The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2018)
Sam Kean (editor)
Science
I had read a number of these pieces before, particularly in The Atlantic. Is there no great but little-known writing out there that this series could promote? The book opens with some editorial political rants, which I largely agree with but which could have been dropped. (That said, the piece on Scott Pruitt's dysfunctional EPA is predictably infuriating.)
The articles themselves are, not shockingly, good. I can't say that any of them stood out particularly, although Ross Anderson's "Welcome to Pleistocene Park" is jaw-dropping in its scope.
Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts
Friday, May 24, 2019
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Book Review: Never Home Alone
Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live
Rob Dunn
Nature, medicine
Don't read this book if you're squeamish. Really, seriously, don't. It'll make you want to burn your house down and then shower with industrial-grade solvents and then cover yourself with sterilized plastic wrap and you still won't feel safe.
If you are lacking squeams, Never Home Alone is a very good book about . . . well, it's about several things. Most fundamentally, it's a celebration of the microbial ecosystem. Dunn's major point, I think, is that we are deeply mistaken if we think that we can exist--much less thrive--separate from the fungi, bacteria, protists, microscopic crustaceans, etc. etc. etc. that surround us. In the first place, we evolved to live with them. In the second place, they're everywhere. In the third place, heavy-handed attempts to engineer this microenvironment tend to go awry, sometimes spectacularly so--wiping out benign strains of Staphylococcus both weakens the immune response and leaves a gap for virulent strains to fill, for example.
Okay, there's a little bit of drum-beating for these ideas going on. Thankfully, it's comparatively muted. Even more thankfully, it's backed up by sound observation and testable hypotheses, which is not invariably the case.
Dunn writes in a pleasingly non-technical style, so Never Home Alone should be accessible to almost any reader. (He's also restrained in using the vertical pronoun--also not invariably the case, and nice to see.) He even offers readers a number of ways to join in the scientific fun. If you have any interest at all in natural history, you should read this book.
Me, I'm off to change my showerhead.
This book pairs nicely with Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes. It also overlaps thematically somewhat with Charles C. Mann's superb The Wizard And the Prophet, particularly in its critique of the technocratic approach to environmental problems.
Rob Dunn
Nature, medicine
Don't read this book if you're squeamish. Really, seriously, don't. It'll make you want to burn your house down and then shower with industrial-grade solvents and then cover yourself with sterilized plastic wrap and you still won't feel safe.
If you are lacking squeams, Never Home Alone is a very good book about . . . well, it's about several things. Most fundamentally, it's a celebration of the microbial ecosystem. Dunn's major point, I think, is that we are deeply mistaken if we think that we can exist--much less thrive--separate from the fungi, bacteria, protists, microscopic crustaceans, etc. etc. etc. that surround us. In the first place, we evolved to live with them. In the second place, they're everywhere. In the third place, heavy-handed attempts to engineer this microenvironment tend to go awry, sometimes spectacularly so--wiping out benign strains of Staphylococcus both weakens the immune response and leaves a gap for virulent strains to fill, for example.
Okay, there's a little bit of drum-beating for these ideas going on. Thankfully, it's comparatively muted. Even more thankfully, it's backed up by sound observation and testable hypotheses, which is not invariably the case.
Dunn writes in a pleasingly non-technical style, so Never Home Alone should be accessible to almost any reader. (He's also restrained in using the vertical pronoun--also not invariably the case, and nice to see.) He even offers readers a number of ways to join in the scientific fun. If you have any interest at all in natural history, you should read this book.
Me, I'm off to change my showerhead.
This book pairs nicely with Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes. It also overlaps thematically somewhat with Charles C. Mann's superb The Wizard And the Prophet, particularly in its critique of the technocratic approach to environmental problems.
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
Steve Brusatte
Natural history, paleontology
As a wee shaver, one of my oft-reread books was All About Dinosaurs, by Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews was a character--he may have been one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones--and his books are a mixture of derring-do, science, and personal history. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is as close as I've ever come to an adult equivalent. Like Andrews, Steve Brusatte is obviously having an enormous amount of fun.
The book is at once a good overall introduction to the natural history of dinosaurs, a charming and discursive autobiography, and an up-to-date survey of modern scientific thinking. Brusatte knows a lot of colorful characters (and he seems to like them all, which is nice). If they never quite get rescued from starvation by the last-minute arrival of their camel caravan in the Gobi Desert, there are still a lot of exotic locales and bone-finding adventures. Oh, and the information itself is really interesting.
The writing is good, too. Brusatte uses a conversational, intimate tone, reminiscent of Ed Yong (that's a good thing). He doesn't dumb anything down, but he does make everything perfectly accessible. For instance, I was particularly and professionally interested in the ways that computers, statistics, and basic machine-learning techniques, are being used now in paleontology; in this, as in general, Brusatte strikes a good balance between too much and not enough information for the general reader.
