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| 0982578113
| 3.60
| 45
| Jan 01, 2012
| Aug 07, 2012
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liked it
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This book was on my reading list for a long time. It has an interesting premise, at the intersection of science and history, but it was never a priori
This book was on my reading list for a long time. It has an interesting premise, at the intersection of science and history, but it was never a priority to read. I finally got to it, and enjoyed the story. There are no Hollywood touches here, no eureka moments or obsessed mad scientist inventors. Instead there were talented guys with an idea for creating a ballpoint pen that they thought they could make work and which would make them a lot of money. It wasn’t even an original idea; patents for pens of this type already existed in several countries, but they didn’t work. They were more concepts of a pen which the people behind them hoped would be taken up by others to work out the details and bring to market, while they shared in the profits. Perfecting the pen took six long years of patient but frustrating development, in three different countries under the shadow of the Second World War. There were problems with manufacturing the pen’s 1 mm ball to be perfectly spherical, but the main issue was finding a formula for ink which would flow smoothly and consistently. Interestingly, finding the right ink was also one of Gutenberg’s key issues in developing the printing press. The main focus of the book is László Bíró, a Hungarian journalist and inventor, and the investors who kept the research efforts going during the lean years of trial and experimentation. Eventually the pen was a stunning success, but by that time Bíró had mortgaged his rights so many times that he only got a fraction of the profits. He made some money off it, but his investors made much, much more, and then even the little stock that remained to him was swindled away by one of them. Not surprisingly, wherever large amounts of money are at stake, it is also the story of lawsuits over contracts and patents. Before fleeing Hungary just hours before the state claimed all intellectual property rights, Bíró had had several partners, including Andor Goy, who had a contract from 1938 giving him sole rights to sell ballpoint pens in fourteen European countries, and who eventually independently brought out a successful pen. Then the communist takeover in Hungary resulted in his business being nationalized. He was fired from his own company and replaced by a Party flunky who also took his car and house, and then stopped making pens. Years later, when the government needed hard currency they tried to use Goy’s contract to take control of the pen market in Europe, but they managed the lawsuit ineptly and lost. Goy spent most of the rest of his life as a poorly paid machine operator. The book was originally written in Hungarian and later translated. The author made an odd stylistic choice which I sometimes found disconcerting: much of the book consists of conversations which are printed as verbatim transcripts. First of all, no one was recording these discussions or taking minutes when they occurred; second, they were more than half a century old by the time the book was written, and the principle characters were all dead. Both Bíró and Goy wrote memoirs, giving their sides of the story, but memories can fade or be embellished, and there are no independent sources for these events. Writing like this gives the book a sense of immediacy, but there is no way for the reader to know how much of it is true and how much is a later re-creation of what might have been said, especially since all of the parties had vested personal and financial interests in their version of history. Sitting here on my desk is a Uni-ball Jetstream ballpoint, my go-to pen when I need to jot something down. It is smooth and reliable, and I appreciate its quality engineering, especially since I am old enough to remember the cheap-o ballpoints of my youth, where the ink often dried up in the ball and an effort was required to start it flowing, and then it sometimes left blobs of ink on the paper. Fountain pens may be elegant writing instruments, but for getting words on paper right now, without any hassles, a ballpoint – or its later derivative, the gel pen – is the right tool for the job. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 28, 2024
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Oct 30, 2024
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Nov 06, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0393319407
| 9780393319408
| 0393319407
| 4.21
| 6,147
| Dec 01, 1992
| May 17, 1999
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it was amazing
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This is an informative and well written book that will leave you depressed as hell. Published in 1992, it sounded a clarion call, warning humankind th
This is an informative and well written book that will leave you depressed as hell. Published in 1992, it sounded a clarion call, warning humankind that it was edging toward environmental catastrophe and collapse, that unless concerted action was undertaken, disaster was inevitable. And what has been the result? Things have gotten worse, much worse, in every category: rain forest destruction, species extinction, pollution of watersheds, over fishing, overuse of fertilizers, greenhouse gases, and a whole Pandora’s box of environmental threats to civilization itself. And indeed, we may already be past the point of no return. Humanity stands at the apex of delicate pyramid, supported by a myriad of other essential lifeforms, largely unnoticed and disregarded.
E.O. Wilson was one of the most influential science writers of the last half century. An ant specialist, he was nevertheless capable of discussing biology on any level. His books have been popular because he has an easy-going, conversational writing style. It never sounds like you are reading a textbook, and you can get so carried along with his stories that you don’t even realize that he is teaching you important things. He also knows how to hide the illuminating fact among his descriptions, the kind that makes the reader pause and think, such as, “Take a gram of ordinary soil, a pinch held between two fingers, and place it in the palm of your hand. You are holding a clump of quartz grains laced with decaying organic matter and free nutrients, and about 10 billion bacteria.” (p. 142) This book is divided into three parts. The first speaks of the resiliency of life, such as in the way a tree falling in the Amazon forests makes a hole in the canopy that allows sunlight to reach the ground, starting a race among the seeds there to grow and flourish. There is also a discussion of how life recovers from environmental catastrophes, using as an example the Krakatoa volcanic explosion in 1883. As soon as the rock had cooled plant spores started drifting in on the winds, and animals soon followed, so that within a few years the island was restored to an ecological state similar to, but not an exact duplicate of, what had existed before. Finally, this section includes a history of Earth’s five great mass extinctions, when large portions of life on earth died off. This leads to a discussion of the Sixth Extinction, the one going on now and caused by humans. Although Wilson did not coin the phrase Sixth Extinction, this was the book that brought the term into the general conversation. The second section of the book is a primer on evolution, and specifically how biodiversity arises by changing one species into many, species into genera, and so on, to the point where all life on earth is descended from one or more self-replicating cells 3.8 billion years ago. It also includes an interesting description of what biologists see when they look at humans:
There is a good discussion on how species evolve away from their parents. Isolation is presumed to be the most common cause, where part of a formerly uniform population finds itself separated for some reason, and starts evolving independently either through genetic drift or by enhancement of whatever random mutations might have been present in the isolated group. Think of Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos: the first arrivals were blown from the mainland or arrived on rafts, and started evolving away from their parent species. The new species then radiated outward to colonize the different islands in the Galapagos formation, and once there started evolving traits that allowed them to maximally exploit the food resources that particular island offered. In time the original species evolved in eighteen new ones. Life finds a way, and evolution drives its changes. All of this is interesting and informative, but it is the last section that readers will remember. It is titled “The Human Impact,” and spends 150 pages explaining in great detail how we are killing the planet, and, of course, ourselves. All species evolve, flourish, and eventually die, but we have vastly accelerated this process. It is worth keeping in mind again that the book was published in 1992, so the numbers Wilson presents are worse now than they were then: “Even with...cautious parameters, selected in a biased manner to draw a maximally optimistic conclusion, the number of species doomed each year is 27,000. Each day it is 74, and each hour 3...[T]he normal “background” extinction rate is about one species per million species a year. Human activity has increased extinction between 1,000 and 10,000 times over this level in the rain forest by reduction in area alone.” (p. 280) Catastrophe is not inevitable, just increasingly likely, and Wilson provided a way out, by doing things such as cultivating edible plants with a lower environmental impact. There are a lot to choose from, but the iron laws of economics of scale narrow our actual choices to only a few. “Perhaps 30,000 species of plants have edible parts, and throughout history a total of 7,000 kinds have been grown or collected as food but, of the latter, 20 species provide 90 percent of the world’s food and just three -- wheat, maize, and rice -- supply more than half.” (p. 287-288) The problem, ultimately, is that a solution would take time, money, and coordinated action across the globe, and politically the world is more and more run by populist politicians, whose outlook never extends beyond the next election cycle. The United States withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord in 2020 because lowering greenhouse gases would have a cost, one which some businesses and some voters did not want to pay, so the entire agreement, critical for the well being of the planet in the next generations, was abrogated. And we don’t even know what we don’t know. No one can estimate to the nearest order of magnitude how many species are out there. We can’t even be sure we have found all the mammals, much less the reptiles, birds, and fish, and have no idea how many types of bacteria and fungi might be out there. Each of them is a chemical factory honed over billions of years of evolution to fit into its ecological niche; who knows which ones might have cures for cancer or an entirely new class of antibiotics? We don’t know now and never will if we keep bulldozing their habitats. The environmental news gets worse each year: higher temperatures, rising sea levels, depletion of ground water, desertification of previously arable land, and many others, any one of which could be disastrous, and collectively they might be civilization-enders, snuffing humanity out as surely as that meteorite did to the dinosaurs. The Diversity of Life is a fine book, worth reading despite its age, but you will finish it hearing a clock ticking in your head, knowing that time is running out. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 23, 2022
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Jul 27, 2022
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Dec 13, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0062853910
| 9780062853912
| 0062853910
| 3.95
| 3,716
