The Bible I want on my bookshelf is the Robert Crumb Version. He’s got one chapter done: Crumb is about to publish his version of Genesis, which will be a “scandalous satire” which “presents a complex, even subversive, narrative that calls for a significant re-examination of both the Bible’s content and its role in our culture”. Sounds fun!
Of course, we’ll never have a complete RCV Bible. No one could ever drop enough acid to do Revelation right.
This could be cool: an evolutionary biologist is going to read Darwin’s Origin of Species for the first time and post chapter-by-chapter discussions of the book right here on Scienceblogs between now and Darwin Day. Get your own copy and follow along with John Whitfield!
Another reading suggestion: Wilkins writes about Darwin worship. It’s going to be a tricky balancing act this year — Darwin was a great scientist and his contributions were immense, but he is not an object of veneration. The difficult job will be to maintain a balance between hero worship and reactionary criticism, and to show the real man and the real work.
Everyone is also asking me for a list of children’s books on evolution, and it’s always hard to come up with any titles. I am now saved: Charlie’s Playhouse has a list of 89 kids’ books on evolution!
You know, Darwin Day is coming up, and we could create a new tradition of educating young’uns on 12 February…
Now someone else is giving away a free book to commenters — it’s like Christmas or something. Leave a comment at Domestic Father and maybe you’ll win a copy of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which is a really good deal, since that book isn’t yet available in the US, and I’ve been itching to get my hands on it for a while.
I was tempted not to tell you all, just to improve my chances of winning, but altruism won out.
It’s easy — just follow the link from The Countess’s blog, read about weird supernatural monsters, leave a comment, and you’re entered in a drawing for an anthology of erotic horror stories.
Yeah, erotic horror. I think it’s supposed to leave you all hot and bothered in a state of tension … not erotic horror like retelling a woman’s sexual history in a church service, which is horrifying in an “eww, ick” and “cover the children’s ears, Martha!” and “ooooh, Harold, I come over all tremulous just thinking about it” sort of way. Sanctimonious dunderheads need not apply.
Simon Ings has written a wonderful survey of the eye, called A Natural History of Seeing: The Art and Science of Vision(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and it’s another of those books you ought to be sticking on your Christmas lists right now. The title give you an idea of its content. It’s a “natural history”, so don’t expect some dry exposition on deep details, but instead look forward to a light and readable exploration of the many facets of vision.
There is a discussion of the evolution of eyes, of course, but the topics are wide-ranging — Ings covers optics, chemistry, physiology, optical illusions, decapitated heads, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ many-legged, compound-eyed apts, pointillisme, cephalopods (how could he not?), scurvy, phacopids, Purkinje shifts…you get the idea. It’s a hodge-podge, a little bit of everything, a fascinating cabinet of curiousities where every door opened reveals some peculiar variant of an eye.
Don’t think it’s lacking in science, though, or is entirely superficial. This is a book that asks the good questions: how do we know what we know? Each topic is addressed by digging deep to see how scientists came to their conclusion, and often that means we get an entertaining story from history or philosophy or the lab. Explaining the evolution of our theories of vision, for example, leads to the story of Abu’Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haythem, who pretended to be mad to avoid the cruelty of a despotic Caliph, and who spent 12 years in a darkened house doing experiments in optics (perhaps calling him “mad” really wasn’t much of a stretch), and emerged at the death of the tyrant with an understanding of refraction and a good theory of optics that involved light, instead of mysterious vision rays emerging from an eye. Ings is also a novelist, and it shows — these are stories that inform and lead to a deeper understanding.
If the book has any shortcoming, though, it is that some subjects are barely touched upon. Signal transduction and molecular evolution are given short shrift, for example, but then, if every sub-discipline were given the depth given to basic optics, this book would be unmanageably immense. Enjoy it for what it is: a literate exploration of the major questions people have asked about eyes and vision for the last few thousand years.
It’s December, and Squidmas is coming. Maybe you’re like me, and the kids have all moved out, so you’re thinking having a little intelligent life at home would be nice. Or maybe you’re kids are still home, and you think they’d love a pretty pet. Or maybe you just love cephalopods, as do we all, so you’re thinking, hey, let’s get an aquarium and an octopus! What a fun idea!
One word of advice: NO. Don’t do it. You can’t just rush into these things.
Here’s a positive suggestion, though. Start reading TONMO, the octopus news magazine online, regularly. If you haven’t been reading it already, you aren’t worthy of owning a cephalopod anyway. If you start dreaming about tentacles, then maybe you can consider feeding your obsession by planning to get a cephalopod of your own.
