The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science
In recounting the "Nemesis Affair," Raup aims to elucidate the scientific and journalistic climate in which the idea was born. The story begins with a 1980 paper in Science implicating impact of an extraterrestrial body with Earth as the cause of dinosaur extinction. It proceeds through the later hypothesis that mass extinctions are time-periodic and astrophysicists' suggestions (including "Nemesis," an undiscovered small companion star to our sun) to explain the periodicity. All the hypotheses are still under debate. Raup, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and a participant in the "Nemesis Affair," is a clear-eyed and frank, if not completely unbiased, reporter. His book makes good reading for anyone curious about "Nemesis" or about science. Margery C. Coombs, Zoology Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts, AmherstCopyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.