| Apr 2021
| Apr 27, 2021
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really liked it
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I had previously read Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth, and enjoyed it, and I liked this one
I had previously read Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth, and enjoyed it, and I liked this one as well. The book is popular science, and there is no math or physics to be found, which limits the depths to which the book can describe events, but the author has a talent for making complex phenomena easily accessible. For instance, he provides a brief account of one hypothesis for the Snowball earth phenomenon approximately 650 million years ago: volcanic rocks absorb vast amounts of CO2 as they weather, removing it from the atmosphere. If there had been a great deal of volcanic activity among low-latitude continents, the warm weather there would have caused the lava beds to erode rapidly, pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, cooling the earth, and initiating glaciation. As the ice spread from the poles, it would have reflected more and more of the sun’s radiation back into space, further cooling the planet, until the whole world was trapped under a blanket of ice. However, volcanoes giveth and they taketh away, and after a time renewed volcanic activity could have melted some of the ice, pouring new CO2 into the atmosphere where it trapped heat, raised global temperatures, and pushed the glaciers back toward the poles. Early in the book there is an informative graphic showing the percent, by weight, of elements in the earth, and in the cells of the human body. In the earth, Iron (33%), Oxygen (31%), Silicon (19%), and Magnesium (13%) make up 96% of the total. Nickel (1.9%), Calcium (0.9%), and Aluminum (0.9%) add another 3.7%, and everything else, all those other naturally occurring elements in the periodic table, account for the remaining 0.3%. Similarly, in the human body Oxygen makes up 65%, Carbon 18%, Hydrogen 10%, Nitrogen 3%, Calcium 1.5%, and Phosphorous 1.0%. Together they account for 98.5% of our bodies by weight. Another explanation which I liked was the transition to oxygen-based photosynthesis. For three billion years, since the origin of life on earth, living things were microscopic single cell bacteria and archaea, extracting what energy they could from inefficient anoxygenic photosynthesis processes using hydrogen sulfide. Then, however:
The book’s eight chapters start from the very beginning, the consolidation of a cloud of interstellar gas and debris from previous generations of stars, and then proceed step by step to our modern world. The chapters are: Chemical Earth, Physical Earth, Biological Earth, Oxygen Earth, Animal Earth, Green Earth, Catastrophic Earth, and Human Earth. They are chronological in sequence, but also move forward through increasing levels of complexity as life finds ways to capitalize on new sources of energy. The book is a good general introduction to its subject, accessible to anyone, so I was dismayed to see that Amazon also sells two different summaries, which were clearly written for students who don’t want to do the reading for their class, who are determined to put in the absolute minimum level of effort. Why bother to actually learn things, when you can manage a passing grade by reading a twelve page summary? But for people who do want to learn something, read the book; it is worth your time. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 21, 2022
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Jun 27, 2022
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Dec 13, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 022617428X
| 9780226174280
| 022617428X
| 4.20
| 84
| Jan 01, 2014
| Oct 29, 2014
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really liked it
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The more you know about the intricacies of cellular biology, the more humbling the experience becomes. Even simple-seeming prokaryots like bacteria ar
The more you know about the intricacies of cellular biology, the more humbling the experience becomes. Even simple-seeming prokaryots like bacteria are not simple at all, and the eurkaryots, cells with a nucleus, are fantastically more complex. Even something that sounds like it would be straightforward, such as a membrane, is precisely constructed of multiple layers, each performing specific functions, and there are multiple perforations to allow nutrients in and waste out. Add to that organelles, each performing specific functions, and mitochondria to power everything, and it is an awe inspiring structure. As an example, in your organs right now, cells are sensing the presence or absence of chemicals in the bloodstream. When a cell detects that more of something is needed, the precise location for the gene to make it is found along the four billion bases of the copy of DNA stored in the cell nucleus. The two strands of DNA are unwound at the correct place, and RNA polymerase binds to one of them. It reads the information between the gene’s start and stop markers and makes a copy in the form of a single strand of RNA. Some sections are not needed – the so-called junk DNA, which actually serves many purposes, but protein synthesis is not one of them, so these sections are cut out and the remaining sequence spliced back together. The modified RNA, now called messenger RNA (mRNA) is moved out of the nucleus and to a ribosome, which translates the sequence into amino acids, building a long chain of them until it reaches the stop code, and then releases the newly created string, which begins to fold in a precise way to become a protein. Many can fold in multiple ways to create different proteins, and thus 24,000 human genes can create around 100,000 different proteins. An adult human is composed of about 37 trillion cells of 200 different types. Not all of them have nuclei – red blood cells, which are optimized for hemoglobin transport, do not, but most of them do, and your body must create new ones constantly. As Steven Vogel writes in Cat’s Paws and Catapults,
If you reject the idea of supernatural creation, all of this had to come from somewhere, and that is subject of this book. It is really written for someone with at least an undergraduate understanding of chemistry and biology, and some of the descriptions of processes left me in the dark, as in “they decarboxylate pyruvate to generate acetate, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen gas (hence the name), and couple this reaction to the production of ATP by substrate-level phosphorylation. (p. 159) Well, of course. Nevertheless, the book repaid my efforts to keep going through the technical details to reach the points where the author synthesizes the details into an overarching explanation, where the wonders of evolution come alive. It starts with a beautiful term which I had never heard before: biopoiesis, the development of living matter from nonliving matter. Note that this is not evolution, which is concerned with descent with modification and has nothing to say about the ultimate origins of life, but biopoiesis is an inevitable concomitant in discussion of the forces which caused cells to develop the way they did long long ago. The first mystery to be confronted is that “Living things are made up of lifeless chemicals; their composition, and everything they do, is consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry. And yet there is nothing in those laws that would lead one to expect a universe that harbors life. At the head of the mystery lurk cells, the elementary units of life and the smallest entities that display all its characteristics.” (p. 6) Although every theory of biopoiesis generates an equal and furious opposite theory, the most widely accepted hypothesis for the emergence of life from non-life is in the deep-sea warm smoker vents. These are not the more well known hot vents ejecting boiling water, but calmer alkaline vents running at around 70ºC. They precipitate rock formations pocked with tiny crevasses about the size of a cell, which may have been where the chemicals and processes necessary for life could have been concentrated until a self-sustaining reaction took place – life. Once it had begun life was in no hurry to evolve into us. This might have been because the early earth possessed almost no free oxygen to power chemical reactions. What is now known as The Great Oxydation Event did not occur until 2.4-2.0 billion years ago. Again with the understanding that there are multiple schools of thought, the generally accepted idea is that all life falls into three domains: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryota. It is unknown whether bacteria or archaea arose first, but cellular similarities indicate that eukaryota evolved from archaea as a form of chimera which incorporated some bacterial genes as well. In early life vertical evolution, from one generation to the next, was less important than horizontal evolution, where the early cells passed genes back and forth between each other (which bacteria still do today). It was only when life had attained sufficient stability and efficiency that it become a viable evolutionary strategy to protect the existing genes rather than continue to incorporate new ones. I have a weakness for cleverly constructed analogies, so I found the author’s introduction to deep time helpful, “Let 1 millimeter, the thickness of a dime, stand for 1 year. Then 1 meter makes a millennium, 1 kilometer 1 million years, and the age of the earth (about 4.5 billion years) spans 4,500 kilometers, a little more than the distance between Miami and Seattle.” (p. 6) There is disputed evidence that life may have arisen as far back as 4 billion years ago, more convincing evidence for 3.8 billion, and firm evidence that by 3.5 billion years ago the dance of life was in full swing. Although evolution continued to operate, major changes did not come for a very long time. “For more than than three-quarters of life’s history, all the life that lived consisted of single-celled microorganisms invisible to the naked eye. By the time multicellular organisms appear in the geological record some six hundred million years ago, the evolution of cells themselves had largely run its course.” (p. 7) Heredity is manifested in genes, and it is these which have come down through the ages. Genes are potentially immortal, and some of the ones we possess are very ancient indeed. As Richard Dawkins pointed out in The Selfish Gene, bodies are transient vessels whose purpose is to ensure that the great chain of gene transfer remains unbroken. Most genes do slowly change over time, although it is important to understand that it is not always in the direction of greater and greater complexity: if an environment changes so that some genes are no longer necessary they can be lost, and the human genome consists of a number of broken genes that no longer perform the functions they once did, such as one to synthesize Vitamin D. The rate of change for genes can be roughly calculated at about one per four million years, and thus we can estimate, for example, that humans and mice last shared a common ancestor about 120 million years ago. I appreciate that author Franklin Harold stepped carefully around the many competing theories of cellular evolution, explaining his own positions but including divergent ones as well. Since direct evidence for ancient life is so sparse, scientists must use induction and references to living organisms to try to peer into the distant past. It is impressive to see how one plausible explanation after another is generated to create a complete system, only to topple like a house of cards when new evidence emerges. However, that is how science works: all hypotheses are contingent. If certainty is important to you, pick one of the many supernatural explanations and close your mind to any alternatives. The book uses a number of excellent examples to help the reader understand the complexity – and the beauty of life at the cellular level. For example, we all know that cells divide, but I never gave any thought to what “divide” actually means:
