For the ambitious budding cancer biologist

I’m teaching cancer biology in the fall, and if you want to get a head start over the summer, here are the texts we’re going to be using:

Biol 4103: Cancer Biology

Introduction to Cancer Biology, by Robin Heskith
Cambridge University Press, 1st ed.
ISBN 978-1107601482

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Scribner, reprint ed.
ISBN 978-1439170915

Last time around, I used Weinberg’s The Biology of Cancer, which is an excellent, in-depth text, but was really heavy going for an undergraduate course — it’s more of a graduate/MD level reference book. The Heskith book is very good, giving more substantial introductions to the difficult concepts, and also as a bonus, is one third the price. Just having general chapters on cell signaling in normal cells, for instance, will be a big help in bringing students up to speed.

For you outside observers, sorry, but this class won’t be going the supplementary blogging route. I’ve got some other cunning schemes I’m going to try on the students instead.

More lies from the Discovery Institute

Oh, christ. Another book is coming from those frauds at the DI, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. It’s Stephen Meyer’s unqualified, incompetent take on the Cambrian explosion.

Casey Luskin has already given us three reasons we’re supposed to buy it. 1) It’s going to contain the best arguments for intelligent design creationism EVAR; 2) it’s going to be packed full of reviews of the work of the “ID research community”; and 3) we’re living in a “post-Darwinian world”, where all the evolutionary biologists are already deserting the sinking ship of neo-Darwinism. Those aren’t reasons to buy the book; those are reasons the book is going to be total crap.

And why should you read it anyway? You want to know about the Cambrian, read books by real scientists. They’re out there already. One excellent resource is James Valentine’s On the Origin of Phyla; it is not light reading, but if you want to know about the paleontology and systematics of the invertebrate phyla of the Ediacaran and Cambrian, it really is the book to read.

And then to my surprise, while I was digging up the link to that book, I discovered that Douglas Erwin and James Valentine have a new book out as of January: The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity, which the reviews say is less technical than the Phyla text, but highly rated as an excellent overview. I can’t say I’ve read it yet, but I instantly ordered it.

I think it might be an interesting summer project to compare Erwin & Valentine side-by-side with Meyer. Well, “interesting” in a Bambi Meets Godzilla sort of amusing sense.

But if you want to know what caused the Cambrian explosion, I can give you the short answer. Not intelligent design; that doesn’t even make sense. What it was was environmental changes, in particular the bioturbation revolution caused by the evolution of worms that released buried nutrients, and the steadily increasing oxygen content of the atmosphere that allowed those nutrients to fuel growth; ecological competition, or a kind of arms race, that gave a distinct selective advantage to novelties that allowed species to occupy new niches; and the evolution of developmental mechanisms that enabled multicellular organisms to generate new morphotypes readily. Read the real books if you want to know more, and ignore the uninformed babble the charlatans of the DI will try to sell you.

By the way, Joe Felsenstein is asking for help: he’d like suggestions for what Stephen Meyer ought to have in his book.

Greta Christina has a new book

It’s called Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More. I bought it. I read the first page of the introduction, my gnarled and liver-spotted hands trembling, and saw words that were threatening to my comfortable cis male heterosexual conventionality, and then started getting palpitations. I set it aside. Maybe when I’ve recovered and my heart gets a little stronger, I’ll try the second page.

Unless…maybe one of you can read it and tell me if it’s got stuff suitable for a geezer. Or, you know, I’m not really into unicorns, so maybe you can tell me which page has the hot cephalopod action.

Another possibility is that I could give it to my wife to read. I’m just afraid that if she really likes it, I might not survive the experience.

Or maybe I could ask her to read it aloud to me. That ought to be safe. Like a children’s book, right? Bedtime stories?

Goddamn cancer

This past week, I got to meet Jay Lake, a most excellent SF author and current cancer survivor who did not give me optimistic news about his prognosis.

Then this morning I get up to the news that my all-time favorite author, Iain Banks, has issued A Personal Statement in which he announces that he has terminal bladder cancer, is not expected to live out the year, and has written his last book, ever. I have never met Banks, although I’d love to, and now it looks like I never will.

Goddamn motherfucking cancer.

There’s not much we can do, but at least take a look at Jay Lake’s and Iain Banks’ books on Amazon. Good stuff all around.

The cold dead hand of Christopher Hitchens will reach beyond the grave and get you

Hitchens’ own publisher, Verso, apparently commissioned a hatchet job on him, hiring a Marxist-Leninist ideologue to write (using that word loosely) a tell-all called Unhitched to expose Hitch as a plagiarist and heretic and fame-grubbing careerist.

Now I utterly detested Hitchens’ politics; I think he saw the world in binary terms and backed the wrong side in the battle against ignorance because he couldn’t see any other position than GW Bush’s and the fanatical Islamist horde’s. But he was passionate and sincere (not that that excuses anything) in his ideals, and absolutely heroic in his writing and speaking ability. There is room to criticize Hitchens on the facts, and I think a book that looked at the man critically and honestly would both provide an interesting appraisal and honor his talents.

According to the review, this book did neither. The author chose to attack Hitchens by denying his undeniable strengths, and the publisher hired someone who “nature did not intend” to write. The professional calumnist who wants to attack Hitchens post mortem faces a formidable obstacle: the man was a great writer, and every slander is going to look paltry and unimaginative next to Hitchens’ most casual jibe.

Mission accomplished

The Happy Atheist

I am relieved to announce that this book thingie has been edited and shipped back to the publisher. Next step is some arcane process called “typesetting”.

The best thing about it: I really, really love editors. They have a skill that they apply well, and they make everything twinkle sninily that they touch. I wish I could take this one and make her copy edit all my blog posts from now on (even though she’d probably correct “sninily” and tell me I have to explain these weird terms.)

The worst thing: this book has been moldering at the publishers for so long that I really felt this terrible urge to rewrite the whole thing from the ground up…an act both temporally impossible and contradictory, because then it would take even longer to get out.

Also, I’ve got other deadlines stacked up awaiting my service right now.

Hey, there’s a virtual book floating on the verge of existence here

cover

I have good news and bad news.

The excellent news: I have received the copy-edited manuscript of my book-to-be, The Happy Atheist, from Pantheon. After many delays, it’s finally going to happen for sure! Go pre-order your copy now! Buy buy buy buy buy!

The heart-attack-inducing but not at all unexpected news: I’m supposed to review this manuscript and make any corrections and changes (and I’m on a firm deadline, so have no fear, this will not cause any further delays), and when I opened it up, it was a wall of purple editor’s marks — just page after page of nits picked and wording/grammatical errors hacked into submission. Editors are truly scary people, but I know they have an essential role in the ecosystem — I think they’re kind of like a top predator, poised to cull the herd and feast on the flesh of the weak.

Anyway, I can tell what I’ll be doing this week. Licking wounds. But it’s good for me!