Remembrances of books past

Our university library is having a book sale today, one of those unfortunate but necessary events where they purge old or duplicate items from the collections to make room for new books, and I had to make a quick browse. What did I discover but an old children’s book that startled me with fearful and powerful remembrances — this is a book that I checked out from the Kent Public Library when I was ten years old.

i-42323a240c23f6619ccc6b6598f0921b-zim.jpeg

That’s the Golden Guide to Mammals by Herbert S. Zim and Donald F. Hoffmeister, copyright 1955. It features “218 ANIMALS IN FULL COLOR”, with maps of their distribution and short descriptions of their habitat and life histories. I remember reading that from cover to cover, practically memorizing it, and going on long walks out into the fields and forests around my home, looking for the elusive Boreal Red-Backed Vole or the dens of the Hoary Bat, or using it to try to identify the shredded carcasses of road kill.

Now with hindsight I realize it’s a rather awful little book, simultaneously too thin on information for each species to be really useful, and far too limited in breadth to be helpful in actually appreciating diversity, but I have to appreciate it for being an early provocateur, telling me that there was more to the life around me than people, my dog, and the lettuces and corn growing in the nearby fields. So thank you Drs Zim and Hoffmeister! I had to buy the rather ragged copy on sale at the library today as a nod to my early years.

I also had to buy it as an act of expiation. I sinned in my youth, and it curiously still nags at me. I checked the book out of the library when I was 10, and I didn’t return it. I kept it hidden away in my bedroom for a long, long time, and it was small enough to fit in my pocket when I went out, so I just…kinda…kept it. The library sent out all kinds of late notices and my parents kept nagging me to find the damned overdue book, while I just willfully pretended I didn’t know where it was, and they eventually had to just pay to replace it (so I’m pretty sure the Library Police aren’t still trying to hunt me down). I was so bad.

When I look back on my childhood and recollect the naughty things I did, I have to say that my appropriation of that shallow little book is at the top of my list of criminal acts, and I still do feel a bit guilty about it. But now I have my very own copy, openly and rightfully paid for! It’s not as if I’ll ever actually use it, but it’s sweet how holding it now brings me back to the edges of old ponds, hiking the steep flanks on the west side of the Green River Valley, wandering half-lost through silent forests, and that time I climbed up the side of an abandoned gravel pit to startle a grouse at the top who almost sent me plummeting backwards to my likely death when he puffed up and flew right at me.

Which led me to check out the Golden Guide to Birds, which was another story…

The sexist brain

It looks like I have to add another book to my currently neglected reading list. In an interview, Cordelia Fine, author of a new book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), has a few provocative things to say about gender stereotypes and the flimsy neuroscience used to justify them.

So women aren’t really more receptive than men to other people’s emotions?

There is a very common social perception that women are better at understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings. When you look at one of the most realistic tests of mind reading, you find that men and women are just as good at getting what their interaction partners were thinking and feeling. It even surprised the researchers. They went on to discover that once you make gender salient when you test these abilities [like having subjects check a box with their sex before a test], you have this self-fulfilling effect.

The idea that women are better at mind reading might be true in the sense that our environments often remind women they should be good at it and remind men they should be bad at it. But that doesn’t mean that men are worse at this kind of ability.

…

But it seems like a Catch-22: Women who pursue careers in math are being handicapped by the fact that there are so few women pursuing careers in math.

Gender equality is increasing in pretty much all domains, and the psychological effects of that can only be beneficial. The real issue is when people in the popular media say things like, “Male brains are just better at this kind of stuff, and women’s brains are better at that kind of stuff.” When we say to women, “Look, men are better at math, but it’s because they work harder,” you don’t see the same harmful effects. But if you say, “Men are better at math genetically,” then you do. These stem from the implicit assumption that the gender stereotypes are based on hard-wired truths.

Here we have a brain, receptive and plastic and sensitive to learning, constantly rewiring itself, with a core of common, human traits hardwired into it, and over here we have scientists who have been the recipient of years of training, often brought up in a culture that fosters an interest in science and math…and somehow, many of these scientists are resistant to the idea that the brain is easily skewed in different directions by the social environment. I don’t get it. I was brought up as a boy, and I know that throughout my childhood I was constantly being hammered by male-affirmative messages and biases, and I think it’s obvious that girls were also hit with lots of their gender-specific cultural influences. Yet somehow we’re supposed to believe that the differences between men and women are largely set by our biology? That women aren’t as good at math because hormones wire up their brain in a different way than the brains of men, and it’s not because our plastic brains receive different environmental signals?

Fine appeals to my biases about the importance of environmental influences, I’ll admit; the interview is a bit thin on the details. But I’ll definitely have to read her book.

