Books
jlynch | February 23, 2008Vox Day - who writes for WorldNetDaily - has published a book, The Irrational Atheist which is available for free online. It’s an attack on Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and other "new atheists". Brent Rasmussen over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable has taken the book very seriously. So I decided to check it out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t start off very well for Day.
Turning to chapter 1, you see the epigraph Vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science attributed to Charles Darwin. Is Darwin actually saying that the "voice of God" is not to be trusted in science? As anyone who…
laelaps | February 18, 2008As T. Ryan Gregory recently pointed out in his paper "Evolution as Fact, Theory, and Path," it is a shame that the English language is so impoverished as to cause the concept of evolution to be so controversial. Within the evolutionary lexicon, "theory," "saltation," " macroevolution," "direction," "purpose," and "design" are among the words that unfortunately seem to conflate rather than enlighten as far as the general public is concerned, and now Ken Miller (of Finding Darwin's God fame) wants to take back "design" for evolution. I don't have a good feeling about this one...
As John Wilkins…
grrlscientist | February 17, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
A friend of mine, Ian Paulsen, loves books as much as I do, and possibly (gasp!) moreso! I know this is difficult to believe, but he has collected books about birds and natural history themes for as long as I've known him, which has been a fairly long period of my life. As far as I know, Ian reads all of his collected books, too, unlike most book collectors. Further, Ian knows just about every publisher out there who has ever published a…
pharyngula | February 17, 2008I received a fascinating pdf of a book from the author of the Cape Cod History page — it's by Bergen Evans, was published in 1946, and is titled The Natural History of Nonsense. As far as I've read yet, it's a wonderful example of rational thinking, and makes one wonder why this kind of writing isn't more representative of American popular literature.
Here's a short sample from the chapter titled "Adam's Navel," which is about the curious history of the omphalos theory, and it also gets into some of the mixed signals our country was sending about race and intelligence.
This ingenious theory,…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2008The anthology I edited last spring, Scholarly Journals Between the Past and the Future, has received one long thoughtful review by Alun at Archaeoastronomy and another one by the Grumpy Old Bookman.
clock | February 13, 2008Yes, that time has come....Going it alone in 2006 was far too much work for one person. Reed Cartwright was the first guest editor in 2007 and this was a perfect solution. So, going on into the new year and new victories, it is now time to announce the Editor of the Open Laboratory 2008. Drumroll....
The anthology editor for this year will be Jennifer Rohn!!!
Jennifer is a post-doc in cell biology at University College London, she blogs at Mind The Gap and is the Editor of LabLit.com.
Stay tuned for more book-related news soon. The new submission form will be available very soon as well…
laelaps | February 11, 2008
Given that tomorrow is Darwin Day, I've been trying to think of something original to write that will not merely be an echo of what my fellow bloggers have already written about Charles Darwin. Unfortunately, I have to brave the cold to attend classes for the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening, but I thought I would post something to illustrate just how much Darwin's perspective of natural history changed between the time he traveled the world on the Beagle to the time he published On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Writing in his diary during the Beagle voyage (…
cmooney | February 11, 2008
...and I have read a lot of them, including Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe.
Nevertheless, the book I just reviewed in the latest New Scientist--Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King's The Hot Topic--trounces them all. This it does by being simultaneously more comprehensive, and less ideological, than any other global warming book I'm aware of. Or as I write of Walker and King:
Their overview of the science and policy of climate change is a model of clarity, comprehensiveness and, above all, sanity. It truly does find a middle ground in the…
laelaps | February 9, 2008Tonight I finished Rudwick's Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes, and I certainly feel that I have a better understand of Cuvier's work than I did previously (although the subject of his embranchments and debates with Geoffrey only received a fleeting mention). What is truly curious, though, is that Cuvier was not a biblical literalist and yet did not seem to favor a mechanism by which the various unique fossil taxa he described could have come into existence. He noted that an "age of reptiles" likely preceded an "age of mammals" (divided by a catastrophic revolution…
laelaps | February 6, 2008Update: Michael has been kind enough to track down a copy of A Discourse on the revolutions of the surface of the globe..., although it looks like I'm going to have to learn French if I want to read Researches on fossil bones.
