call “pathways” that link changes in environment to changes in phenotype.
The opposite pathway is that predators who depend on surprise attacks on their prey, are going to do better if they are camouflaged. If you rely on catching seals who come up for air at holes in the ice, you are definitely going to thrive if your fur is white. This is going to be true, no matter what the exact genetic or epigenetic (or any other) mechanism is that makes the camouflage happen.
Arctic foxes have done a really great job of camouflage. They are white in the winter and brownish in the summer. And arctic hares do the same, for the exact opposite reason.
By contrast, wolves hunt their prey in packs, so they have no need for camouflage. Neither do muskoxen, whose defence is to live in herds and stand in circles with their horns facing outwards when predators approach. Which is why we’re not allowed to shoot them; it’s just too easy.
“All genes, all the time” was a perfectly reasonable explanation of evolutionary changes as the science of genetics developed. Now that researchers are delving further into it, epigenetics is starting to become mainstream, and the whole business of evolution is turning out to be a lot more complex than we thought. Why on earth should this be a surprise? – it’s how science works (except Climate Science of course, where the conclusions come before the observations). And it should also be no surprise that leaders of the status quo ante, like Richard Dawkins, are slow to give credit to new and evolving theories. Old dogs, new tricks, etc. That’s also part of how science works.
I will be reading Dr. Crockford’s book. I just hope that the long covid has left me with enough attention span to get through it (39 months since I first caught the covid, and I still can’t taste my food, still have difficulty remembering why I just came downstairs etc. although I can breathe easier now). Don’t let me go on about the whole covid thing, it’s a rabbit hole…
Smart ==> “and the whole business of evolution is turning out to be a lot more complex than we thought.” and that it is.
On the moths, the species has not changed color, even in the UK. What has changed is the prevalence of dark to light representatives of that species. This story is often mis-told to strengthen evolutionary arguments — a pretty correct version is here.
My version of “survival of the fittest” is “what ever lives, lives to breed”….but because it lives and breeds does not make if the “fittest” — it might just be particularly lucky!
???
A seal looking upward from their holes in the ice?
By your rationale, the bear should now be blue, to match the color of the sky.
So in the current Ice Age that started 2.6My ago when did the shift take place ? If polar bears are less than 400ky old why did it take 2.2My or longer for them to evolve?
Robertvd – the term “ice age” is misleading. It has not been a consistent 2.6 million years of icy climate, but rather a rather long series of glaciations and interglacials, approx. 26 of them, at varying intervals. Not including the much smaller and shorter climate variances during that time (like the “Medieval Warm Period”, or the “Little Ice Age”). These cycles have occurred anywhere from 100 thousand to 200 thousand years each.
So the evolution of polar bears and other creatures that live in the arctic or sub arctic zones of the planet is not a straight line process, but a series evolutionary zigs and zags that ultimately leads us to where they are today.
I’m sure that Dr. Crawford can and does explain this in vastly greater detail than the summary above, but it should not be surprising that climate-responsive adaptation and evolution is not necessarily a linear process.
and with all those vast, drastic changes in the climate- life goes on- yet we’re suppossed to be terrified of a relatively trivial change in temperature- calling it an emergency, a catastrophe, a disaster- that we need to stop it to save the planet, save the biodiversity, change everything about civilization, blah, blah, blah
clearly the lunatics have taken over the asylum
Duane ==> And you would be exactly right about that….to find out the whole story, it is necessary to read Crockford’s book.
Good morning all! It’s clear that Robert and others have an interest in this topic but lack a complete understanding of the issues. That’s why I wrote the book.
I get asked all the time about when and where the polar bear arose. There have been more than a dozen genetic studies undertaken to address that question, and virtually all have come up with a different answer. All of those genetic studies have failed to check that their solution fits the fossil and geological records. Because they are geneticists, they believe their answers should stand alone, that their answers are the “real” ones.
However, genetic analyses of this kind are just like climate models: the outcome depends on certain assumptions that may or may not be true. The fossil record and geological history are critical checks against genetic hubris.
No one has done this before. It’s why I did it. It needed to be explained, step by step and in clear language that non-scientists will understand, why most of the estimates of when the polar bear arose can’t possibly be true.
In the mean time, if you’re interested, invest in the book. You won’t be sorry.
Susan
“There have been more than a dozen genetic studies undertaken to address that question, and virtually all have come up with a different answer. All of those genetic studies have failed to check that their solution fits the fossil and geological records. Because they are geneticists, they believe their answers should stand alone, that their answers are the “real” ones.”
The entire world’s problems distilled into a single paragraph.
(by analogy)
Just ordered the book. 420 pages . That’s a lot of stuff to read so it will take a while. Thanks for the hard work.
Before polar bears could evolve, ringed seals had to evolve.
Before the mid-Pleistocene transition, glacials peaked only about every 40,000 years. After it, at about 100,000 year intervals, ie, the average of two or three such cycles.
I’ve been re-watching a 10 part documentary series from a little more than a decade ago entitled, “Voyage of the Continents”, which is about plate tectonics and the effects on biota and the climate of the collisions and separations of the plates which carry our current land masses around the planet. The massive changes in environment that have occurred over the billions, hundreds of millions, and tens of millions of years since our planet was born is just quite literally “mind boggling”. If there is a tag line to this series it would be “nothing ever stays the same”.
I do not comprehend how the warmunists are so scientifically illiterate that they cannot see that whatever possible effects that humans have on climate are infinitesimal compared to the inexorable natural processes that govern our planet and the universe. They moan and whine about the potential extinction of one or a few marginally-surviving species, while ignoring that geologic events (plate tectonics) as well as external effects (the sun, asteroid collisions) caused multiple instances of complete extinction of nearly all life forms on the planet, only to be replaced by even more varied, robust, and complex life forms, not to mention just the slowly occurring events.
The planet does not need “saving”. If anything needs saving (but cannot be), it is every creature and plant that exists today and that, sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, is going to disappear completely from the planet. Including humans.
“disappear completely from the planet. Including humans.”
might happen if the aliens so decide- the recent revelations from an intelligence official- and no, not just another UFO fantasy- this is the real deal
We are not alone: The UFO whistleblower speaks
It’s no more or less real than all the other claims.
I did hear something of what he was saying and, if I remember correctly, it all hinged on him having access to reports that were so heavily redacted that they were almost completely black – his testimony is based on ‘interpreting’ those blacked-out reports from memory. Not an awful lot to go on.
He gave Congress names and places- so it’s up to Congress to do their homework. And, I gave another link here- where the full interview can be found on YouTube but it apparently was deleted.
Another angle to the Polar bear- Grizzly bear divide
https://news.ucsc.edu/2013/03/polar-bear-genomics.html
‘At the end of the last ice age, a population of polar bears was stranded by the receding ice on a few islands in southeastern Alaska. Male brown bears swam across to the islands from the Alaskan mainland and mated with female polar bears, eventually transforming the polar bear population into brown bears’
Random mutations or another mechanism at work?
These were a mutated form of polar bears that couldn’t swim, presumably? Polar Bears are usually fast, strong swimmers that have been recorded swimming up to 420 miles with only short breaks. Brown Bears lack the Polar Bears webbed paws, tend to be slower in the water and tire quite quickly, although they have been seen swimming up to 6 miles at a time.
Your story doesn’t seem too credible – ‘stranded by receding ice?’ ‘Male Brown Bears swam across to the islands?’ Seems too much like the delusions of climate enthusiasts than reality.