Product Description

Can the structures that animals build--from the humble burrows of earthworms to towering termite mounds to the Great Barrier Reef--be said to live? However counterintuitive the idea might first seem, physiological ecologist Scott Turner demonstrates in this book that many animals construct and use structures to harness and control the flow of energy from their environment to their own advantage. Building on Richard Dawkins's classic, The Extended Phenotype, Turner shows why drawing the boundary of an organism's physiology at the skin of the animal is arbitrary. Since the structures animals build undoubtedly do physiological work, capturing and channeling chemical and physical energy, Turner argues that such structures are more properly regarded not as frozen behaviors but as external organs of physiology and even extensions of the animal's phenotype. By challenging dearly held assumptions, a fascinating new view of the living world is opened to us, with implications for our understanding of physiology, the environment, and the remarkable structures animals build. (20001210)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #336732 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
[Turner's] thesis is that many of the external structures that organisms build represent the same kind of physiological machinery we typically associate with kidneys, lungs and other squishy bits. He demonstrates his view with verve and enthusiasm in fascinating chapters on how organisms manipulate the external environment to their advantage...Stories like this form the heart of this book, presenting a novel set of environmental mysteries and revealing their solutions. But Turner does not merely explain the answers--he dissects them and makes us see why they are the answers. Each chapter is, in fact, a hidden lesson in physiology, biomechanics and environmental chemistry..."The Extended Organism" can be read and enjoyed without taking a position on the Gaia question. It is a clever dissection of environmental physiology from a persistent and clever teacher. Like most good teachers, Turner manages to slip a huge range of new information into your head along the way--information that helps change your view of organisms in their world. -- Stephen R. Palumbi "American Scientist"

Review
With his audacious new book, J. Scott Turner shoots an impressive salvo across the bows of narrow thinking. He...[seeks] to dispense with...the distinction between phenotype and environment...As he painstakingly builds his argument, one progresses from head-scratching to head-nodding. To work this metamorphosis, Turner brings to bear scientific incisiveness, humor, and a prose style that makes scientific minutiae fun to read...[The Extended Organism] stands apart as a remarkably synthetic piece of scholarship.
--Kurt Schwenk (New York Times Book Review 20001123)

With case upon case [Turner] shows how the sharp, traditional line between organism and external world often proves at least a nuisance and how, almost as often, we tacitly ignore it. And he concludes that our outlook on how organisms function would be empowered by drawing a more encompassing line...Few readers of this book will fail to be fascinated by his examples. Turner's tales of the subtle ways organisms capitalize on the opportunities afforded them by their physical and chemical surroundings provide more than ample reason to read the book.
--Steven Vogel (Nature )

While surveying the edifices that animals engineer, Turner argues that such structures, though external to the organisms' bodies, should be regarded as physiological parts of those animals. This argument develops around a functional analysis of how animals build tunnels, mounds, webs, coral reefs, and other such structures and the ways that they work. (Science News )

[Turner's] thesis is that many of the external structures that organisms build represent the same kind of physiological machinery we typically associate with kidneys, lungs and other squishy bits. He demonstrates his view with verve and enthusiasm in fascinating chapters on how organisms manipulate the external environment to their advantage...Stories like this form the heart of this book, presenting a novel set of environmental mysteries and revealing their solutions. But Turner does not merely explain the answers--he dissects them and makes us see why they are the answers. Each chapter is, in fact, a hidden lesson in physiology, biomechanics and environmental chemistry...The Extended Organism can be read and enjoyed without taking a position on the Gaia question. It is a clever dissection of environmental physiology from a persistent and clever teacher. Like most good teachers, Turner manages to slip a huge range of new information into your head along the way--information that helps change your view of organisms in their world.
--Stephen R. Palumbi (American Scientist )

When a gene determines a physical or behavioural characteristic of an animal, there is little doubt that the end result of the gene's activity is a function of the animal's genome...But what about structures that animals build? They fulfill the same criteria although they are separated from the individual; but then so are eggs. Is there a fundamental difference between the way that eggs and the nest in which they are laid are encoded in the genome?...[This] concept is elaborated...in this masterful book by J. Scott Turner.
--Dennis Cotton (Biologist )

About the Author
J. Scott Turner is Associate Professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse.

Customer Reviews

Bringing the Outside In
In _The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures_ (Harvard University Press), J. Scott Turner gives plenty of surprising examples to show that animals indeed use the environment outside in ways that would qualify the outside as part of their physiology. He intends us to take a broader view that organisms are not just tangible things wrapped up in skin or chitin or scales. An organism is, instead, an ephemeral collection of organized matter and energy. An organism is busy all its life influencing the flow of matter and energy through itself, but also through the environment. He argues that the reductionism of molecular and evolutionary biology may give way to a more holistic view, and winds up with the controversial idea of Gaia, the hypothesis that earth can be viewed as a single living organism. He says he doesn't want to air the arguments pro and con of this idea, but if organisms modify their environments into becoming part of their physiology, then it is not much of a step to saying that the Earth has a physiology of its own.

Perhaps. Turner's book is well argued and full of good ideas, and it may presage a neo-holism. Whether it accomplishes that, though, is less important than what it does manage to do. Turner is astonishingly encyclopedic in his explanations of his many surprising examples of out-of-body physiology. He draws upon thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, chemistry, electrical circuits, fractals, acoustics, and much more to put his audacious ideas onto a sound scientific foundation. This does not make for easy reading, but he is a genial guide and he tries his best to explain complicated ideas simply; the book is not for those, however, who can't stand equations mixed with the text. The best parts of the book are the examples of animals that have as good as made their surroundings part of their innards. There are lots of examples. In addition to the beetles that grab a bubble of air to use as scuba gear, there are beetles that not only do that, but if there is a current moving over them, their hydrodynamic form causes a suction, so that if they face into the current (which they of course habitually do), a bubble forms, pulled out of the water itself. They make this their gills, and they never have to go to the surface. Spittlebugs make a frothy white spittle attached to plants. The spittle isn't spittle, of course, but a froth of sap from the plant, processed by the digestive tract, excreted, and inflated with bubbles. Turner makes the case that since the bugs have a diet of protein-rich sap, they have a lot of ammonia as a waste product, and they cannot detoxify it as other animals do. The spittle enables the ammonia to be carried away; in other words, it functions as an exterior kidney. Earthworms, Turner shows, are fundamentally aquatic animals that only manage to get around when the water content of soils is perfectly balanced for them. (Turner reminds us that Darwin got enormous satisfaction for his last great work concerning earthworms and what they do to soils; before Darwin, earthworms were regarded as pests which ate plant roots.) The burrowing activities of the earthworm actually make the soil itself more favorable to the narrow needs of their own survival, and they use the soil as an organ to maintain a proper salt and water balance inside them.

There are many examples even before Turner gets to bees and to termites, which are his own particular enthusiasm and which use their homes to regulate temperature, oxygen content, and more. It is inarguable that these creatures really do shape their environment, and in ways that are not obvious. With clarity, humor, and a broad scientific understanding, Turner has done much to advance an argument to his holistic view.