I wouldn't have minded if The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs had been 50% longer, but that's hardly a complaint. Hopefully there will be a sequel.
For a biography of Andrews, see Dragon Hunter by Charles Gellenkamp. Though not exclusively dinosaur-related, Douglas Preston's Dinosaurs in the Attic tells the story of the American Museum of Natural History and provides a good recounting of the Bone Wars.
Steve Brusatte
Natural history, paleontology
As a wee shaver, one of my oft-reread books was All About Dinosaurs, by Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews was a character--he may have been one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones--and his books are a mixture of derring-do, science, and personal history. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is as close as I've ever come to an adult equivalent. Like Andrews, Steve Brusatte is obviously having an enormous amount of fun.
The book is at once a good overall introduction to the natural history of dinosaurs, a charming and discursive autobiography, and an up-to-date survey of modern scientific thinking. Brusatte knows a lot of colorful characters (and he seems to like them all, which is nice). If they never quite get rescued from starvation by the last-minute arrival of their camel caravan in the Gobi Desert, there are still a lot of exotic locales and bone-finding adventures. Oh, and the information itself is really interesting.
The writing is good, too. Brusatte uses a conversational, intimate tone, reminiscent of Ed Yong (that's a good thing). He doesn't dumb anything down, but he does make everything perfectly accessible. For instance, I was particularly and professionally interested in the ways that computers, statistics, and basic machine-learning techniques, are being used now in paleontology; in this, as in general, Brusatte strikes a good balance between too much and not enough information for the general reader.
I wouldn't have minded if The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs had been 50% longer, but that's hardly a complaint. Hopefully there will be a sequel.
For a biography of Andrews, see Dragon Hunter by Charles Gellenkamp. Though not exclusively dinosaur-related, Douglas Preston's Dinosaurs in the Attic tells the story of the American Museum of Natural History and provides a good recounting of the Bone Wars.
Monday, August 13, 2018
Book Review: Buzz
Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees
Thor Hanson
Natural History
Another fine book from the author of Feathers and The Triumph of Seeds. Hanson has a gift for picking interesting subjects, and for delving into the most interesting topics within them.
More than that, he has a gift for narrative flow. One of his better techniques, for example, is to unobtrusively shift paragraph breaks. That is, he takes what would be the conventional break-point between two related paragraphs and moves it a sentence or two ahead. (Indeed, he sometimes does the same thing at the chapter level.) Done badly, this would be incoherent--but Hanson manages to make it work; it's a way of introducing a little smidgen of suspense, of tension that's immediately resolved, into the text.
As to the content of Buzz, I defy you to read this and not start looking for bees the next time you go outdoors. They're extraordinary little critters. Not just the honeybees, either, although Hanson does necessarily devote a good deal of space to them. Sweat bees, carpenter bees, mason bees, bees with tongues longer than they are, parasitic bees, flowers that are codependent on one specific sort of bee, flowers that are actually bee escape rooms, flowers that look like female bees (guys are alike throughout the animal kingdom) . . . it's like the first time you ever walked into the American Museum of Natural History and saw the dinosaur skeletons. You can't help but say: Wow.
Thor Hanson
Natural History
Another fine book from the author of Feathers and The Triumph of Seeds. Hanson has a gift for picking interesting subjects, and for delving into the most interesting topics within them.
More than that, he has a gift for narrative flow. One of his better techniques, for example, is to unobtrusively shift paragraph breaks. That is, he takes what would be the conventional break-point between two related paragraphs and moves it a sentence or two ahead. (Indeed, he sometimes does the same thing at the chapter level.) Done badly, this would be incoherent--but Hanson manages to make it work; it's a way of introducing a little smidgen of suspense, of tension that's immediately resolved, into the text.
As to the content of Buzz, I defy you to read this and not start looking for bees the next time you go outdoors. They're extraordinary little critters. Not just the honeybees, either, although Hanson does necessarily devote a good deal of space to them. Sweat bees, carpenter bees, mason bees, bees with tongues longer than they are, parasitic bees, flowers that are codependent on one specific sort of bee, flowers that are actually bee escape rooms, flowers that look like female bees (guys are alike throughout the animal kingdom) . . . it's like the first time you ever walked into the American Museum of Natural History and saw the dinosaur skeletons. You can't help but say: Wow.
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
Book Review: The Evolution of Beauty
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World--And Us
Richard O. Prum
Natural history
[WARNING: long]
The Evolution of Beauty is a very good book. It's well-written. It has an interesting idea at its core and a leavening of entertaining personal content. It may even change the way you look at the world. It's also overstated, and in parts quite probably wrong--but intriguingly so.
