It’s that time of year when I think everyone got Amazon gift cards and then they go asking me to make book recommendations. It’s hard. Writing a science book is even harder. And there are a lot of bad science books out there.
One problem is that everyone wants the shortcut: there’s a hot new science topic, lots of people are curious about it, they want to know more, the publishers see an opportunity, so they commission a flashy pop sci book that will sate that curiosity. And it’s garbage, because it’s written by people who don’t know the basics, or because it’s written for people who want to hear that the answer is magic. Case in point: there are no good popular books about epigenetics right now, as far as I can see. If it’s got “epigenome” in the title, just scratch it right off your list. This may change, I hope it will change, but it’s an example of a topic where the situation is rather dire. That’s unfortunate, because it’s an important topic.
At the other extreme, there are the textbooks. There is a reason that textbooks exist, and it isn’t just the venality of publishers and the conservative nature of professors: they are dense repositories of basic knowledge. My genetics class uses Klug’s Concepts of Genetics, it’s not light reading, and to get the most out of it you should actually sit down and do the problems at the end of each chapter. Does that sound like fun? How does the $196 price tag sound to you?
There is a sweet spot in popular science writing where the author manages to simultaneously explain the basics and get them right, while also getting the big picture explained in an interesting way. Carl Zimmer consistently hits that target, Sean B. Carroll is good, Adam Rutherford’s Creation does a fine job of covering biotech and the origin of life, Nick Lane is always amazing. The microbiome was one of those buzzwords that spawned a lot of crap books, like the word “epigenetics” now, but Ed Yong rose above the dross and came out with a good general science book on the subject.
But it’s still really difficult to address requests for recommendations. Usually it’s because someone wants an answer that they can digest in a couple of days of light reading, and often, that can’t be done.
The correct answer is that what you need to do is register at the University of Minnesota and sign up for my classes. I’ll whip you into shape in 15 weeks of harsh discipline.
If you could get a sabbatical, would you try to write one?
Not exactly. My plan is to write about developmental biology, primarily, but there’d have to be some epigenetics in there.
I wonder if a good one already exists in Japanese. Maybe I’ll get this one from the library when it opens up again after the holiday.
Good pop-sci books etc. are necessary for the populace to become enough scientifically savvy to recognize phoney science and medicine and all the accompanied bullshit.
I know science is complicated and difficult, but please do not commit the fallacy of false dilemma, where you propose one either has to dedicate all their time to any particular scientific subject in order to know something of value, or they are doomed to be totally ignorant about it. There are correct middle ways to educate general populace on even the most complicated topics. The problem is not that “… and often, that can’t be done.”, but that is has not been done yet, or that the light reading available is heavily interspersed with garbage produced by deepity dispensers. And therefore for recognizing the garbage an expert has to step in – in a form of a recommendation.
Every single one of us has to rely on “light reading” (light from the point of view of experts) on a lot of the sciences – even scientists. There is not a single person around the world who is an expert on everything. Indeed being an expert on everything even in one single field is not humanly possible anymore and has not been for a long time.
One good thing about being in mathematics is that in the rare cases when the first quoted sentence applies (Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Poincare Conjecture being the only two I can think of: although those weren’t strictly “hot new topics”, but they were certainly hot stuff), the second sentence as a whole generally doesn’t apply: the books just can’t be written at all “by people who don’t know the basics”. [Disclaimer: I’m good friends with authors of would-be popular books on both topics, who are—nearly necessarily—relevant subject-matter experts. I don’t think any of the them are getting rich on the royalties, however. As the old saying goes, a mathematician would rather be correct than interesting.]
…Okay, I lied—I had forgotten that Marilyn Vos Savant actually created a book-like object on FLT, no doubt with the help of her sister Edie O. Savant, which, however, didn’t even try to explain Wiles’s proof because she was so arrogantly ignorant that she thought it was wrong for trivial reasons!!! I don’t think anyone has even attempted a similar disservice to Perlman’s proof of the Poincare Conjecture.
I could imagine this being a very brief post.
“It’s that time of year when I think everyone got Amazon gift cards and then they go asking me to make book recommendations. It’s hard, but I recommend The Happy Atheist. Go buy a second copy.”
I recently checked out of the library ‘The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being’ by Alice Roberts (2014). I’m only on chapter 2 (Heads and Brains). Like PZ’s planned masterpiece, this book is mostly about developmental biology including some epigenetics. I checked it out cold just because I saw it on the shelf and liked the drawings inside (and the nod to the Kundera title). So far it’s quite a nice read. I’d like to hear from others though who may be more expert on its contents.