I've been reading a lot about Cuvier as of late, but I realized that I haven't actually read much of Cuvier's own work (not being able to read French is a general impediment). I was wondering, then, if any of you know of available English translations of Discours sur les revolutions du globe (
A discourse on the revolutions of the surface of the globe, and the changes…
laelaps | February 6, 2008
Following one of the great "rules" of paleontological fieldwork, a team of paleontologists and volunteers from the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, Illinois, came across the toe bones of a theropod dinosaur at the very end of their field season. With no time to dig out the specimen, they reluctantly had to cover the remains up and hope that no one else would come across the fossil before they could get to it the next year. Fortunately for them, the specimen was still intact and proved to be one of the most amazing fossil finds of recent years; a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex named…
clock | February 5, 2008
Two books - Facebook: The Missing Manual and Wikipedia: The Missing Manual arrived in my mailbox today. How did I get them? By being on Facebook, getting a message from the O'Reilly Facebook group and being one of the first 20 to respond. The first glance at the books and the tables of contents suggests both books will be useful references and I will try to use them in the near future as I plan how to take over the world!
laelaps | February 5, 2008
Yesterday was a good day as far as books went; I read G.G. Simpson's Splendid Isolation from cover-to-cover, two review copies arrived in the mail, and a book I've long been wanting to read also arrived at my door. That book is Johannes Weigelt's Recent Vertebrate Carcasses and their Paleobiological Implications, first published in 1927 but translated by Judith Schaefer and re-released in 1989. I haven't gotten a chance to dive into it yet, but it is an absolutely beautiful book, and even though the subject matter may be a bit macabe it has already inspired me.
Lately I've been thinking of…
grrlscientist | February 4, 2008tags: global warming, LabLit, science fiction, book review
I read the first two books in this trilogy last year [book 1 and book 2] and ever since I finished them, I had wondered; and then what happened? Well, now I know the answer to this question, and I can honestly say that this, the third of three books, made the entire trilogy into a huge disappointment, even though the series started out by showing some promise. Sixty Days And Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson (NYC: Bantam Books; 2007) is the last installment in a eco-political near-future sci-fi thriller trilogy. This particular book's…
laelaps | February 2, 2008I just passed the 325-page mark in Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, which puts me in the middle of chapter 4. Chapter 1 was perhaps the most difficult, the abstracts at the end of the opening section being a bit cumbersome. Once I got into chapter 2, however, the sailing was a little smoother, and by Chapter 3 Gould hits his stride. Whatever complains I might have about the style or need for editing aside, I am getting quite a lot out of this book. I'm curious to see how Gould unveils his hypothesis for hierarchical selection in the later chapters, but as far as the historical…
jlynch | February 2, 2008Razib has posted his thoughts on Chapter 4 of Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory and ends with:
I suspect that defenders of this reputedly brilliant work will claim the long build up cashes out in a stupendous climax which will leave me aghast at its audacity. We shall see, but after 341 pages, 1/4 of the narration, I’ve been treated to a nearly useless prologue and passable if self-indulgent history of science.
This reminds me of one of the paradoxes about Gould. Among historians (and the public) he was believed to represent mainstream science, a belief not shared by many…
laelaps | February 2, 2008
Over the course of evolutionary history there have been a number of animals that have sported elongated neural spines, the structures sometimes aiding in the support of a hump (as in bison) and other times as the framework for a great sail (as in Spinosaurus). Of the group of "sail-backed" and "bison-backed" animals, the pelycosaur Edaphosaurus (the spines of which are pictured above) are unique, and the presence of transverse bars arranged on either side has long vexed paleontologists.
Charles R. Knight's sculpture of "Naosaurus" with a revised Edaphosaurus head. Courtesy of Dan Varner…
laelaps | February 1, 2008As if things weren't contentious enough around here already, I've got another subject for general discussion that I'm sure will lead to some debate. In science there has long been a tradition of trying to engage the public, whether it be through public debates/lectures, books, etc. As Stephen Jay Gould noted in the obituary he wrote for Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection entwines both technical and popular writing into an effective and important package. (Indeed, the widely-published version of On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection was Darwin's…
laelaps | February 1, 2008
Yesterday I ran into an old friend of mine while shuffling between classes (I was carrying a copy of Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory at the time, so a shuffle was the best I could manage), and we got on the topic of anthropology & science books. My friend mentioned Jared Diamond and noted that he was one of the greatest ecologists of all time. I'm sure he noted the quizzical look on my face, because after starting in on The Third Chimpanzee (which I admittedly did not finish) I didn't come away with so high an opinion of him. Maybe I just read the wrong book, but I didn't…
laelaps | February 1, 2008
Smilodon is perhaps the most famous of all the saber-toothed cats, but the level of notoriety it has received has led to a number of misunderstandings. As a child I remember hearing in a documentary (complete with somewhat hokey stop-motion giant sloths) that sabercats became extinct because their teeth grew so long that they could not close their mouths. I did not know it at the time, but this fallacious idea had been around for quite some time, and was quite surprised to find an effective refutation of it when I read G.G. Simpson's popular book The Meaning of Evolution (1950);
The…