Very briefly summarized, the theory that Prum is championing--originating in Charles Darwin's second great book, The Descent of Man--is that species can evolve features that don't help them survive at all, if those features help them attract mates. The peacock's tail is an example: it doesn't help the peacock fly, fight, or feed, but it surely attracts the chicks (rim shot). Prum's own field of study provides numerous fascinating examples of birds that have evolved some astonishing ornaments and behaviors, none of which seem to be "adaptive" in the survival-of-the-fittest sense. These features persist not because they have any use, but because mates prefer them--and mates prefer them not for any adaptive reason, but just ... because.
To take an well-known example, consider the sneetch (Seussius sneetchis).
Quite at random, a few male sneetches have stars on their bellies. The stars have no function; they're just a random mutation. Nonetheless, some female sneetches think the stars are sexy--again, not for any particular reason, but just because sneetches make value judgments about stuff. Generation after generation . . .
For a slightly more subtle point, imagine that what the sneetch-ettes inherit is not just "a star is better than no star," but "more stars are better". In this case, the even-rarer two-star sneetches have an advantage over their one-star brethren. Once the one-star trait becomes common, the female preference for more stars preferentially benefits the two-star sneetches. And similarly, once two stars are common, the sneetch-ettes start flocking to the three-star sneetches . . . and so on, and so on . . . In this way, even a trait that does begin as a positive adaptation can turn negative, by being exaggerated into uselessness.
Returning to Richard Prum, his point is that a purely aesthetic preference is perfectly capable of driving evolution, survival value be damned. This is (according to him) something of a heresy within the evolutionary-biology world. Apparently there are those--Stephen Jay Gould called them "hyperadaptationists"--who insist that no trait can be inherited unless it contributes to genetic fitness, i.e. competitive advantage. This view explains the peacock's tail as a signal, advertising the genetic health of the bearer. An extreme version holds that the very uselessness of the tail is part of the signal--look at me, it's saying, I'm so genetically overendowed that I can carry this useless ornament around and still prosper.
Prum takes vigorous issue with these views. I think he's right to do so. The evidence for them seems weak, and their internal logic is less than compelling. Under the extreme view, for instance, shouldn't organisms with extreme deformities attract more mates? If surviving with a long useless tail signals fitness, then surely surviving with a long useless tail and intestinal parasites and only one wing signals more fitness. Ask for it by name!
Another of Prum's targets is the idea that animals simply can't form arbitrary, aesthetic preferences. Evidently there are a good many scientists who believe this; these scientists have never owned cats. (Consider, for example, the laser pointer. One of ours ignores it, one evinces occasional interest, and one will chase it endlessly. Nor is it just a matter of different neurological wiring, because all three were equally excited when they first encountered the Red Dot.) The idea that humans are just so very special in this regard is nothing more than a warmed-over search for the soul. Humans' ability to form aesthetic preferences came from somewhere; simple scientific parsimony suggests that it came from our animal ancestors.
At the same time, I wonder a little bit whether the prevailing wisdom is quite as prevalent as Prum makes out. Certainly his theory is one that I--a complete outsider--had heard before, including the fact that a trait need not be adaptive if it's sufficiently preferred. It's clear, however, that Prum is heavily emotionally invested in his theory. It may be that he's a bit hyper-focused on the opposition. It's almost certain that he's overstating his case.
One issue is that Prum mingles factual truth and normative truth. He points out, correctly, that--in the common case where females chose the mates--mate choice is consistent with female sexual agency, choice, and empowerment (which I'll call FSACE, for short). It's also true that we, societally, consider FSACE ethically desirable--indeed, mandatory. Those two things, however, are not connected. FSACE is not ethically mandatory because it's consistent with mate choice, and mate choice isn't necessarily true because it's consistent with FSACE. Put another way, FSACE is an ethical must even if someone proves that Prum's ideas are false.
In this regard, Prum also doesn't see that the evidence he cites against competing theories can also be used against his own. For example: in many societies women's sexual pleasure has always been marginalized, denigrated, or just ignored. This is evidence against the idea that female sexual pleasure is adaptive, true enough. But it's also evidence against the idea that female sexual pleasure is a consequence of women selecting sexually-compatible mates.
Another overreach comes when Prum tries to explain some behavioral differences between humans and our closest evolutionary relatives. Among apes, females generally can't select mates; the dominant male controls mating. So why do human relationships (cross-culturally, even in small tribal groups) tend towards pair-bonding?
Prum's proposal is that female mate choice explains this. Women, he suggests, prefer males who allow them to exercise their preferences. That is, proto-women preferred to hook up with proto-men who were inclined towards pair-bonding, rather than dominance/polygyny, which in turn spread the pair-bonding genes through the population--not because they provide any particular survival advantage, but because they offer more mating opportunities.
Well, sure, that might be true. There's no evidence of it. Furthermore, it suffers from a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: women promote free mate choice by exercising their free mate choice to select males who will permit them free mate choice, which raises the question of where the free mate choice came from in the first place.
There are plenty of other equally-credible explanations. Here's one alternative, in dialogue form:
#1 MALE: I hereby invoke my maleness to take away your Female Sexual Agency, Choice, and Empowerment!
