Two book lists

I’ve been sent two lists of “10 Books That Screwed Up the World”, and I’m not very impressed with either of them. The first is from a new book by Benjamin Wanker Wiker of the same title, published by Regnery Press, the imprint of right-wing wackaloons everywhere. Here’s Wiker’s list:

  • The Prince, Machiavelli
  • Discourse on Method, Descartes
  • Leviathan, Hobbes
  • Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
  • The Descent of Man, Darwin
  • Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
  • Mein Kampf, Hitler
  • Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead
  • Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey

Here’s another list, which seems to be inspired by Wiker’s, but with a few substitutions.

  • Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer and Sprenger
  • Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead
  • The Prince, Machiavelli
  • Mein Kampf, Hitler
  • The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger
  • Democracy and Education, Dewey
  • Baby and Child Care, Spock
  • The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
  • Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
  • Darwin’s Black Box, Behe

Bleh. A list of books that screwed up the world ought to include books that have actually had some major impact for the worse on the lives of large numbers of people: I can definitely see that for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and the Malleus Maleficarum. Others, not so much. Coming of Age in Samoa may have confused the discipline of anthropology for a while, but putting it on the same list as Mein Kampf is simply ridiculous. The work of Marx has been potent and maybe deserves to be on these lists because we’re still living with the ideological struggle that it was part of…but really, it ought to include both sides, and Adam Smith’s work doesn’t seem to be here.

Darwin’s book is a science text that describes an empirical reality. To claim that it screwed up the world is like declaring that Newton’s Principia, because it described difficult facts, hurt us. It’s only on the list because Wiker is a Discovery Institute cretin.

Kinsey is on the list because he makes homophobic wingnuts feel uncomfortably icky. I don’t think that making the likes of Benjamin Wiker feel all squirmy in his pants qualifies as screwing up the world.

And Behe? You’ve got to be kidding. His book is inconsequential noise, error after error larded with silly egotism. It’s the work of a popular crackpot; if you’re going to include that, then we need to include the works of Velikovsky and Chopra and every astrologer, acupuncturist, homeopathist, quack, and faith healer ever written.

And most damning of all, it is impossible to take these lists seriously when they’ve left off the works that have been overwhelmingly influential, incredibly widely read, and have led billions of people into delusion and stupidity: the Christian bible and the Koran. Toss in the Book of Mormon and Dianetics and any holy book you can imagine as equally fit for condemnation. Isn’t it glaringly obvious that both lists omit any work that is explicitly religious? It’s another example of unthinking privilege handed to theological gobbledygook.

When did “Christian” become a synonym for “crap”?

One century, you’ve got Bach, another century, you’ve got Li’l Markie. Christianity has really gone downhill from its prior status as the font of funding for culture and art and intellectual endeavor to being the being the bottom of the barrel source for kitsch and crap. Case in point: Denyse O’Leary’s hideous, horrible, talentless hackery has been nominated for a Canadian Christian Writing Award. Even setting aside the fact that I disagreed vehemently with the content of the book, if you judge it on the quality of the writing, it doesn’t deserve recognition, it warrants condemnation — it’s probably the worst-written bit of tripe to cross my desk all year long, and that’s saying a lot. I’ve got a few people trying to persuade me to review their Christian apocalyptic fantasy novels, and O’Leary’s book is more incoherent than those.

Mass market genre surprise

Today, I briefly emerged from my little academic cocoon and stepped outside. I was shocked to discover that the snow had all melted, the lakes were all thawed out, there were birds in the air, and the sun was shining — I think I somehow missed the appearance of spring. Don’t worry, I’m buckling back to work in my oubliette now, but it was a bit of a surprise.

But that’s not what I wanted to mention. It was another surprising bit of weirdness. The reason I was dragged out of the dungeon of academe was to run an errand, and I was at Wal-Mart (don’t ask)…and while I was there, bored and awaiting the mistress’s orders, I was browsing their book section. It’s also been a long, long time since I plumbed that paragon of mass-market genrefication, the warehouse shopping version of a bookstore, and I discovered a new (to me) development.

First, there was something entirely expected: wall-to-wall romance novels, with their pink covers and naked-chested manly men flexing their pectorals. That’s a regular fixture in these places. I even read some, several years ago, and as formula fiction goes, they weren’t my cup of tea, but they weren’t that bad. There are well-honed conventions there, but some of the better authors do manage to sneak a little imagination into the filigree.

No, the real surprise was the second most popular genre that was everywhere on those book shelves: vampire novels. It’s as if Laurell Hamilton and Anne Rice have recently had an unholy tryst and have spawned a scampering horde of little horror-romance novelists who have all skittered off and scrawled out series after series of stories about vampiresses, vampire huntresses, vampire princesses, vampire trailer park queens, and vampire lovers. They all seemed to be by female authors and feature female protagonists, too; some of the covers also blurred into similarity with the romance novels, except that the muscular-breasted Fabio on the cover was also sporting fangs.