There are places where this book is heavy going for someone without a background in the life sciences, but I am happy that the author never dumbed down his explanations just to carry the lowest common denominator of readers along. There were parts I did not understand, but the overall grand synthesis of emerging life was profound, beautiful, and fascinating. ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 23, 2022
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May 27, 2022
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Nov 22, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0593241312
| 9780593241318
| 0593241312
| 4.59
| 10,778
| Sep 28, 2021
| Nov 02, 2021
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really liked it
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A few days before I started reading Immune I accidentally cut my finger while dicing an onion, but after uttering a few choice expletives and fishing
A few days before I started reading Immune I accidentally cut my finger while dicing an onion, but after uttering a few choice expletives and fishing a band-aid out of a drawer I went back to making supper without giving it another thought. According to Philipp Dettmer, there was a lot going on in those few drops of blood. Each one contained about 250,000,000 red blood cells, 400,000 immune cells, 15,000,000 platelets, and 13,000,000,000,000 antibodies. The more you know about the immune system, the more amazing it gets: layer after layer of sophisticated defenses, some of them quick reacting and general purpose, to immediately start fighting intruders while the main defenses gear up. Others are slower but more specific, taking several days to analyze the threat and build specific weapons to counter it. This is why you are often sick for a couple of days before you start feeling better, because it takes time for the body to marshal and deploy its full array of defenses. Most of us have heard about macrophages and Killer T-cells, and we have a vague idea that antibodies are floating around in our blood doing something to help keep us healthy. These are only a few of the different types of immune cells, which trigger and interact with each other in subtle and complex ways. It can be argued that the most important part of your car is not its engine but its brakes, because while moving is nice, being able to stop is critical. Similarly, the immune system’s most important feature is its restraint: able to effectively repel invaders but not so hair-trigger sensitive that it indiscriminately attacks and destroys normal, healthy cells. For this reason your body’s most powerful defenses must receive a separate confirmation signal before they can be activated, sort of like two-factor authentication for computer systems. The first line of defense is our skin, and the book has a chapter examining its various layers and how they create an effective barrier to keep bacteria and other threats out. A single millimeter separates the dead skin cells on top from the living ones below, but in that distance multiple stages play out, as the cells are generated and then compress, spread out, connect to each other, forming a tight chemical bond that ensures there are no gaps for invaders to penetrate. There are multiple levels of threats that the body must be able to respond to. If you get a cut, bacteria swarm in, because bacteria are everywhere, in fantastic numbers. The body is tuned to recognize Self from Other, and since bacteria are clearly Other they are instantly attacked, while other systems work to close the wound and repair the blood vessels damaged by the cut. Viruses represent a more sophisticated level of threat, because they do their work inside the cells, invisible to many of the body’s defenses. To counter this the cell’s surface is studded with proteins which let the immune system “see” inside, and will order the cell to kill itself if anything is amiss. The cell does not just die, which might release the viruses inside, but slowly folds in on itself, creating pockets that trap the viruses until a macrophage can come along and consume them. Of course, viruses evolve just like everything else, and in their case the generative processes are very sloppy, so that each generation can have new mutations, which means that purely by random evolutionary chance some of them will be better able to defeat the body’s defenses, such as by eliminating the surface proteins that let the immune system examine cell contents. Worst of all are cancers, because they are the body’s own cells. Even so, the immune system does a good job recognizing and destroying cancer cells, and is doubtless doing so right now somewhere in your own body. However, some cancers are more insidious and harder to detect than others, and as we get older our body’s defenses get weaker and less effective. Finally, in addition to fighting off threats, the body must remember what it has battled in the past, so it can respond immediately in the future. This, of course, is the fundamental rationale for immunizations, so get those shots. Measles is particularly dangerous, because it specifically targets the cells which hold your immune system’s memories, so not only can it kill you directly – and it is one of the most contagious of all diseases – but it can leave you open to reinfection by pathogens your younger, stronger, healthier body defeated decades ago, and now you have no immunity to them. The author of this book had to walk a fine line between burying the reader in scientific detail and describing things in such a simplified manner that important topics got glossed over. In general, he does a good job covering all the bases without making the reader’s head spin with biochemical complexity. To do so, however, he adopts an approach which I found jarring. After correctly emphasizing that the immune system’s components are just biological machines doing what evolution assigned them to do, and that they have no agency of their own, he nevertheless describes them in extravagantly anthropomorphic terms, such as “Suddenly a jolt of energy shoots through the Macrophage’s bloated body. In a heartbeat, its spirit comes back and it feels fresh again. But there is something else: A hot, white anger. The Macrophage knows what it needs to do: Kill bacteria, right now!” (p. 99) Nevertheless, despite this authorial quirk, the book is successful as a general, nontechnical introduction to the human immune system. It does a good job explaining the wondrously sophisticated systems that keep us alive, and its bibliography points to the reader to where to look for more technical information. Life has been a 3.8 billion year evolutionary arms race since the first cells appeared, and in that time a marvel of powerful, ingenious defenses has been created, carefully balanced between aggression and restraint. The fact that it sometimes goes awry and causes autoimmune diseases is unfortunate, but the real wonder is not that those things happen occasionally, but that they don’t happen to all of us all the time. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 08, 2022
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Jun 13, 2022
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Nov 22, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0393319903
| 9780393319903
| 0393319903
| 3.84
| 197
| 1998
| Jan 17, 2000
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really liked it
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Nature may show what’s possible, but she’s a poor guide to what’s worth doing. The combination of high toughness and low resilience means that lots of
Nature may show what’s possible, but she’s a poor guide to what’s worth doing. The combination of high toughness and low resilience means that lots of energy [in a spider web] can be absorbed in a stretch and that the energy doesn’t come out again as elastic rebound. In other words, spider silk is stretchy, but it doesn’t behave at all like a rubber band: it absorbs and then keeps the energy. But energy, according to the first law of thermodynamics, can’t be destroyed, and the energy appears as heat. Now that may not pose a problem for a skinny thread...but imagine using a rope of spider silk to stop a falling body or a moving aircraft. If the rope is thick enough to do such a big job, the silk will be immediately ruined by the resulting increase in its temperature. (p. 286-287) A good science book can make you see the world around you in a new way. While reading this one I took a walk around my neighborhood to look at street sign stanchions. One kind was a round pole, the best shape to deflect high winds. Another was a square pole with rows of holes punched into the four sides, to lower both weight and wind resistance. A third type was a simple rectangular post with a U-shaped centerline indentation running along its length, a corrugation to increase strength. Needless to say, I had never noticed any of this before. There did not seem to be a plan for which types of posts went where, but all of the designs must serve their purpose, since I’ve never seen one blown down or a sign blown off. Cat’s Paws and Catapults has many examples like this, and is well illustrated to make its points clear. It looks at engineering from the perspectives of both nature and humans. There are many similarities, but even more differences, because of environmental and material constraints. Size can make a big a difference in choosing a solution, since at some scales gravity is less of a factor than, say, surface tension. On the other hand, some commonalities exist across a vast range of sizes, “An individual muscle of a tiny insect might weigh a microgram; a large muscle of a big whale may approach a hundred kilograms – several hundred pounds. Those masses are a hundred billion times different, 10^11-fold, and performance doesn’t deteriorate noticeably at either extreme.” (p. 176) Although nature has evolved some giants, most life exists at a smaller scale than humans. “Not only are most organisms smaller that we, but in most groups smallness is the ancestral condition and largeness the specialization. Big fossils are impressive, but little ones are more likely to lead somewhere.” (p. 41) And nature has been at this for a very long time. Traces of life go back at least 3.8 billion years, but it was not until the arrival of multi-cellular creatures sometime before the Cambrian Explosion (a slow motion, 20 million year “explosion”) about 540 million years ago that evolution shifted into high gear, beginning a never-ending competition of shells versus teeth, speed versus stealth, size versus maneuverability, and many other trait permutations. Our primate ancestors were late to this game. There is disputed evidence of tool use as far back as 3.3 million years ago, but it does not show up clearly in the fossil record for another 700,000 years. Modern humans evolved about 300,000 years ago, by which time tools were an ancient trait of our hominin ancestors. Almost all living things, plant, animal, or bacteria, have approximately the same density as water. As a result they all follow the same size/weight/volume rules, and thus, for example, a fish that is twice as long as another of the same shape will weigh eight times as much. Such factors come into play across a wide variety of engineering considerations. “A wing’s lift varies with its area, just as its drag does. Therefore, doubling length (while keeping shape unaltered) gives a craft four times the lift but eight times the weight….One solution is having really large wings on the larger craft; another is to fly somewhat faster: Like drag, lift goes up with speed through the air.” (p. 46) Nature can build with fantastic precision, but standardization is at the species rather than the individual level. Medical students learn the names of the large blood vessels, but not the small ones, because the locations of these vary from person to person. (p. 236) Nature rarely resorts to cloning, and even then usually only as a last result when sexual selection is not available. Furthermore, the materials of life are fragile and require constant upkeep.