FEMALES: Let's kill him.
#2 MALE: Yeah!
#3 MALE: I'm in.
#1 MALE: Wait, what? Argh, gurgle.
FEMALES: Good riddance.
FORMER #2 MALE: Aha! Now I am #1 Male, and I--
FEMALES and FORMER #3 MALE: Ahem.
FORMER #2 MALE: . . . that is . . . ah . . . things will be a bit different . . . mistakes were made.
Richard Prum doesn't present any more evidence for his idea than I have for mine. If anything, I think mine is more plausible, because it explains one thing that's unique to humans (our sexual arrangements) with another thing that's unique to humans (our ability to communicate, plan, and cooperate).
On the other hand, Prum's description of his own work with birds is tremendous. He goes into deep detail (which could have gotten dull, but doesn't) about, for example, bower birds' elaborate constructions and manakins' elaborate dances. Here I think his evidence is very strong and his arguments sound. It's no coincidence that the bird-oriented chapters are a lot lighter on the "it is possible"s and the "it could well be"s and the "might have"s.
That's not to say that I discount Prum's ideas entirely when it comes to humans. I do mistrust the single-cause fallacy, particularly when it comes to something as multifarious as human behavior--but that applies to Prum's opponents as well as to Prum himself. If you're at all interested in this sort of thing, do read The Evolution of Beauty. It'll keep you thinking for quite some time.
There are a number of good books on evolution, adaptation, and related topics. High among them, though also speculative, is Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire. Daniel Lieberman's The Story of the Human Body is extremely convincing, if not quite as daring. A good deal older, but still very much worth reading, is Melvin Konner's The Tangled Wing.
Richard O. Prum
Natural history
[WARNING: long]
The Evolution of Beauty is a very good book. It's well-written. It has an interesting idea at its core and a leavening of entertaining personal content. It may even change the way you look at the world. It's also overstated, and in parts quite probably wrong--but intriguingly so.
Very briefly summarized, the theory that Prum is championing--originating in Charles Darwin's second great book, The Descent of Man--is that species can evolve features that don't help them survive at all, if those features help them attract mates. The peacock's tail is an example: it doesn't help the peacock fly, fight, or feed, but it surely attracts the chicks (rim shot). Prum's own field of study provides numerous fascinating examples of birds that have evolved some astonishing ornaments and behaviors, none of which seem to be "adaptive" in the survival-of-the-fittest sense. These features persist not because they have any use, but because mates prefer them--and mates prefer them not for any adaptive reason, but just ... because.
To take an well-known example, consider the sneetch (Seussius sneetchis).
 |
| Image hosted at Wikimedia |
- Male star-bellied sneetches attract more mates than plain-bellied sneetches, because some sneetch-ettes just prefer them.
- These couples have more children than plain-bellied sneetches.
- The children inherit stars.
- The females inherit a preference for stars.
For a slightly more subtle point, imagine that what the sneetch-ettes inherit is not just "a star is better than no star," but "more stars are better". In this case, the even-rarer two-star sneetches have an advantage over their one-star brethren. Once the one-star trait becomes common, the female preference for more stars preferentially benefits the two-star sneetches. And similarly, once two stars are common, the sneetch-ettes start flocking to the three-star sneetches . . . and so on, and so on . . . In this way, even a trait that does begin as a positive adaptation can turn negative, by being exaggerated into uselessness.
Returning to Richard Prum, his point is that a purely aesthetic preference is perfectly capable of driving evolution, survival value be damned. This is (according to him) something of a heresy within the evolutionary-biology world. Apparently there are those--Stephen Jay Gould called them "hyperadaptationists"--who insist that no trait can be inherited unless it contributes to genetic fitness, i.e. competitive advantage. This view explains the peacock's tail as a signal, advertising the genetic health of the bearer. An extreme version holds that the very uselessness of the tail is part of the signal--look at me, it's saying, I'm so genetically overendowed that I can carry this useless ornament around and still prosper.
Prum takes vigorous issue with these views. I think he's right to do so. The evidence for them seems weak, and their internal logic is less than compelling. Under the extreme view, for instance, shouldn't organisms with extreme deformities attract more mates? If surviving with a long useless tail signals fitness, then surely surviving with a long useless tail and intestinal parasites and only one wing signals more fitness. Ask for it by name!
Another of Prum's targets is the idea that animals simply can't form arbitrary, aesthetic preferences. Evidently there are a good many scientists who believe this; these scientists have never owned cats. (Consider, for example, the laser pointer. One of ours ignores it, one evinces occasional interest, and one will chase it endlessly. Nor is it just a matter of different neurological wiring, because all three were equally excited when they first encountered the Red Dot.) The idea that humans are just so very special in this regard is nothing more than a warmed-over search for the soul. Humans' ability to form aesthetic preferences came from somewhere; simple scientific parsimony suggests that it came from our animal ancestors.