Charly @4:
There are often “middle ways”, but they are also often incorrect. For example, you’ll see ‘explanations’ of some physics which involve particle-antiparticle pairs popping in and out of the vacuum. And this is OK, we’re told, because the energy-time uncertainty relation allows such things to happen. That’s all nonsense, with no basis in the actual theories. There is no fundamental energy-time uncertainty relation in quantum mechanics, in the same sense as the position-momentum uncertainty relation. The horror is that you’ll even see this in some otherwise excellent textbooks*, because the ‘pop’ picture has become so ingrained. And I’ve seen this picture used to ‘explain’ vacuum polarization, the Casimir effect, and Hawking radiation**. No doubt other stuff as well.
The problem is that you can’t explain a lot of stuff without a fair bit of mathematics.
Now, there are excellent explanations of some pretty hairy stuff. Siggy wrote posts on Bell’s theorem and the Kochen-Specker theorem which are as good as or better than anything I’ve seen, in terms of accessibility. But they’re certainly not light reading, and (must, I think) require a fair bit of effort from the reader.
I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if the same sort of problems occur in other fields.
*The weird thing is they’re so obviously out of place in the textbooks. They just make you go “huh?”. It’s as though editors insist the author include it.
**Not by Hawking himself, though.
“I Don’t Wanna Make Book Recommendations”
The original lyrics to the Ramones’ “I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement” didn’t have the same je ne sais quoi.
Kinda…
Nevermind.
Long time reader, just signing up here to second your recommendation of Ed Yong’s excellent “I Contain Multitudes”. In addition to being interesting, and very careful not to overstate evidence in a sensationalist way, it is eminently readable – fun, even. I blew right through it, and it’s stayed with me for weeks.
@Rob Grigjanis #8
I do not dispute this. I think you misunderstand gravely what I was trying to say.
My message is: You do not need to have expert understanding of many topics in order to have imprecise but nevertheless reasonably valuable understanding of them.
Every knowledge we have has a degree of error, even the most detailed and expert knowledge. What makes a difference between laymans understanding and experts understanding of any topic is not that the experts understanding is free of errors, but that it contains fewer errors and less fundamental ones.
The goal in educating public is not about conveying them expert knowledge, but to provide them with the least flawed and most usefull simplification available, big enough to give them some understanding all the while giving them clear signal of how much they still do not understand, but not as big as to overwhelm them and discourage them.
Experts might cringe, but if your goal is perfection or nothing, then you are essentially bound to do nothing and therefore you are useless as an educator. Even experts are built by being given less and less imprecise knowledge, each step on the way helped along by wrong but nevertheless helpfull simplifications.
People might want to avoid anything published by Simon & Schuster.
Charly @12: In the example I gave, it’s not a matter of “imprecise but nevertheless reasonably valuable”, it’s just bleedin’ wrong. Unfounded. Fictional. What do you think is “reasonably valuable” about that?
I was not defending the specific example you gave, I was defending the general principle.
In the textbook department, the authors of probably the leading parasitic disease medical textbook published a new edition in 2016 and have made it available as a free pdf:
http://www.parasiteswithoutborders.com/parasitic-diseases-6th-edition/
A not-bad science book is Warped Passages by Lisa Randall (first female theoretical physicist ever to get tenure at Harvard.
A not-bad sci-fi book is Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle. What would space travel be like if Aristotle’s cosmology were…CORRECT???
A very good magic-fantasy book is The Grimm Legacy by Polly Shulman.
The thing about book is its often out of date before its even typeset. And to fix even the smallest error requires silly bits of paper to be dropped on the floor on opening or a new edition.
When I was at uni I returned early at the start of term and popped into the library (to read the newspapers) and found one of my lecturers removing all the copies of the course book so we’d have to buy new ones! Thats no way to run a course!
Free PDFs are slightly better but PDFs are paper shaped and I want things that are computer shaped. In 1990 HTML was proposed. Most text books can be modernised into even simple hierarchical HTML and provide far more effective tools than dead tree or Pointless Document Format versions.
Have you read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book, The Gene (it has a section on epigenetics)? I’d be interested in your impressions of this book.
Fuck Steve Klug. Don’t give him money. That’s all I’m gonna say.
ChasCPeterson @20: Is it the same Klug who was shot dead by a student last year?
no.