Humans build with elemental metals, something no other living creature has evolved to do, although there is widespread use of metallic compounds. The author considers the reasons for this, and the answer may be that the first creatures were simply too small to accommodate the necessary functions required to process metals, and by they time they were large enough to do so they had already evolved along different paths. As a general rule, we build things that are large and go fast, and while nature makes them small and slow, they are nevertheless true engines, and have passed evolution’s unforgiving test of fitness to pass along their genes. “An ordinary corn plant lifts about four quarts of water each day from the soil. Lifting is work, so a corn plant must have an engine, as must almost all terrestrial plants. The main engine is simple but strange: a direct-acting solar-powered evaporative engine.” (p. 172) While I was out looking at street signs, I paused to consider the flying, flitting, buzzing critters around my hedge. Marvels of design that are lightweight, efficient, and superbly fitted for the task of survival, this time I saw them not as simply insects, but as brilliantly evolved biological machines. As I watched the sunlight glinting off their wings, it reminded me of another illuminating quote from the book: “When it comes to stiffening flat plates with a minimum of material, nothing touches insect wings. Insects commonly invest only about 1 percent of body mass in their wings. Yet the wings move at several meters per second through the air, and many reverse their movement several hundred times each second. To get sufficient stiffness for this demanding application, they combine curvature, veins, and lengthwise pleats.” (p. 62) To ask whether nature or humans do a better job of engineering is to ask the wrong question. The best design is the one that meets the design criteria most efficiently and effectively. Sometimes that means a jet engine on a four hundred ton aircraft hurtling through the sky at a large fraction of the speed of sound, and sometimes it means a squid pulling in water and then expelling it to move, another type of jet engine. Both are superbly designed for the tasks they perform. ...more |
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| 9781632863607
| 163286360X
| 3.45
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| Feb 16, 2016
| Feb 16, 2016
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really liked it
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Henry Petroski’s 1990 The Pencil was one of the early books in a now fairly common genre, which takes ordinary objects (salt, cod, etc) and examines t
Henry Petroski’s 1990 The Pencil was one of the early books in a now fairly common genre, which takes ordinary objects (salt, cod, etc) and examines them in light of their history, physical attributes, and cultural impact. Petroski showed a deft hand making the ordinary pencil an object of interest. For instance, why are most pencils yellow? At one time yellow was considered elegant and associated with China, from which some of the best graphite came. Since then he has published sixteen additional books, some on engineering and society, and some along the lines of The Pencil. His book The Evolution of Useful Things explains how things like paperclips and forks did not just appear one day, but were the result of careful research to solve specific problems. In this book he looks back on a lifetime as a civil engineer, primarily as a professor at Duke University, and explains the technical, social, political, and financial forces that affect engineering projects. The chapter on road construction was particularly good, starting with the history of various paving methods and moving on to the options available today, primarily the choice between concrete and asphalt. Concrete is much longer lasting, and if properly applied can last for decades, but asphalt is faster and easier to apply and thus cheaper, although its lifetime maintenance costs will be approximately three times its initial cost. Petroski also explains the history and eventual standardization of lane markings, causing me to actually pay attention to them for the first time. And who knew that stoplights had such a long and complicated history? It was not until 1930 that the current order of lights, with red on top, then yellow, then green became the standard, which was a great help to the 10 per cent of male drivers who are color-blind and see both red and green as shades of gray. Even so, one Irish-American community in Syracuse, New York insisted that green should be the top color, an homage to their former homeland, and it was not until the 1960s that their stoplights followed the standard pattern. The book has a number of interesting facts, such as: - A million households had been established in the United States by 1800, and another million by 1825, a rate of one hundred a day. - In 1900, city traffic was primarily horse-drawn. In New York City at the time there were 130,000 horses, each of which produced an average of about twenty-five pounds of manure and a quart of urine daily. - Stop signs initially elicited such strong feelings of opposition that in 1922 they were ruled illegal by courts in Illinois because they were “a violation of the right of individuals to cross streets.” - According to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, traffic congestion alone costs the country $121 billion annually in lost time, which amounts to more than $800 per driver. For truckers, the cost in wasted time and diesel fuel consumption is about $27 billion annually. - In the United States, each day on average 650 water mains fail and seven billion gallons of water are lost through leaks, resulting in about 16 percent of clean drinking water being wasted. - At the beginning of interstate construction in 1956, the Bureau of Public Roads, which was overseeing the program, had projected the final cost to be $27.5 billion; after the first five years of construction the revised estimated cost was $41 billion. Some of the 50 percent increase was attributed to inflation, but an estimated 10 to 20 percent of it was blamed on graft amounting to at least $100,000 per mile of highway built. Only part of the book focuses on how engineers analyze and solve problems, the rest looks at the intersection of engineering and society. There is an instructive chapter on how the best-laid plans for replacing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after it was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake went awry. Initial estimates were that it would cost $200 million to retrofit the bridge and in excess of $1 billion to replace it. And then politics got involved, along with corruption, incompetence, and frequent changes to the designs, which “led state politicians to call for a criminal investigation of Caltrans by the California Highway Patrol. According to one report, Caltrans was under investigation for ‘knowingly accepting substandard work at taxpayer expense, and retaliating against those who sought to bring problems to light.’ ” By the time the new bridge opened in 2013 its price tag had risen to $6.4 billion, plus another $400 million to remove the old bridge. People of California, your tax dollars at work…. Sometimes the book meanders away from its premise as Petroski takes time to explain his personal experiences with things like the storm drains in front of his house or problems with repairs to his driveway. Although he tries to tie these incidents back to the larger issues discussed in the book, it doesn’t really work. Nevertheless I learned quite a bit, and in particular that only bad things happen when politicians start getting involved in engineering decisions. ...more |
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| 4.14
| 5,953
| May 08, 2018
| May 08, 2018
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really liked it
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I might not have read this book if it had been written by someone else. The history of the quest for ever greater levels of industrial precision sound
I might not have read this book if it had been written by someone else. The history of the quest for ever greater levels of industrial precision sounds interesting, but in the hands of some writers it would be a dull recitation of charts and tables. I have read two of Winchester’s other books, The Professor and the Madman and The Map that Changed the World, and I like his writing style. He was a journalist, and writes like one, knowing when to step back from math and machinery to emphasize the history and the people involved, and he never gets so deeply into the engineering details that the reader loses the thread of the narrative. An argument can be made that the first documented precision instrument was the Antikythera mechanism, dated variously to 178 or 204 BC. It is an assembly of finely made gears and cogs, some to a tolerance of one-tenth of a millimeter, and built to predict celestial phenomena. Whatever its merits as an engineering masterpiece, however, it cannot be considered a precision instrument, because modern reconstructions show it to be wildly inaccurate, up to 38 degrees out of true. For another two thousand years craftsmen would continue to make things like this: carefully and expertly, one at a time, and none of their parts interchangeable with others. The dawn of precision engineering in its modern sense has an agreed-up father and date, John Wilkinson in May of 1776. He had previously patented a process for making canons by casting them as a single, solid piece, and then boring out the tube. Previously they had been hollow-cast, which introduced a number of problems, such as the bore being out of true or having weak spots which could lead to an explosion when the cannon was fired. As Wilkinson was perfecting his process, James Watt was struggling to improve steam engines. One of the biggest problems was that the piston did not fit the cylinder very well, so a great deal of steam, and therefore power, was lost. He turned to Wilkinson, who bored a cylinder that fit Watt’s piston with a precision never seen before, leaving a gap of only one-tenth of an inch. From that moment the race was on to achieve ever greater levels of precision across all areas of industrial production. Each chapter of the book is built around a specific person or device, and as time moves forward, ever greater levels of precision are achieved. Some of these are well known, such as John Harrison’s invention of the marine chronometer, which in 1761 completed a 5000 mile sea voyage over 147 days with an error of only 1 minute 54.5 seconds. Modern consumer grade quartz clocks are only accurate to fifteen seconds a month, so over five months they might gain or lose 75 seconds, and thus the Harrison chronometer’s 115 seconds error, over two hundred sixty years ago, is still remarkably close close to modern standards. Dava Sobel’s book Longitude is an excellent recounting of Harrison and his amazing mechanical devices. Others incidents from the book are less well known, though they played important roles during their time. Sailing ships carried hundreds of pulley blocks to help manage sails and rigging, and they had previously been made one at a time by skilled craftsmen. During the Napoleonic era the Royal Navy expanded and needed one hundred thirty thousand of them every year, far outstripping the ability of the craftsmen to keep up with demand. Henry Maudslay, a mechanical genius who designed and built fine locks took on the task, and over six years created a series of machines that entirely automated the production process, producing one block a minute, which worked so well it was in use until 1965. However, the author also points out the social costs of automation; in this case over one hundred skilled craftsmen were replaced by ten unskilled laborers whose only jobs were to lubricate the machines and keep them fed with raw materials. Two very different automobiles are used to describe precision at the dawn of the twentieth century. First was the Rolls-Royce, lovingly crafted by artisans obsessively devoted to making every single part perfect. The machines were the wonders of their