At the same time, I wonder a little bit whether the prevailing wisdom is quite as prevalent as Prum makes out. Certainly his theory is one that I--a complete outsider--had heard before, including the fact that a trait need not be adaptive if it's sufficiently preferred. It's clear, however, that Prum is heavily emotionally invested in his theory. It may be that he's a bit hyper-focused on the opposition. It's almost certain that he's overstating his case.
One issue is that Prum mingles factual truth and normative truth. He points out, correctly, that--in the common case where females chose the mates--mate choice is consistent with female sexual agency, choice, and empowerment (which I'll call FSACE, for short). It's also true that we, societally, consider FSACE ethically desirable--indeed, mandatory. Those two things, however, are not connected. FSACE is not ethically mandatory because it's consistent with mate choice, and mate choice isn't necessarily true because it's consistent with FSACE. Put another way, FSACE is an ethical must even if someone proves that Prum's ideas are false.
In this regard, Prum also doesn't see that the evidence he cites against competing theories can also be used against his own. For example: in many societies women's sexual pleasure has always been marginalized, denigrated, or just ignored. This is evidence against the idea that female sexual pleasure is adaptive, true enough. But it's also evidence against the idea that female sexual pleasure is a consequence of women selecting sexually-compatible mates.
Another overreach comes when Prum tries to explain some behavioral differences between humans and our closest evolutionary relatives. Among apes, females generally can't select mates; the dominant male controls mating. So why do human relationships (cross-culturally, even in small tribal groups) tend towards pair-bonding?
Prum's proposal is that female mate choice explains this. Women, he suggests, prefer males who allow them to exercise their preferences. That is, proto-women preferred to hook up with proto-men who were inclined towards pair-bonding, rather than dominance/polygyny, which in turn spread the pair-bonding genes through the population--not because they provide any particular survival advantage, but because they offer more mating opportunities.
Well, sure, that might be true. There's no evidence of it. Furthermore, it suffers from a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: women promote free mate choice by exercising their free mate choice to select males who will permit them free mate choice, which raises the question of where the free mate choice came from in the first place.
There are plenty of other equally-credible explanations. Here's one alternative, in dialogue form:
#1 MALE: I hereby invoke my maleness to take away your Female Sexual Agency, Choice, and Empowerment!
FEMALES: Let's kill him.
#2 MALE: Yeah!
#3 MALE: I'm in.
#1 MALE: Wait, what? Argh, gurgle.
FEMALES: Good riddance.
FORMER #2 MALE: Aha! Now I am #1 Male, and I--
FEMALES and FORMER #3 MALE: Ahem.
FORMER #2 MALE: . . . that is . . . ah . . . things will be a bit different . . . mistakes were made.
Richard Prum doesn't present any more evidence for his idea than I have for mine. If anything, I think mine is more plausible, because it explains one thing that's unique to humans (our sexual arrangements) with another thing that's unique to humans (our ability to communicate, plan, and cooperate).
On the other hand, Prum's description of his own work with birds is tremendous. He goes into deep detail (which could have gotten dull, but doesn't) about, for example, bower birds' elaborate constructions and manakins' elaborate dances. Here I think his evidence is very strong and his arguments sound. It's no coincidence that the bird-oriented chapters are a lot lighter on the "it is possible"s and the "it could well be"s and the "might have"s.
That's not to say that I discount Prum's ideas entirely when it comes to humans. I do mistrust the single-cause fallacy, particularly when it comes to something as multifarious as human behavior--but that applies to Prum's opponents as well as to Prum himself. If you're at all interested in this sort of thing, do read The Evolution of Beauty. It'll keep you thinking for quite some time.
There are a number of good books on evolution, adaptation, and related topics. High among them, though also speculative, is Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire. Daniel Lieberman's The Story of the Human Body is extremely convincing, if not quite as daring. A good deal older, but still very much worth reading, is Melvin Konner's The Tangled Wing.
Monday, January 22, 2018
Book Review: White Pine
White Pine: American History and the Tree that Made a Nation
Andrew Vietze
Nature, history
To be honest, White Pine isn't really a great book. I liked it anyway.
This is the kind of book that you get when you combine an author with a deep, idiosyncratic interest in a subject with a lack of high-powered editing. White Pine isn't about Pinus strobus in general. It's about what interests Andrew Vietze, and what interests Andrew Vietze is (a) New England, and (b) the history of the tree's importance in colonial and revolutionary times. Which, to be fair, is pretty interesting! White pines were the premier trees used for making masts for the Royal Navy, and so they were constant flashpoints for royal decrees and local dissent. The broad arrow used to mark trees reserved for the King became such a hated symbol that many early revolutionary flags bore a pine tree as a mark of defiance.
