Book Review: I, Mammal - The Story of What Makes Us Mammals

"  For although maturity may teach us that there's not always a definitive answer to such queries - and that we might also do well to ask the more prosaic questions of 'How?,' 'What?' and 'When?' -- 'Why?" remains our favorite question."

Science writer Liam Drew was inspired to write I, Mammal: The Story of What Makes Us Mammals by two noteworthy events.   The second was the birth of his first child and witnessing his wife's care of hers.  The first was getting hit in the testicles by a ball during a soccer game.  I'm not kidding.  He brings it up at least once in every chapter.

With such a seemingly silly starting point, you might be excused for thinking that I, Mammal is going to be a light, easy read.  It's really not.  Instead, it offers one of the most comprehensive explorations of what traits unite animals as different as bats, bears, blue whales, and brush-tailed bettongs, and what distinguishes us mammals from the rest of the animal kingdom.  Topics covered range from the obvious (milk, hair, placentas) to the less readily apparent, such as chromosomes, tooth structure, and, of course, the scrotum that features so prominently in the author's writings (the first chapter is called "The Descent of Man('s Gonads)").  The book takes a tour through the breadth of mammaldom, with special attention paid to those least mammallike-of-mammals, the platypus and echidna.

Besides his sports injury, Drew focuses also on the birth of his two daughters and the care that he and his wife put into them.  Granted, a lot of the care comes from his wife, not because Drew is lazy or indifferent, but because so much of the female mammal's biology is uniquely developed for the care of the young.  Male mammals can't carry pregnancies, nor can they lactate.  The vast majority of mammals, he explains, have no role in parental care apart from serving as sperm donors - especially those outside of our own order, the Primates.  Much of what makes us different as a taxonomic class, however, is focused on how we care for our young - though he does point out the irony that, as a group of animals, we are named after a physical feature, the mammary glands, that is really only used by less than 50% of us.

One of Drew's last chapters focuses on our mammal brain power.  He doesn't, however, fall into the lazy scientific trap of assuming that mammals are inherently better or more advanced than other animals (we've traditionally been called "the higher animals").  Even the tendency to call this "the Age of Mammals" he disputes - after all, we're a very small minority on the planet, especially compared to the insects.  We're not better, he argues.  Just unique.

Especially humans.  We are, after all, the only mammals that deliberately play gams that can injure our reproductive organs.

I, Mammal: The Story of What Makes Us Mammals at Amazon.com