Second positive suggestion: buy a copy of Cephalopods: Octopuses and Cuttlefishes for the Home Aquarium(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Colin Dunlop and Nancy King. This is essential. All in one place and in a very practical way, it describes all the important information you’ll need to successfully keep a cephalopod in your home, and it may discourage all but the most fervent. Here are a few of the reasons you should not try to keep cephalopods, gleaned from this book and my reading of TONMO.
They are difficult to raise. You will need a well-maintained salt water aquarium, which with all the apparatus required can be quite expensive, and you will need to invest a fair amount of time every day in maintenance. This is a job for a serious aquarist.
They need live foods. What this means for most of us is that you’ll need two tanks — one for the octopus and another to raise the octopus’s food.
A cephalopod’s life is one of heart-breaking brevity. They do not live for long, even in the wild, so no matter what, you’re going to have a pet funeral every six months to a year.
There are few species that you can keep. Most can’t live in the confines of a tank, a few are very dangerous, and many are rare, and it would be unethical to strip natural environments of these precious specimens.
It will eat just about anything else you try to put in the aquarium. The cephalopod and its food will be the only creatures you will have.
Forget keeping one as a pet—a cephalopod in the house is your Lord and Master, and you will serve it everyday. Forget those silly ideas that this will be your little pal, it is going to rule you.
If you aren’t yet discouraged, then you know your proper place in the universe and can consider getting a cephalopod. In order to figure out how to do so, you will first have to buy this book: it contains all the information you will need to proceed. Plus, it’s beautifully illustrated with photographs of the beloved class, so you’ll enjoy reading it, and it therefore makes an excellent Squidmas gift. Then what you may do is purchase a salt-water aquarium and supplies, but at first you should only raise something boring, like damselfish. Master the art of maintaining a stable aquarium for at least a year, and then you may consider obtaining a cephalopod for it. Conceivably, then, you could have one for next Squidmas. But don’t even dream of it yet.
I have a little metric for rationality that I exercise now and then: when I visit a bookstore, I compare the sizes of the religion/new age sections to the size of the science section…if I can find it. Typically, there’s at least a 10:1 disparity in the amount of shelf space dedicated, and it’s often much worse — there have been a few bookstores where, when I ask to find the science books, the clerk will point me to a small shelf labeled “Pets/Nature”. Bleh.
Anyway, I got a good question on Saturday at Guelph, which also mentioned this cluelessness by too many bookstores. Could we compile a list of excellent science books, that is, books that should appeal to the lay public, have some chance of commercial success, and that we think do a good job of presenting an interesting and accurate view of science? I suspect there are a few people here who read books, and might have some opinions here — how about expressing them in the comments?
What I’d like to accumulate is actually a couple of lists. If you went to the religion section of the local Barnes & Noble, you’d be quite surprised if the Christian bible were absent — similarly, I’d like a list of the essential books a good bookstore ought to carry, the ones that are perennially useful and popular. This would be handy for confronting an owner and asking him why he has so many obvious omissions.
Another list would be of commercially viable popular science books. These would be books that present good science, but ought also to be popular among readers. Bookstore owners want to make money, so doing a little pre-screening for them and helping them to make an informed decision would be productive and helpful, and maybe they’d actually listen if we showed a list like that.
So here’s the deal: nominate some books. For each one, say whether it is essential or popular. It might also be useful to assign a broad category (math, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, psychology, for instance) to each. I’ll compile them later this month and put together some simple pdfs that you can download and use at your local bookstore to try and encourage some upgrading of the stock.
I hope Jerry Coyne will forgive me that my frequent thought as I was reading his new book, Why Evolution Is True(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was, “Wow, this sure is easier to read than that other book.” That other book, of course, is Coyne and Orr’s comprehensive text on Speciation(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which is a technical and detailed survey of the subject in the title, and that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend to anyone who wasn’t at least a graduate student in biology. We all have our impressions colored by prior expectations, you know, and Jerry Coyne is that high-powered ecology and evolution guy at the University of Chicago whose papers I’ve read.
The new book is simple to summarize: just read the title. It’s aimed at a lay audience and answers the question of why biologists are so darned confident about the theory of evolution by going through a strong subset of the evidence. It begins with a discussion of what evolution is, then each subsequent chapter is organized around a class of evidence: fossils, embryology and historical accidents, biogeography, natural selection, sexual selection, speciation, and human evolution. If you want a straightforward primer in the experiments and observations that have made evolution the foundational principle of modern biology, this is the book for you.
Why Evolution is True makes an almost entirely positive case for evolution; it has an appropriate perspective on the current American conflict between science and religious fundamentalism that avoids dwelling on creationist nonsense, but still acknowledges where common misconceptions occur and where creationist PR, such as the Intelligent Design creationism fad, has raised stock objections. It’s a good strategy — the structure of this book is not dictated by creationist absurdities, but by good science, and creationism is simply noted where necessary and swatted down efficiently. It’s a more powerful tool for it, too — creationists can lie faster than anyone can rebut them, so the best strategy is to focus on the real evidence and force critics to address it directly.