That history takes up about two-thirds of White Pine. There's then a sort of middle-of-the-book epilogue chapter that drifts lightly across the nineteenth century, a couple of chapters of contemporary reportage, and a summation. An opinionated editor, looking at this, would say that White Pine is either too much or too little concentrated on colonial New England. Too much, if it's intended to be a general biography-of-a-substance book; too little, if it's intended to be about that specific time and place.
And yet the book is kind of charming. It's written in an agreeable, readable tone, with some nice personal touches. The history is genuinely illuminating--it's a great window into a little-known but very evocative microcosm of the tensions that led to the American Revolution. There are some lively characters, some famous names, some natural history.
Andrew Vietze, in short, loves his subject maybe a little too much. There are worse flaws.
Andrew Vietze
Nature, history
To be honest, White Pine isn't really a great book. I liked it anyway.
This is the kind of book that you get when you combine an author with a deep, idiosyncratic interest in a subject with a lack of high-powered editing. White Pine isn't about Pinus strobus in general. It's about what interests Andrew Vietze, and what interests Andrew Vietze is (a) New England, and (b) the history of the tree's importance in colonial and revolutionary times. Which, to be fair, is pretty interesting! White pines were the premier trees used for making masts for the Royal Navy, and so they were constant flashpoints for royal decrees and local dissent. The broad arrow used to mark trees reserved for the King became such a hated symbol that many early revolutionary flags bore a pine tree as a mark of defiance.
That history takes up about two-thirds of White Pine. There's then a sort of middle-of-the-book epilogue chapter that drifts lightly across the nineteenth century, a couple of chapters of contemporary reportage, and a summation. An opinionated editor, looking at this, would say that White Pine is either too much or too little concentrated on colonial New England. Too much, if it's intended to be a general biography-of-a-substance book; too little, if it's intended to be about that specific time and place.
And yet the book is kind of charming. It's written in an agreeable, readable tone, with some nice personal touches. The history is genuinely illuminating--it's a great window into a little-known but very evocative microcosm of the tensions that led to the American Revolution. There are some lively characters, some famous names, some natural history.
Andrew Vietze, in short, loves his subject maybe a little too much. There are worse flaws.
Monday, January 8, 2018
Book Review: Feathers
Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle
Thor Hanson
Nature
Like The Triumph of Seeds, Feathers is a beautifully-written book about a fascinating, easy-to-overlook subject. Feathers are absurdly, wonderfully complex. Just the description of how they grow--the cells behave like fans in a sports stadium doing the Wave--is mind-boggling. Hanson peels back multiple layers of featherology: evolution, physics, natural history, looks, physics. Woven in and out of this are a nice series of personal touches and anecdotes, anchoring the book in time and place. If you have any interest at all in looking more deeply into nature, this is a book to latch onto.
Like The Triumph of Seeds, Feathers is a beautifully-written book about a fascinating, easy-to-overlook subject. Feathers are absurdly, wonderfully complex. Just the description of how they grow--the cells behave like fans in a sports stadium doing the Wave--is mind-boggling. Hanson peels back multiple layers of featherology: evolution, physics, natural history, looks, physics. Woven in and out of this are a nice series of personal touches and anecdotes, anchoring the book in time and place. If you have any interest at all in looking more deeply into nature, this is a book to latch onto.
Friday, July 7, 2017
Book Review: The Ground Beneath Us
The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are
Paul Bogard
Nature, philosophy
Back in December, as mymany regular readers may recall, I read a book called Of Beards and Men. I disagreed with most of the author's conclusions, but I liked the book anyway. With The Ground Beneath Us I had the opposite reaction. There's scarcely a sentiment--scarcely a sentence--I disagreed with. But I didn't like the book.
The basic problem is that The Ground Beneath Us is a purely Romantic exercise in prose styling. It's long on lyricism, it's long on passion, but it's quite devoid of intellect. Bogard is the kind of author who thinks that name-checking famous writers (Thoreau! Muir!) is enough to qualify him as profound. He likes scare quotes. He cites big frightening-looking numbers without giving any context. He believes unquestioningly that "indigenous" is an exact and infallible synonym for "noble". He uncritically parrots false equivalencies.
And he abuses statistics. In my book, this is an unforgivable sin. For example, there's this:
Finally, even granting the righteousness of Bogard's propaganda, he's absolutely lacking in any concrete intellectual proposals. Agreed: global warming bad, urban sprawl bad, resource depletion bad, habitat loss bad. So what? What should we do about it? Bogard's answer to this appears to be some kind of mystical transcendence involving "knowing the connections that keep us alive". The word "sacred" gets thrown around a lot. (It's probably indigenous.) What this amounts to is a refusal to face up to the plain facts:
Failing that, Bogard's only logically consistent position would be to hope for a plague that kills off a good fraction of the human race. I bet he won't own up to that one, though.
