New Book by Shipman Hailed by Reviewers

31 January 2001 -- A new book titled The Man Who Found the Missing Link, by Pat Shipman, adjunct professor of anthropology at Penn State, has been hailed by reviewers upon its publication by Simon & Schuster in January 2001.

The book is a biography of the life of Eugene Dubois, the Dutch anatomist who in 1887 set out to find the transitional ape-man that would prove Darwin's theory of evolution. Against all odds, Dubois found the missing link he called Pithecanthropus erectus--now known as Homo erectus--in Java in 1891-1893. Unfortunately, Pithecanthropus did not fit the general preconceived notion of what a missing like should have looked like or where it should have lived. So Dubois, once scorned for quitting his professorship to "follow Darwin's crazy idea," later found his conclusions challenged, questioned, and often disbelieved by the scientific community in Europe. He fought an often-bitter battle until his eventual vindication more than thirty years later.

A review in the New York Times on 21 January 2001 hailed Shipman as "among the best writers who manage to describe science to popular audiences without sacrificing the complexities of the issues that energize and sometimes divide scientists." Another reviewer called the book "a masterpiece" that "frequently reads more like a novel than a biography." Shipman's scholarship has been hailed as "exhaustive" and her writing "engaging." According to one reviewer, "She is at her most evocative when she describes colonial life in the tropics, and how the proper Dutch--those who survived--were entranced and seduced by the scents, the tastes, the teeming life, and languid climate of what is now Indonesia." The New York Times reviewer comments, "Dubois could not have asked for a more capable and understanding biographer."

Writing The Man Who Found the Missing Link placed Shipman squarely in the middle of a vibrant controversy over how much speculation is permissible in biography. Although the documentation of Dubois' life and work is extensive--there are more than 500 endnotes--Shipman found some tantalizing gaps in the evidence. "Rather than leave out significant events when Dubois' motivations were not clear, I decided to go beyond the strict confines of the documentation to create a coherent story that is true to Dubois' character and to his science," she said.

Telling science in this way is stating a hypothesis, Shipman says. "If new evidence turns up, my interpretation may have to be revised, but I believe I serve science better by writing a biography that fires the imagination rather than boring readers with the endless 'what-ifs' and 'might-have-beens' that characterize many scholarly biographies."

Shipman's previous success as a teller of scientific stories is reflected in various honors and prizes. In 1999, she was selected by the BBC to narrate part of a segment on Homo erectus, filmed in Java, for a six-part series titled "Ape-Man." She twice has been a finalist for the prestigious Rhone-Poulenc General Science Award, winning the prize in 1997 with The Wisdom of the Bones. This account of the discovery and interpretation of Homo erectus fossils in Kenya was written with her husband Alan Walker. In 1998, she won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for science writing and was a runner-up for the Los Angeles Times Science Prize with Taking Wing, a look at the contentious debate over the evolution of birds and their relationship to dinosaurs. Both Taking Wing and an earlier book, The Neandertals (co-authored with Erik Trinkaus in 1992), were featured on the covers of their respective issues of the New York Times Book Review section. In 1996, Shipman also won the silver medal of the Society of National Association Publications for an essay on her decision to leave the practice of science to become a full-time science writer.

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