age, but each was a bespoke work of engineering artistry, and making parts interchangeable was not even a design consideration. If you could afford a Rolls, you could afford to have new parts hand-crafted to fit it. Henry Ford, on the other hand, built cars for the masses. He did not invent the factory assembly line, but he perfected its use. Not only did he sell over sixteen million Model Ts between 1908 and 1925, but as more and more production steps were automated he was able to lower the price almost every year, from $850 to $260 by the end of the model run. And every part on every car was designed to be interchangeable with other vehicles. The story moves on to the development of jet engines in the 1930s, and the author makes two points which I had never considered. First, a reciprocating engine has many moving parts: pistons, cams, valves, crankshaft, and many many more, hundreds in all. A turbine basically has one: the rotating shaft which compresses air between the rotor and stator blades before feeding it into the combustion chamber. Second, a piston engine’s power is constrained by the size and number of its pistons, which set an upper limit on how much air can be taken in and thus how much power is generated with each stroke, but a turbine’s intakes can be as large as needed; on a Boeing 777 engine they are over 9 feet wide. Aircraft play a large role in the next chapter as well, which focuses on the limits of our engineering abilities, using the example of Qantas Flight 32, a loaded Airbus 380 which experienced a catastrophic engine failure shortly after taking off from Singapore on November 4, 2010. With some expert piloting, and a bit of luck, the aircraft made it back with no loss of life. The post-accident investigation revealed the likely culprit: a tiny metal pipe five centimeters long and three-quarters of a centimeter in diameter which had developed a crack that burst, causing a fire inside the engine, resulting in one of the turbine blades breaking free. The part had been improperly manufactured: when it was being bored out it apparently slipped just a tiny amount in its fixture, causing one side to be machined half a millimeter thinner than the other; this caused an imbalance of stresses which led to metal fatigue, which led to the failure. The post accident investigation revealed similarly defective parts on dozens of other aircraft. The question that gets raised, then, is when do we lose human oversight of engineering precision, and have to place our trust in machines which have themselves been designed and are operated by humans who may incapable of recognizing when things go wrong? The book next discusses cameras and moves on to the quest for ever more precise ways to tell time, resulting in the development of GPS, which can be used to locate one’s position to within a few feet anywhere on the earth that satellites are visible from. The American GPS system uses thirty-one satellites, but it is no longer the only one. The EU has created its own, called Galileo; the Russians have GLONASS, and the Chinese Beidou. A company called Coros sells smartwatches that can connect simultaneously to the American, Russian, and Chinese systems, allowing wearers to find their position to within centimeters. The book moves on to computers, telling the story of the invention of the transistor and the development of the integrated circuit. The first IC was the the Intel 4004, released in November 1971 as part of a calculator for a Japanese company, and was advertised as having the same processing power as the room-sized Eniac computers of the 1940s. The processing core of the 4004 was a tiny sliver of silicon twelve millimeters wide and containing 2300 transistors spaced ten microns apart. By 1985, with the Intel 80386, the circuit spacing had shrunk to one micron and the chip had more than a million transistors. Today there are chips using 5 nanometer processes, containing billions of transistors with a density of one hundred million per square millimeter; each transistor only about one hundred atoms thick. In Washington State and Louisiana are Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories, built to detect the gravity waves which Einstein had predicted, and they have successfully done so on several occasions. The precision required to do this is mind-boggling:
And finally, the author visits a Seiko factory in Japan and waxes euphoric over the handmade Grand Seiko mechanical watches. I respect the precision and care that go into making them – each craftsman produces only two a day, but when I looked them up on the internet I didn’t think they were particularly attractive and they go for $6800 each. I’ll stick with my Apple Watch. Simon Winchester has an engaging writing style, and is never dull. The examples he uses in this book to describe ever greater advances in precision are interesting and informative, illuminating how the modern world has undergone unimaginable changes in just a few centuries. There is a lot to learn here, and a lot to think about, so I recommend this book for anyone with an interest in science and society. ...more |
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Apr 20, 2022
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Apr 26, 2022
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Oct 25, 2022
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| 0465022383
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| 3.63
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| Jun 07, 2011
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really liked it
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The other day I found myself in the produce section of my local supermarket staring intently at the pineapple in my hand and seeing its patterns for t
The other day I found myself in the produce section of my local supermarket staring intently at the pineapple in my hand and seeing its patterns for the first time. Sure enough, as Ian Stewart pointed out, the irregular hexagons fit together into interlocking helical spirals. “One family winds anti-clockwise, viewed from above, and contains 8 spirals; the other winds clockwise, and contains 13. It is also possible to see a third family of 5 spirals, winding clockwise at a shallower angle.” For all the pineapples I have eaten I never noticed what now seem like obvious patterns. It’s funny how we can look and still not see. Ian Stewart is a prolific popular science writer who generally goes a bit deeper into math and science than the usual “Look, it’s a bird” type of book. Sometimes this approach works very well for explaining complex subjects, but occasionally it wanders too deeply into the technical aspects of things, and the readers can loose the narrative thread. The book is about the growing field of mathematical biology, which Stewart says will be the new frontier of the twenty-first century. However, he takes awhile to get there. He sees mathematics as the sixth great revolution in biology, the previous five being the invention of the microscope, the Linnean classification system, the theory of evolution, the discovery of the gene, and determining the structure of DNA. Each of these gets a chapter to itself, so if you already have a passing familiarity with Van Leeuwenhoek; Linnaeus; Darwin; Mendel; and Watson and Crick there is not much new here, although to be fair Stewart tells the reader in the preface that the first third of the book is going to be primarily about the history of biology rather than mathematics. He can do a good job pulling up illuminating statistics that help the reader along, for instance mentioning that human bodies contain more than 200 different types of cells and approximately 75 trillion total cells (though he does not mention that only about half of these are human cells, the rest being bacteria and other fellow travelers, many of which we could not live without). I also like the way he defined the number of species on Earth, saying “Estimates range from 2 million to 100 million, though a figure of 5 to 10 million is probable,” and then gives an accounting of our part of the animalia branch of the tree of life: “Vertebrates account for a mere 60,000 species: 30,000 fish, 6,000 amphibians, 800 reptiles, 10,000 birds and 5,000-plus mammals. Among the mammals, about 630 species are primates, the order of animals that includes monkeys, lemurs, apes ... and humans.” There is an interesting discussion of Fermat spirals, such as those seen in sunflowers, which have one spiral of 34 seeds winding clockwise, and another of 21 going counter-clockwise. These are aligned in accord with the Golden Angle, 137.5º, defined in Wikipedia as “the smaller of the two angles created by sectioning the circumference of a circle according to the golden ratio; that is, into two arcs such that the ratio of the length of the smaller arc to the length of the larger arc is the same as the ratio of the length of the larger arc to the full circumference of the circle.” It has some amazing characteristics. “In 1979, Helmut Vogel of the Technical University of Munich considered a simple mathematical representation of the geometry of sunflower seeds, and used it to explain why the golden angle is especially suited to such arrangements. In his model, "the nth primordium is placed at an angle equal to n times 137.5°, and its distance from the centre is proportional to the square root of n.” This book uses that information to present a series of three spirals, one with an angle of 137º, one at 137.5º, and one at 138º. Incrementing or decrementing the Golden Angle by as little as half a degree causes an inefficient arrangement of seeds in sunflowers, resulting in gaps between the arms of the spirals. Only at precisely 137.5º do the seeds completely fill the available space, maximizing their number and thus the likelihood that one or more will germinate and pass on the genetic legacy of the parent plant. He also has an excellent discussion of genetically modified plants. I had never given the issue much thought, assuming it was just a modern version of the kind of selective breeding that farmers have been doing for thousands of years, but it is more problematic than that. The procedure involved is essentially a shotgun blast of new genes into the plant’s existing DNA. The problem with this is that gene interaction is complex; pieces of individual genes are located in various sections of the chromosome, and some of them are required to be close to one another to function correctly. Adding new genetic information without controlling where in the plant DNA it lands could cause trouble, which might not be immediately apparent. It sounds to me like something too important to have decisions left solely to companies focused on making a profit off patenting their work. There is a good section on cladistics, and once again Stewart showed me that it is more complicated than I had previously thought. Cladistics is a method of graphically depicting the relationship between any two organisms by tracing their paths independently back to their last common ancestor. It sounds straightforward, and in many books on evolution it is presented as a clear and accepted procedure. As in so many things, however, the devil is in the details. Stewart uses an example showing the evolutionary relationship between a leopard, a cheetah, and a house cat. One possible representation is to show that the cat branched off from the leopard after the cat/leopard branch had split from that of the cheetah. Another way to look at the data is to say that the leopard first branched off from the line leading to the cheetah, and then the cat, separately, before the cheetah evolved. It is possible to further refine the model (and in fact, the second of the above scenarios is correct), but it involves sorting through vast numbers of pair-wise comparisons requiring considerable computing power. The further back in time you go the more problematic the cladistic diagrams become, and finding the relationship between a human and, say, an iguana, would involve so many steps and so much inferential analysis that any purported clade should be seen as notional at best. And finally, the book has a good discussion of the relationships between DNA, amino acids, proteins, and genes.