Paul Bogard
Nature, philosophy
Back in December, as my
The basic problem is that The Ground Beneath Us is a purely Romantic exercise in prose styling. It's long on lyricism, it's long on passion, but it's quite devoid of intellect. Bogard is the kind of author who thinks that name-checking famous writers (Thoreau! Muir!) is enough to qualify him as profound. He likes scare quotes. He cites big frightening-looking numbers without giving any context. He believes unquestioningly that "indigenous" is an exact and infallible synonym for "noble". He uncritically parrots false equivalencies.
And he abuses statistics. In my book, this is an unforgivable sin. For example, there's this:
While the percentage of population density increase in the United States since 1940 has been 113 percent, around national parks it has been nearly double that, at 224 percent . . . 210 percent around Glacier and 246 percent around Yellowstone . . . 3,000 percent around Mojave National Preserve . . .Here's the thing. National Parks, for some strange reason, tend to be located in sparsely populated areas. So a small increase in the absolute number of houses will seem like a large percentage. To take an extreme case, imagine that where there was one house in 1940, there are now six. That's a 500 percent increase! OMG! To the barricades! Or, to use Bogard's own example: one of the towns adjoining Mojave National Preserve is Baker, CA, population 735. For Baker to have grown by 3,000% since 1940, it would have had to have added about 700 houses. If you had added those same 700 houses to, say, Chicago, what percentage growth would that represent?
Finally, even granting the righteousness of Bogard's propaganda, he's absolutely lacking in any concrete intellectual proposals. Agreed: global warming bad, urban sprawl bad, resource depletion bad, habitat loss bad. So what? What should we do about it? Bogard's answer to this appears to be some kind of mystical transcendence involving "knowing the connections that keep us alive". The word "sacred" gets thrown around a lot. (It's probably indigenous.) What this amounts to is a refusal to face up to the plain facts:
- People in the developed world are not going to voluntarily go out and move en masse into organic free-range low-impact yurts.
- People in the developing world are not going to nobly and indigenously turn their backs on the kind of high-energy, high-impact Westernized lifestyle that they see people like me leading.
Failing that, Bogard's only logically consistent position would be to hope for a plague that kills off a good fraction of the human race. I bet he won't own up to that one, though.
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Book Review: The Invention of Nature
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
Andrea Wulf
Biography
Alexander von Humboldt is probably the most famous person you've never heard of. And that's a shame. There's a reason the man has a couple of mountain ranges, an ocean current, a species of penguin, a bay, a glacier, a disappearing river, at least twenty U.S. places, etc. etc. etc. named after him. He influenced men as diverse as Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, and Henry David Thoreau.
Andrea Wulf does a good job bringing von Humboldt out of the shadows as a person, and of documenting his influence. She does only a fair job at explaining the scientific aspects of his journeys, and at explaining why he was so influential to such a diverse group of readers. The substantive descriptions of Humboldt's findings are also spotty; her description of the Casiquiare River, for example--which splits and flows into two separate drainage basins--is pretty unclear (and the accompanying map is just plain wrong).
Where The Invention of Nature really shines, though, is as an intellectual biography. Wulf brings a pleasing coherence to von Humboldt's ... philosophy? way of thinking? worldview? What distinguished him, at least in Wulf's telling, was that he was one of the earliest thinkers to consider the world holistically, in terms of interconnected systems. He lived at the cusp of the Enlightenment/Romantic divide, and his though partakes of both traditions. He collected, he measured, he documented; but equally he explored, he thrilled, he synthesized.
The Invention of Nature doesn't quite make it onto my "everyone should run right out and read this" list. However, it's intriguing and readable and occasionally eye-opening; it commits the laudable feat of appealing equally to natural-history enthusiasts and biography mavens; and it gives its hero the credit he's due. Overall, a fine job.
I've read quite a lot of books in this general sector. Here are three that stand out:
Andrea Wulf
Biography
Alexander von Humboldt is probably the most famous person you've never heard of. And that's a shame. There's a reason the man has a couple of mountain ranges, an ocean current, a species of penguin, a bay, a glacier, a disappearing river, at least twenty U.S. places, etc. etc. etc. named after him. He influenced men as diverse as Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, and Henry David Thoreau.
Andrea Wulf does a good job bringing von Humboldt out of the shadows as a person, and of documenting his influence. She does only a fair job at explaining the scientific aspects of his journeys, and at explaining why he was so influential to such a diverse group of readers. The substantive descriptions of Humboldt's findings are also spotty; her description of the Casiquiare River, for example--which splits and flows into two separate drainage basins--is pretty unclear (and the accompanying map is just plain wrong).
Where The Invention of Nature really shines, though, is as an intellectual biography. Wulf brings a pleasing coherence to von Humboldt's ... philosophy? way of thinking? worldview? What distinguished him, at least in Wulf's telling, was that he was one of the earliest thinkers to consider the world holistically, in terms of interconnected systems. He lived at the cusp of the Enlightenment/Romantic divide, and his though partakes of both traditions. He collected, he measured, he documented; but equally he explored, he thrilled, he synthesized.