I can’t judge the contents, and maybe they’re all wonderfully creative and entertaining, although I suspect Sturgeon’s Law will still apply. I’m just a little baffled about where this sudden surge in one narrow genre has come from.

New book contest!

Hey! Carl Zimmer is giving away free copies of his brand new book, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) — all you have to do is ask a good question in a comment to stand a chance of winning one.

I don’t need to enter; my copy is sitting on my desk right now, begging me to read it. I keep barking back at it that I want to, but I’ve got 3 exams to give in the next week, and there is no time right now. And then it reproaches me with those big gentle puppy-dog eyes and weeps sloppy proteoglycan tears and threatens to adhere permanently to my shower tiles. It’s persistent and ubiquitous, so everyone better read it soon.

Subversive chemistry

I must urge you to steal buy this book: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). The description makes it sound perfect.

Laboratory work is the essence of chemistry, and measurement is the essence of laboratory work. A hands-on introduction to real chemistry requires real equipment and real chemicals, and real, quantitative experiments. No existing chemistry set provides anything more than a bare start on those essentials, so the obvious answer is to build your own chemistry set and use it to do real chemistry.

Everything you need is readily available, and surprisingly inexpensive. For not all that much more than the cost of a toy chemistry set, you can buy the equipment and chemicals you need to get started doing real chemistry.

…

DIY hobbyists and science enthusiasts can use this book to master all of the essential practical skills and fundamental knowledge needed to pursue chemistry as a lifelong hobby. Home school students and public school students whose schools offer only lecture-based chemistry courses can use this book to gain practical experience in real laboratory chemistry. A student who completes all of the laboratories in this book has done the equivalent of two full years of high school chemistry lab work or a first-year college general chemistry laboratory course.

Ooooh, I wish this book had been around 15 or 20 years ago, when I could have infected my kids with it. Maybe I’ll have to wait a few years (many years!) and expose a grandkid to it … which will have an added advantage that the parents will have to deal with the messes and smells.

Odd thing, though: I looked through the table of contents, and there’s not one single solitary thing about chemistry prayers. How can the experiments possibly work?

Optical Allusions

Jay Hosler has a new book out, Optical Allusions(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). If you’re familiar with his other books, Clan Apis(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Sandwalk Adventures(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), you know what to expect: a comic book that takes its science seriously. Hosler has a fabulous knack for building serious content into a light and humorous medium, just the kind of approach we need to get wider distribution of science into the culture.

This one has a strange premise. Wrinkles the Wonder Brain is an animated, naked brain working for the Graeae Sisters, and he loses the one eye they share between them — so he has to go on a quest to recover it. I know, it sounds like a stretch, but it works in a weird sort of way, and once you start rolling with it, you’ll find it works. Using that scenario to frame a series of encounters, Wrinkles meets Charles Darwin and learns how evolution could produce something as complex as an eye; talks about the sub-optimal design of retinal circuitry with a cow superhero; discovers sexual dimorphism with a crew of stalk-eyed pirates; learns about development of the eye from cavefish and a cyclops; chats with Mr Sun about the physics of radiation; there are even zombie G proteins and were-opsins in a lesson about shape changing. This stuff is seriously weird, and kids ought to eat it up.

It isn’t all comic art, either. Each chapter is interleaved with a text section discussing the details — you can read the whole thing through, skipping the text (like I did…), and then go back and get more depth and directions for future reading in the science. This is a truly seditious strategy. Suck ’em in with the entertainment value, and then hand ’em enough substance that they might just start thinking like scientists.

It’s all good stuff, too. A colleague and I have been considering offering an interdisciplinary honors course in physics and biology with the theme of the eye, specifically for non-science majors, and this book has me thinking it might make for a good text. It’ll grab the English and art majors, and provide a gateway for some serious discussions that will satisfy us science geeks. I recommend it for you, too — if you have kids, you should grab all of Hosler’s books. Even if you don’t have kids, you’ll learn a lot.

Jay Hosler also explains the intent of the project, and you can read an excerpt.

GP for the masses

My colleague Nic McPhee (with a couple of other people) is an author of a new book, A Field Guide to Genetic Programming — I think I’m going to have to read it.

Genetic programming (GP) is a systematic, domain-independent method for getting computers to solve problems automatically starting from a high-level statement of what needs to be done. Using ideas from natural evolution, GP starts from an ooze of random computer programs, and progressively refines them through processes of mutation and sexual recombination, until high-fitness solutions emerge. All this without the user having to know or specify the form or structure of solutions in advance. GP has generated a plethora of human-competitive results and applications, including novel scientific discoveries and patentable inventions.

See? It sounds cool!