Proteins are long chains of amino acids, which “fold up in a complex way under the influence of molecular forces. The basic point here is that the DNA, interpreted as amino acids, does not ‘contain the information’ that tells the protein how it should fold. Instead, the protein folds automatically, in response to the chemicals in the surrounding medium.” Advanced mathematics are providing new insights into the biological processes which shape life, but Stewart is careful to set the boundaries of what is possible today. There is still much to learn and there will be many dead-ends ahead. After all, “Neither relativity nor quantum mechanics captures the universe precisely, even though these are the two most successful physical theories ever. It is pointless to expect a model of a biological system to do better.” I enjoyed the book, although I have to admit that the chapter on Spots and Stripes required me to focus closely on the arguments and re-read some sections. And I was surprised to learn that Alan Turing, the genius who helped break the German Enigma encryption system during the Second World War, also created mathematical models to try to explain the spots, stripes, and dappled patterns exhibited by animals. If your interest in life sciences skews toward math and physics, but you don’t want to wrestle with integrals and differential equations, Ian Stewart’s books offer good introductions, and he is adept at picking the examples he uses to make his points. I enjoyed this book and am going to put several others by him on my reading list. ...more |
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Apr 14, 2022
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Oct 25, 2022
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| 0393348849
| 9780393348842
| 0393348849
| 3.50
| 685
| Feb 01, 2013
| May 19, 2014
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liked it
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I read Hugh Aldersey-Williams’s Periodic Tales, and liked it, so when I returned it to the library I checked to see if they had anything else by him,
I read Hugh Aldersey-Williams’s Periodic Tales, and liked it, so when I returned it to the library I checked to see if they had anything else by him, and found this book. Aldersey-Williams trained as a chemist, so his book on the elements was informed by personal experiences and professional knowledge. The only class he seems to have taken in biology was in middle school, so whatever understanding he has of this subject comes from research and interviews with experts. There is nothing wrong with writing a book using this approach, but it needs to have a tight focus or it will wander off into a series of mostly unrelated anecdotes. That is the case with this book: some of the researched biological facts are interesting and informative, but it is primarily a cultural history of the body, so the science bits are interspersed among stories from history, biography, and art, with the result that the book feels meandering. I highlighted a number of passages that I considered interesting, which I have included below. However, having read some of the other reviews, by people with a better grasp of biology than I will ever have, now I’m not sure how much faith to put in them. Most of them are of course true, but some likely fall into the ‘yes-but’ category, where additional information is needed to put them into their proper context. - A bone can typically resist a load of a tonne and a half per square centimetre before it breaks. The bones of a child’s arm are are easily strong enough to support the weight of a family car, for example. (p. 56) - To a first approximation, the body is simply an assemblage of straight, rigid beams hinged in various ways at the ends to the next such beam to make up an articulated whole. (p. 57) - A frequent cause of rib fractures is a severe coughing fit when the pressure comes from inside the ribcage. (p. 49) - Blood entering the left chamber of the heart is warmer because, we we now know, it has been replenished with oxygen whose reaction with haemoglobin releases heat. (p. 72) - One body part more than any other shows how the human anatomy is still not fully mapped even now. The clitoris seems to have been known, lost, found, lost again and found once more during the course of 2,000 years of medical history. (p. 80) - Abundant hair takes the form of shagginess in men, covering large areas of skin, and sinuous length in women. When hidden, women’s hair is equated with chastity. Putting the hair up indicates eligibility for marriage. Long, flowing hair is an indication of wantonness – our guilty culture’s imaginative extrapolation from nature’s gift of hair at puberty. (p. 94) - In circumstances where sexual selection couldn’t be less relevant, beauty still has the power to sway our judgement. One typically startling discovery is that attractive persons are more likely to be acquitted at trial. (p. 100) - what are we to make of the fact that our body’s cells are completely renewed over a period of seven years or so, so that we are materially not the same person at all? (p. 107) - All eyes contain a certain amount of one pigment, melanin….It is the variation in the levels of this pigment, together with the light-interference effect, that gives rise to the entire range of eye colours that we cherish. With progressively less melanin present, the eye can appear dark or light brown, hazle, green, grey or blue. (p. 170) - researchers at the University of Copenhagen discovered a mutation of a particular gene that regulates a protein needed to produce melanin. Babies are often blue-eyed at first, even when born to brown-eyed parents, because this protein is yet to be released to the full extent. According to Hans Eiberg, who led the research, his genetic discovery suggests that all blue-eyed individuals alive today can trace their ancestry to one original Ol’ Blue Eyes, who was the first to undergo this mutation, between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. (p. 171) - The best sight gag in the entire history of art must be the fig leaf. How large it is! And how very suggestive in its shape! How it engrosses what it purports to hide. How many other plant leaves might have done the job with less blatancy. And yet the fig leaf it assuredly is that artists have elected to use when asked to preserve the public decency. The Blble gives them their cover story: in Genesis, when Adam and Even realized their nakedness, ‘they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.’ But aprons are garments that surely provide rather more coverage that the single, strategically positioned leaf of artistic convention, with its three major lobes simultaneously screen and outlining the penis and testicles behind, and two further vestigial lobes appearing so neatly to represent curls of pubic hair. (p. 203) - A human being radiates power at a rate of 100 watts when resting, rising to 300 watts when doing exercise, which is a power conversion unit area roughly equal to a rooftop photovoltaic solar panel, and enough that architects must take it into account when designing spaces that will be crowded with people. (p. 227) ...more |
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| 0008329761
| 9780008329761
| 0008329761
| 4.20
| 5,174
| 2021
| Jan 21, 2021
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really liked it
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For most of this book the author is cautiously hopeful that the destruction caused by human and natural disasters is remediable, that when left alone
For most of this book the author is cautiously hopeful that the destruction caused by human and natural disasters is remediable, that when left alone nature can fix what has been broken: barren soil is recolonized by plants and animals, forests regenerate, toxins break down; life finds a way. And then, in the last chapter, the reader is brought up short with the message the world may indeed heal itself, but it might take the the self-extermination of mankind to make it happen, a path we are already far along on. And if it happens we will take a hell of a lot of other species with us when we go. There is a sad irony in many of the chapters of this book, that only after we have screwed things up so badly that the land or water becomes useless (to us), then can Mother Nature get started restoring things. It reminded me of the situation report from the Vietnam war, “We had to destroy the village to save it.” The author has a good eye for regeneration, identifying the plant and animal species that make the first tentative steps toward reclamation, increasing the viability of the soil and laying the groundwork for later arrivals to help establish a robust ecology. Although she does not call it homeostasis, evolutionary change, climate conditions, and competing species tend to maintain equilibrium as the landscape is renewed. One chapter deals with effects of introduced plants in Africa, breaking out of their initial planting sites to run wild, outcompeting local species and destroying the balance of the forests. However, over time they start to be tamed by the local environment: they spread more slowly, and parasites and diseases begin to catch up to them. Eventually they melt into their environment as just another part of the whole. It made me think about Killer Bees; as they were making their way north toward the United States there were endless apocalyptic stories about how they were going to take over, destroying the honeybees and indiscriminately killing people and pets. After all that, now that have arrived they have become a kind of low level chronic condition, making the news only when an unfortunate incident results in someone being attacked. The author visited Chernobyl to examine the long term effects of the disaster, and provides some helpful statistics to put things into perspective: “Chernobyl is the most contaminated site of all. Though the explosion at its fourth reactor had only a fraction of the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the nuclear fallout it released is thought to have been 400 times greater, thanks to the huge quantity of nuclear fuel housed within the damaged reactor.” (p. 96) There is still a large exclusion zone around the site, but much of the radiation has faded and plants and animals have rebounded sharply in this nuclear wildlife preserve. Dangers remain to plants and people, but the area is not a science fiction wasteland. “In most of the zone, radiation has now declined to levels similar to what one might experience in an aircraft, due to cosmic rays, or during a medical diagnostic scan. Today, most concern centres around the radionuclides caesium-137 and strontium-90, both of which have a half-life of around thirty years, and are readily taken up by plants, thus making their way through the food chain.” (p. 102) For a truly nightmarish place to consider, there is the Place à Gaz, deep in the Zone Rouge, an area around Verdun that was so stricken with unexploded ordnance during