The Frog Scientist

I just got my hands on a very interesting book for the younger set: it’s aimed at kids in grades 5-8, and it’s a description of the life and work of a real live scientist, someone who does both field and lab work, and studies development and the effects of environmental toxins on reproduction. The man is Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley, and the book is The Frog Scientist(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Pamela Turner. It’s excellent stuff — it humanizes the scientist and also does a very good job of letting kids see what scientists actually do in their research, and why they’re doing it. If you’ve got a young one who’s thinking about being a scientist when she or he grows up, you might want to grab this book as a little inspiring incentive.

Plus it has lots of fabulous photos of frogs. You can’t go wrong.

One other thing: the School Library Journal is having a battle of the books, with a poll to bring a book up into the final round of voting. There’s a shortage of science books in the listing: there’s The Frog Scientist, and another one about Darwin, Charles and Emma, but otherwise, while the other books may be very good (I have heard good things about The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, and it’s not because it has the word “evolution” in the title), there isn’t much in the way of kid’s books on science. If you’re familiar with any of these, vote!

Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be

People keep asking me for books on evolution for their kids, and I have to keep telling them that there is a major gap in the library. We have lots of great books for adults, but most of the books for the younger set reduce evolution to stamp collecting: catalogs of dinosaurs, for instance. I just got a copy of a book that is one small step in filling that gap, titled Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Daniel Loxton. It’s beautifully illustrated, and the organization of the book focuses on concepts (and misconceptions!) of evolution, explaining them in manageable bits of a page or two. The first half covers the basics of evolutionary theory — a little history of Darwin, the evidence for selection and speciation, short summaries of how selection works, that sort of thing. The second half covers common questions, such as how something as complex as an eye could have evolved, or where the transitional fossils are. The book is aimed at 8-13 year olds, and it’s kind of cute to see that most creationists could learn something from a book for 8 year olds.

I recommend it highly, but with one tiny reservation. The author couldn’t resist the common temptation to toss in something about religion at the end, and he gives the wrong answer: it’s the standard pablum, and he claims that “Science as a whole has nothing to say about religion.” Of course it can. We can confidently say that nearly all religions are definitely wrong, if for no other reason than that they contradict each other. We also have a multitude of religions that make claims about the world that are contradicted by the evidence. It’s only two paragraphs, and I sympathize with the sad fact that speaking the truth on this matter — that science says your religion is false — is likely to get the book excluded from school libraries everywhere, but it would have been better to leave it out than to perpetuate this silly myth.

Don’t worry about it, though — take the kids aside and explain to them that that bit of the book is wrong, which is also a good lesson to teach, that you should examine everything critically, even good pro-science books.

Say, did you know that Darwin Day is coming up soon? Maybe you should order a copy fast for the kids in your life!

Great bathroom reading?

I have mixed feelings about this: a first-edition copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species has been discovered, which is, of course, great — I do wish I had the pocket change to drop £60,000 to buy it for myself.

The weird part is that it was found in the guest bathroom of an old house in Oxford. Apparently, someone thought the Origin was perfect light, occasional reading for visitors attending to certain private physiological functions, which is nice, if a little trivializing. It’s a bit odd, though, that they put the book there and no one seems to have bothered to notice it for 150 years. I am really curious to know what other books were on that toilet shelf — I’m imagining guests ducking into the bathroom for a few minutes of managing the necessaries, scanning the shelf for a little light reading to pass the time, and skipping over the rare and valuable antique Darwin volume to read…what? A couple of scrolls of the lost plays of Aeschylus, the handwritten manuscript copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and a copy of the Arzhang, the mysterious holy book of the Manicheans? Or was it a yellowed copy of the Daily Mall, a couple of dog-eared editions of the Readers’ Digest, and last week’s TV Guide? This must have been a very curious and neglected bookshelf!

Ray Comfort is a parasite

In this case, it’s unintentional, though. His mangled version of Darwin’s Origin is currently the #1 result of searches for the Origin on Amazon. It’s not there honestly, though: it’s because Amazon’s indexing system has a deep flaw. It doesn’t seem to actually track which edition is the most popular…it just gladly gives Comfort’s edition full credit with every other edition of the same book. This also means that the star rating for the Comfort edition is elevated; he’s getting a leg up by appropriating all the reviews for all the other editions.

Here’s a video to explain the situation.

Amazon needs to fix this, and fix it soon. Otherwise, I predict, every single lousy creationist out there is going to grab any out-of-copyright, reputable science book out there and come out with their own edition by slapping a dishonest foreword on it, and get a free ride on the reputation of the original authors.

I’ll also add that if Ray Comfort has the tiniest scrap of integrity in his itty-bitty body, he’ll be leading the charge to demand that Amazon give credit where it is due and sort out their scrambled ratings system.