The Invention of Nature doesn't quite make it onto my "everyone should run right out and read this" list. However, it's intriguing and readable and occasionally eye-opening; it commits the laudable feat of appealing equally to natural-history enthusiasts and biography mavens; and it gives its hero the credit he's due. Overall, a fine job.
I've read quite a lot of books in this general sector. Here are three that stand out:
- The Invention of Air, by Steven Johnson, is an extended study on the theme of connectedness disguised as an excellent biography of the chemist Joseph Priestley. Johnson also wrote the superb The Ghost Map, which I mentioned here.
- The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, is an amazing and beautifully written book about the Romantic era and its embrace of science.
- The River of Doubt, by Candace Millard, recounts ex-President Theodore Roosevelt's jaw-dropping exploration of the Amazon basin.
Monday, October 19, 2015
Book Review: Rain
Rain: A Natural and Cultural History
Cynthia Barnett
Sociology, culture
In the beginning there was Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky. And the readers and the reviewers looked upon it and saw that it was good. And in its wake there came a steady tide of books whose titles were single nouns. So Salt begat Coal, and Ice, and The Potato, and Spice, and Banana, and Thames, and Rust, and divers others. I expect that right now someone, somewhere is toiling away at Zinc Oxide: A Global Biography.
And now there's Rain. It's not bad. The actual writing achieves a pleasingly lyrical flow, suitable to its subject. Nonetheless, Rain suffers from a not-uncommon affliction of this genre: a compulsion to flit about from one thing to another, including short squibs on every damn thing the author can somehow relate to to the title.
So Rain goes trippingly from Mars to umbrellas to weather forecasting to rain gods to floods to the shape of raindrops to (of course) global warming to Japanese traditional umbrellas to Indian perfume, seldom bothering to tie any two chapters together. Barnett likes fine-sounding phrases, but she doesn't like to substantiate them. Thus, for example, we are at various times informed that "some scientists predict" X, or "many historians believe" Y, or such-like generalizations. Well, who are these "some scientists"? How many of them are there? Is this a mainstream opinion, a minority opinion, a speculation, or a bunch of flakes?
The pity of it is that there's one section that really does hold together. When Barnett stops globe-trotting and settles down for four chapters in the U.S., she produces a really knockout short narrative of Americans' stormy (har!) relationship with rain. From Thomas Jefferson (who was obsessed with the stuff), through the sodbusters who lived and died by it, and on into the eccentricities of weather control, this is good stuff.
Sadly, it doesn't last. The next section goes off into ... I don't remember where. Some lyrical but ultimately disjointed tangent, I suppose.
Don't get me wrong. I like these books. Why else would I have read so many of them? So I sort of liked Rain. But it could have been better.
Salt truly is excellent, as is Rust. I also really liked Hannah Holmes's The Secret Life of Dust, even though it has more than one word in the title.
Cynthia Barnett
Sociology, culture
In the beginning there was Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky. And the readers and the reviewers looked upon it and saw that it was good. And in its wake there came a steady tide of books whose titles were single nouns. So Salt begat Coal, and Ice, and The Potato, and Spice, and Banana, and Thames, and Rust, and divers others. I expect that right now someone, somewhere is toiling away at Zinc Oxide: A Global Biography.
And now there's Rain. It's not bad. The actual writing achieves a pleasingly lyrical flow, suitable to its subject. Nonetheless, Rain suffers from a not-uncommon affliction of this genre: a compulsion to flit about from one thing to another, including short squibs on every damn thing the author can somehow relate to to the title.
So Rain goes trippingly from Mars to umbrellas to weather forecasting to rain gods to floods to the shape of raindrops to (of course) global warming to Japanese traditional umbrellas to Indian perfume, seldom bothering to tie any two chapters together. Barnett likes fine-sounding phrases, but she doesn't like to substantiate them. Thus, for example, we are at various times informed that "some scientists predict" X, or "many historians believe" Y, or such-like generalizations. Well, who are these "some scientists"? How many of them are there? Is this a mainstream opinion, a minority opinion, a speculation, or a bunch of flakes?
The pity of it is that there's one section that really does hold together. When Barnett stops globe-trotting and settles down for four chapters in the U.S., she produces a really knockout short narrative of Americans' stormy (har!) relationship with rain. From Thomas Jefferson (who was obsessed with the stuff), through the sodbusters who lived and died by it, and on into the eccentricities of weather control, this is good stuff.
Sadly, it doesn't last. The next section goes off into ... I don't remember where. Some lyrical but ultimately disjointed tangent, I suppose.
Don't get me wrong. I like these books. Why else would I have read so many of them? So I sort of liked Rain. But it could have been better.
Salt truly is excellent, as is Rust. I also really liked Hannah Holmes's The Secret Life of Dust, even though it has more than one word in the title.
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