World War I that entry is permanently forbidden. There, in 1928, 200,000 chemical weapons, mustard gas, phosgene, and the rest of that devil’s brew, were buried and then set alight. Today, decades later, behind razor-wire fences, a terrible scar still remains, a true dead zone. In 2007 Germans scientists examined the soil. “In places, they discovered 17 per cent of the soil’s weight was made up of arsenic. And plenty more of what biologist call heavy metals: up to 13 per cent zinc, 2.6 per cent lead.” (p. 189) And yet, even here, in this patch of hell on earth, nature is working to reclaim the tortured soil. The area is slowly getting smaller, and some hardy plants are starting to return. Life finds a way. Some parts of the book deal with abandoned land, and others with abandoned people. There are chapters on Detroit, Michigan, and Paterson, New Jersey, once vibrant industrial centers that have fallen into decay and abandonment. Detroit is caught in a vicious negative feedback loop: people leave, so there are fewer tax dollars to provide services for those who remain, so more people leave, further reducing services. On the internet there are some astonishing pictures of then-and-now Detroit, streets in the 1940s and 50s that were shoulder to shoulder with houses and stores, and which are now completely empty of human habitation and have returned to woods and meadows. Paterson lives in the shadow of New York City, with all the ruination and depopulation of Detroit, and additionally suffers from decades of toxic pollution to its waterways. Even so, people live in its devastated areas, castaways, criminals, and hard core drug users, ruined lives in ruined buildings. In some places nature moves in as soon as humans move out, but in others what we leave behind will poison the air, earth, and water far, far into the future. An example is Arthur Kill in Staten Island, where for decades dioxins were made in vast quantities, sometimes forming heaps in the bay that had to be raked down at low tide. Dioxins are stable chemicals, breaking down so slowly they are considered permanent. And they are deadly, “There is no truly ‘safe’ level of dioxin contamination; it’s one of the most toxic substances known to man. It is 170,000 times more deadly than cyanide. The US Environmental Protection Agency considers water with dioxin levels of 31 parts per quadrillion (this is, 31 in 1,000,000,000,000,000) is too contaminated to drink.” (p. 164-165) Even here a few remarkable species of plants and fish have started to adapt, but these are dead zones for the vast majority of life. Natural disasters also have their place in this book. Long ago, when I was in the Navy, my ship visited Montserrat, a British possession in the Caribbean. I remember the capital, Plymouth, as a vibrant, colorful town which also had an American medical school, whose students were happy to show us around in return for a hot shower on the ship. A few years later a volcano, long thought dormant, exploded, burying Plymouth and the surrounding areas. When the author visited she found a strange place where occasional buildings poked out of the ground, and then realized, “We are standing 40 feet above what was ground level. The isolated buildings ahead are, in fact, the top floors of what were four- and five-storey buildings.” (p. 281) The book ends with a visit to the dying Salton Sea in southern California, and the people who live around it, whose lives are as dead-end as the sea itself. This is a place where people go when they have nowhere left to go, or when they want turn on, drop out, and vanish. A community exists even in this blighted place, hardy souls living a kind of post-apocalyptic existence, creating shelter from the detritus of the civilization that once thrived around them. The author recognizes that this could be the future of whatever remains of humankind if we push ourselves and our environment over the edge. There are hopeful passages in this book, and despairing ones. It is heartening to see nature making a comeback even in the most devastated areas, and disheartening to think that they are devastated because of us, because of what we did in the name of progress. That progress may, in the end, be the death of humankind, but nature will go on with our without us. ...more |
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Dec 30, 2021
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Jan 02, 2022
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Sep 13, 2022
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| 0670918113
| 9780670918119
| 0670918113
| 3.72
| 4,663
| Jan 01, 2011
| Feb 03, 2011
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really liked it
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Was Napoleon murdered by arsenic poisoning on St. Helena? Probably not, though a significant amount of it was later found in his body – arsenic was wi
Was Napoleon murdered by arsenic poisoning on St. Helena? Probably not, though a significant amount of it was later found in his body – arsenic was widely used during the nineteenth century to make a vivid green color, and was frequently found in common household items such as wallpaper. Was there a time when aluminum was more precious than gold, and why do Europeans add an extra ‘I’ to make it ‘aluminium’? The initial extraction required enormously expensive raw materials, but when a process was developed using electrolysis its price, as well as its haute couture appeal, dropped sharply. As for that extra syllable, the word was spelled various ways by the early users, but ‘ium’ is a frequent word ending for elements, so it became the accepted spelling in some places. This book combines non-technical popular science writing with history and culture to examine some of the elements that make up the periodic table. Seven metals have been known since ancient times: gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron, and mercury, since they can be found either in their pure forms or in compounds that were easily extracted by early tools. The Greek philosopher Empedocles, around 330 BCE, proposed the idea that all matter was made up of tiny, indivisible particles, but his was only one of a number of theories, and it was Plato’s division of all things into air, earth, fire, and water which caught on and was the dominant position for almost two thousand years. Eventually, during the golden age of alchemy, additional elements were discovered, such as antimony, zinc, bismuth, and antimony, but it took centuries before they were recognized as true elements. Once additional elements began to be discovered, many scientists worked on finding a way to order them in a proper sequence. Dmitri Mendeleev’s moment of genius was to arrange the known elements by their weight (what we would now call the atomic number, or the number of protons in the nucleus) and the properties they had in common, and realize that some must be missing, so he left gaps in his table as placeholders for future discoveries. His idea was not universally accepted, but eventually new elements were discovered that slotted perfectly into the places where he had predicted they would appear. His first periodic table was rotated ninety degrees from the one we are familiar with, so that our rows and columns were reversed, and when the first noble gases were discovered he found it hard to accept that an entire new section would need to be added to the table. The process of finding new elements developed into a kind of a race, with London and Paris as the leading experimental centers, but with Sweden also making significant discoveries. No less than eight elements were discovered from a single mine near Stockholm, four of them given variants of Ytterby, the name of the town in which the mine was located: yttrium (Y), ytterbium (Yb), erbium (Er), and terbium (Tb). The other four were scandium (SC), named for Scandinavia; holim (Ho), for Stockholm; thulium for Thule, the ancient name for the vast undiscovered North (think Ultima Thule from Latin), and gadolinium (Gd), named after the chemist Johan Gadolin. Along the way the author recounts his own childhood fascination with the elements, as he found, bought, or disassembled things to obtain raw materials, leading to his studying chemistry in college. He also enlisted friends and colleagues to attempt to recreate some of the early extraction processes which lead to the discovery of new elements, concluding that some of those alchemists were in fact outstanding experimental chemists. He also visited many of the sites where the discoveries were made and uses those locations to tell the reader about the lives and times of the people who added new elements to the periodic table. Along the way we learn about the history and commercial usefulness of things like plutonium, lead, iodine, tin, and cadmium. The author tried unsuccessfully to obtain a sample of plutonium and relates an amusing story where he found something called homeopathic plutonium, but on looking into it realized that, like most homeopathic ‘treatments,’ it actually contains none of the actual ingredient. Instead, homeopathy is based on the premise that certain molecules retain the ‘memory’ of their having once been associated with something else, and if that sounds ridiculous,well, it is. In his 2013 book The Unpersuadables, Will Storr includes a discussion of homeopathic remedies:
Periodic Tales is interesting, and I learned a number of things about the elements around us. I even went outside one evening to stand under a street light to observe its orange sodium-vapor light, emitted at a wavelength of 589 nm. I have walked under countless street lights of course, but this was the first time I actually thought about them and understood why they have replaced the earlier white lights. It was moments like that which made this book worth reading, and after finishing it I checked out another Aldersey-Williams’s books, Anatomies, which also sounds interesting. ...more |
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Feb 25, 2022
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Mar 03, 2022
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Sep 13, 2022
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| 0316549622
| 9780316549622
| 0316549622
| 4.00
| 2,411
| Oct 01, 2015
| Jun 27, 2017
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really liked it
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Who are you? What makes you tick? What are the historical, biological, social, and educational factors that made you you? It is of course a blend of n
