Content provided in partnership with

The big picture

Natural History, Oct, 2002 by Ellen Goldensohn

Working at Natural History magazine for eighteen years has been nothing less than a re-education for me, not because it immersed me in new scientific findings (though it did that, of course) but because it slowly and surely revised my view of the world. I suspect that the magazine, being based on (and named for) a remarkable scientific discipline, has this effect on many readers. Science narrowly conceived can amount to little more than manipulating the natural world; natural history offers instead an encompassing and exhilarating way of understanding that world and one's place in it. The field of natural history, in other words, is more than the sum of its parts.

Most Popular Articles in Reference: The importance of understanding organizational culture; Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students; What factors attract foreign direct investment?; Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...; How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques; More »

Looking at the world through Natural History's lens--through the eyes of anthropologists, astronomers, biologists, geologists, and paleontologists--regularly brings one face-to-face with a world of complexity, deep time, and, above all, constant change. For me, the view through that lens was so compelling that it reshaped my daily reality. I no longer live only in the here and now. And I no longer live securely within my own skin. I am aware that mastodons once walked where I walk, that the seemingly solid ground under my feet has frozen and thawed (and will re-freeze and re-thaw) over eons. I am aware that I live on a drifting continent. Many dry, cold lands once lay under warm, shallow seas. Not so long ago, green trees grew in the Sahara; further back in time, the badlands of the American West were verdant rainforest. I take quite seriously the notion that I am not an individual, a being tightly packaged in my own skin, but rather a colony of cells, perhaps more like a jellyfish or a sponge or a coral reef, the host to a universe of bacterial symbionts. I have learned that the perfect flesh and bone of a new baby is made of recycled elements released in the ancient explosions of stars.

In the pages of Natural History investigators from many disciplines have deflated our human pretentions to uniqueness: archaeologists have informed us that our hominid ancestors may well have had run-ins with perhaps a dozen quite similar species on the plains of Africa; molecular biologists have reported that viruses and parasitic segments of DNA have intruded themselves into our genome and made themselves at home there; anthropologists have demonstrated that such "cultural absolutes" as the nuclear family are actually highly variable and of recent, local vintage. Biogeographers and ecologists, physicists and climatologists have connected us and every other living being with the elements. Developmental geneticists have revamped the nature/nurture debate by explaining that the environment can act through genes to shape the individual organism. And throughout the magazine's history, field naturalists in the Darwinian tradition have provided other scientists with essential data--observations of whole organisms evolving within whole systems.

Magazines, too, evolve and change. Although I leave the editorship as of this issue, I am confident that Natural History will expand its reach and breadth under its new and skillful editorial stewardship. I know that my successor, Peter Brown, who was editor of the admirable publication The Sciences, will enjoy shaping, and being shaped by, the legacy of this century-old magazine.

The big picture

Natural History, Oct, 2002 by Ellen Goldensohn

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Technology

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference