Man, I'm sick of this

One of my unending and probably hopeless quests is to understand more about the natural world. From time to time I read a book that, in language supposed to be comprehensible by non-scientists, promises to teach me something about material reality. Physics, astronomy, geology, biology. The degree of success--that is, how much I actually do understand and, more important, retain--varies. When it comes to astrophysics, I sometimes get what I'm reading while I'm reading it, as with Simon Singh's very good book Big Bang, but a week or two after finishing the book I'm hard pressed to be able to explain much that I thought I'd learned. My best success comes in reading about evolution, which, not coincidentally, is the topic I find most fascinating of all. For the most part I really do get it (I think!). I thoroughly enjoy reading about it, and have for many years, from the days of the Leakeys' books about their work in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and Donald Johanson's books about the discovery of the 3-million-year-old hominid mother of us all whom he and his team dubbed Lucy (that's her below), to more

recent works including Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale (except for the disgusting anti-affirmative-action rant he felt compelled to include). Two summers ago I went back to the big daddy of them all, Charles Darwin, and read The Origin of Species, which to my surprise I found to be completely accessible, an extremely enjoyable, engrossing read.

But.

With rare exceptions, science writers still refer to homo sapiens as "man." And so, even as I feel my mind expanding as I read these books, I'm also seething, cursing, gritting my teeth page by page. And I'm not just talking about old papa Darwin, writing 150 years ago. I'm talking, for example, about a book I just read, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Is there any excuse for a book published in the year 2007 to characterize a species that consists of two sexes--that in fact is majority female--to call that species "man"? Hell no, there is not. What is wrong with these people?

Not all these people, thank goodness. Some writers of popular science books do nod to reality by referring to humans or people instead of man, and by not using male pronouns exclusively as a generic stand-in for our mostly female species. Best of all is the secular saint Natalie Angier, my favorite contemporary writer about the workings of the natural world. Ms. Angier is a science writer for the New York Times; whenever I see her byline, usually on a Tuesday in the Science Times section, I print out the story and take it home to savor over the weekend. I've read and loved two of her books, Woman: An Intimate Geography and The Canon. I find the way she thinks about and explains science very winning. Man, that's no lie.