You all really ought to pick up a copy of this book if you don’t already have a sound understanding of the basic lines of evidence for evolution (or, if you do, you could always get Speciation to get a little more depth). I recommend it unreservedly. Oh, except for one little reservation: it won’t be available until January. Go ahead and put it on your Amazon pre-order list, then.
Neal Stephenson writes ambitious books. I got hooked with Snow Crash(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), an amazingly imaginative book about near-future virtual worlds; Zodiac(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) is required reading for anyone interested in chemistry and the environment; I had mixed feelings about Cryptonomicon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), but only because it was two books in one, and only one of those books was excellent; The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was a fabulously weird exploration of a New Victorian culture with nanotechnology; and
I ate up his big trilogy, The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), The Confusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)
, and The System of the World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)), which I consider his best to date — historical fiction bubbling over with a fascinatingly skewed perspective on the Enlightenment. He’s definitely one of my favorite authors. He’s an acquired taste; he often seems to abandon the narrative of his book to go noodling about with strange ideas, and it can be frustrating if you read a book with the goal of getting to the end. On the other hand, all of those little distractions and detours seem to culminate in fireworks, so as long as you’re willing to go along for the ride, they’re great.
Now he has a new one out, Anathem(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to finish it. I’m about halfway into it, and it’s a difficult read (most of his books are), but no fireworks. It definitely has an interesting idea at the core, but it doesn’t seem to be one that translates into an interesting novel.
The premise is that it is a story of an alien culture where the philosopher-mathematicians are set aside and isolated from the general population, living in monastery-like “concents” where they live a life focused on ritual and contemplation of their work, undistracted by the outside world of saeculars or even the interests of the applied science and technology class, the itas. The life of these mathematicians very much parallels the life of monks in our world, except they aren’t religious at all — they’re even called “avout” (rather than devout) to emphasize the agnostic nature of their existence. Every once in a while, the outside world intrudes: there are regular events every decade, century, or millennium when the doors of the concents are opened and avouts briefly mingle with the extramuros, or world outside, and in times of need the saeculars will evoke individual avouts, calling them to work in their specialty in the world beyond the concent. Anathem is about a small group of avouts who are suddenly called to carry out a little peregrination after astronomers notice something peculiar in the sky.
As I admitted, I’ve only made it halfway through so far, so perhaps there is some excitement coming up, but I have to admit: the lives of scholastic hermits are excruciatingly boring. No offense intended to any mathematicians reading this, but I think even you would find these math monks tedious, since the excitement (I presume) of their discipline is only described vaguely and indirectly, since no actual math is directly described in the text (there are a couple of appendices that describe some proofs). Of course, this is a small blessing to the rest of us, because perhaps the only thing more dreary than describing the lives of obsessed mathematicians would be a book describing the actual mathematics of a collection of obsessed mathematicians. It does not, however, enthuse the reader to contemplate how easily this book could have been rendered even more uneventful and abstract.
So far, in my progress through the book, we have explored this strange world of Stephenson’s and been introduced to the life of the avout, and a small group of central characters. They have been evoked, and are crossing over the North Pole on their way to a remote continent, where, somehow, they are going to solve (I presume) they mystery of a pattern of lights observed in orbit around the world, which for some so-far unexplained reason, has unsettled many influential people among the saeculars. Not much has happened, actually. It’s a fine exercise in science-fiction world-building, especially if you are fond of dessicated academics, but as stories go…it’s a little less than enthralling.
I should mention that being halfway through it means I’m on page 450.
Like I said, I’m beginning to doubt that I will make it to the end of this epic journey. I am parched and fading, and there aren’t even any fireworks. I may bring it along on my next plane trip, but even there I fear it will only promote more napping while airborne.
The book has another flaw, which you may deduce from my summary. Stephenson is making up words like a Pentecostal on a meth/caffeine/LSD cocktail. I can understand why he’s doing it — it’s to give his philosophomathematicians an atmosphere of the cloister and the cathedral while not freighting them with any kind of religious sense — but it makes the whole book even more wearing. I got this book for fun (fireworks!), it’s already turning into a hard slog, and on top of that, I have to learn a whole new language in order to understand it? Ouch. Even the title is one of his odd hybrid words!
Randall Munroe seems to be feeling the same way I do.
This book is only for True Fans™ of Neal Stephenson, and even at that, I suspect there will be much shuffling of feet and averted eyes when it comes up for discussion at the SF cons.