Who are you? What makes you tick? What are the historical, biological, social, and educational factors that made you you? It is of course a blend of nature and nurture, but this book comes down firmly on the side of nature, “The conclusion is always the same: a significant portion of the variance – between 20 and 60 per cent – in temperament is explained by the genetic package we are born with.” (p. 182) Like Gaul, this book is divided into three parts. The first deals with developmental psychology, and looks at experiments that try to understand the reasoning skills of newborns and young children. Since they cannot speak, the tots are evaluated on things like what they focus their attention on, and even, seriously, how hard they suck on their pacifier (which, mysteriously, is called a ‘dummy’ in England and in this book as well. I was very confused the first few times I saw the word.) It all sounds rather bizarre, but apparently these experiments have been replicated sufficiently that they are accepted by scientists who study these things. Also in part one is an interesting discussion of language acquisition in young children. In another context I remember reading about how Japanese speakers have trouble distinguishing between ‘l’ and ‘r’ sounds, which seems odd to English speakers since they are such distinctly different sounds – to us. Now say the words “that thing” and note where your tongue is for each word; it is between the teeth for ‘that’ and above them on the alveolar ridge for ‘thing.’ To us they are both simply ‘th’ sounds, but in some languages, like Ancient Greek and Old English, speakers’ brains processed them as being distinct enough that they were given separate letters in their alphabets. Getting back to this book the author remarks that “in Spanish there are five vowel sounds, while in French, depending on the dialect, there are up to seventeen (including four nasal vowel sounds).” (p. 23) Dutch, meanwhile, has forty. The second part of the book deals with cognitive psychology, and covers a wide range of interesting topics, such as the core functions of consciousness, dreaming, and the effects of drug use on our perception of reality. There is an interesting discussion on decision making, which can be summarized as, “When we make a decision by carefully thinking over a small number of elements, we choose better if we take our time. Yet when the problem is complex, in general we make better choices by following our intuition than if we stew over it.” (p. 60) The third section could be called practical neuroscience, and in it the author attempts to apply what has been learned about how to solve real-world problems, such as designing improved educational curricula. The book discusses the idea of innate talent in a way I had never considered, and it is worth thinking about. I had always assumed that talent is a real thing, that for certain abilities some people have a lot of it, and some have none at all, but this book takes the position that talent is simply doing the same thing over and over until you get good at it. Psychologists William Chase and Herbert Simon examined chess grandmasters, and found that they only achieved acclaim after they had put in about 10,000 hours of effort. The reasoning goes like this: parents convince themselves that their little darling has a special talent for something, such as tennis. Their praise motivates the child to practice, and she gets better and better, resulting in more praise and more practice, and even better results, and the feedback loops keeps the improvements going. What seems like the maturing of an innate talent is actually just practice, practice, practice. Finally, the book looks at the malleability of the brain, which does not just respond to stimuli, it changes as a result of them. It really does make a difference when babies are held and stroked and played with, because it builds new neural connections that can then be leveraged for even more complex interactions. Our experiences change our brains, as do our education, beliefs, and social interactions. I once heard someone say, “What are we but the sum of our memories and past experiences?,” and I thought about that as I read through this book. This neuroplasticity, furthermore, is not limited to early childhood. The choices you make as an adult can change your brain and enhance your cognitive skills, so turn off the TV and read a book, dammit, and then write a review. You’ll be better for it. ...more |
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Nov 11, 2021
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Nov 18, 2021
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Jul 05, 2022
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| B0DLT7CZZH
| unknown
| 3.76
| 111
| 2003
| 2003
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really liked it
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Okay, class, settle down, it’s time for a refresher in human genetics. The basis for inheritability is DNA – Deoxyribonucleic acid. The fact that all
Okay, class, settle down, it’s time for a refresher in human genetics. The basis for inheritability is DNA – Deoxyribonucleic acid. The fact that all living things use DNA to pass along their genes is Exhibit A for evolution, showing the unbroken chain of life that stretches back to the first self-replicating cells, between 3.8 and 4 billion years ago. DNA forms the famous double helix: think of a ladder twisted around its long axis, so that it spirals up and up. From our father we get one of the side rails (made of phosphates and sugars), and one-half of each nucleotide that forms the rungs of the ladder. From our mother we get the other side rail and the other half of the rung. The rungs are made up of cytosine, guanine, adenine, or thymine. The human genome consists of approximately 4.2 billion nucleotides, a small percentage of which code for the 23,000 or so genes that we are made of. About 99% of nucleotides do not code for proteins, and were once called “junk DNA.” Some of it is true junk, such as old and nonfunctional copies of genes; however, as more is known about the genome it appears that some of these areas play important roles in our lives. Nessa Carey has written a book called Junk DNA that explains the latest science on this. When the genome was being sequenced around 2000, most experts were expecting there to be between 60,000 and 150,000 genes, and were shocked that the number was only about 23,000, not much more than cats or dogs. The tiny water flea Daphnia has 31,000, as does the tomato plant. Genes code for proteins, and many of ours can fold into multiple three dimensional shapes, so we can make 100,000 proteins from only 23,000 genes. The protein sequences are grouped into twenty-three chromosomes, and again, we get one set from each of our parents. There is no logical sequence to the genes in each chromosome; they are where they are simply because of our long evolutionary history, keeping whatever improved survival chances no matter where it appeared in the genome. The exception is the last chromosome, number 23, which is special enough to have names for its maternal and paternal contributions: X and Y. Everyone gets an X from their mother, and either an X or a Y from their father. If the resulting child is XX she is female, and if XY he is male. The reason you always get an X from your mother is, of course, that she only has X’s to give. Note that this also means that every male inherits a full set of female sex genes via his mother’s X, and can pass them along if he fathers a girl; this is how she could inherit traits from her paternal grandmother, even though the intermediate generation – her father – is male. X is a full size chromosome, with around 1600 genes, many of which have nothing to do with sex. Y, however, is just a stub, with its active genes mostly coding for male sexuality. “[M]ost of the Y chromosome is a wasteland, full of junk fragments of damaged genes interspersed with a few genes that have managed to cling on through the bad times.” (p. 60) The reason it has shrunk so much is that its genes have only a 50% chance of being passed down each generation, so the ones that were not sex related gradually moved to another chromosome via random mutations or died out altogether. The fact that X has many non-sex genes on it, and men have only one copy, can spell big, often fatal, trouble. We all have bad DNA in our genome, quite a lot of it in fact, as might be expected when 4.2 billion nucleotides need to be copied with every cell division. Fortunately, getting the same genes from each parent acts as a failsafe: where you got bad DNA from your mother, chances are you got a good batch from your father, and vice versa, so you are healthy. This also shows why incest is very bad: the more closely two people are related, the greater the likelihood that they will have bad stretches of DNA in the same places, and will pass them along to their children. Since males get only one X, if there is bad DNA on it they have no fallback from their father’s side. Several notable diseases are a direct result of this, such as hemophilia, which ran like a red thread through the royal families of Europe. Queen Victoria is thought to have been a carrier, meaning that, as a female, she inherited two X’s, one of which was defective. Since she had one good copy, she herself was healthy but each of her children had a 50% chance of getting the bad gene. If a male child got the bad copy he would have the disease. If the child was female, however, she would probably be healthy but could pass the bad gene on to the next generation, continuing the cycle. Female hemophilia is possible, but very rare compared to its incidence in males, since it requires the child to get the bad gene from both parents. Another terrifying disease is muscular dystrophy: Bend your arm at the elbow and the muscle fibers of your biceps contract and slide over one another to pull on the tendon attached to the bone. But any time one thing slides over another there is friction, and friction can destroy muscle tissue just as it can destroy your car’s engine. Healthy people have a microscopic layer of fat and oil over the surface of their muscles, providing the necessary protection, which is held in place by tiny pins just a few millionths of an inch long. The gene to make those pins is on the X chromosome, and you can see where this is going. Without the ability to make those pins the lubricating layer slides off, and muscles are damaged over time, usually starting with the large ones in the legs, and then progressively affecting others. Few people with this disease survive beyond their early twenties. This book will take you on a journey into the strange life of X, and its effects on both women and men. It starts with a discussion of what triggers maleness or femaleness. For a long time, going back at least to the days of Aristotle, it was believed (by men, mostly), that maleness was an active characteristic, and femaleness a passive on. In other words, if you couldn’t become a man, too bad, I guess you have to be a woman. Not surprisingly, modern genetics paints a much more complex picture, but it appears that a gene on the Y chromosome, called Sry, plays a key role in starting a cascading sequence of actions that lead, one after another, to the development of male sexual traits. There is also an interesting discussion about how women’s bodies deal with having double X chromosomes. Since the 1930s researchers have wondered why this does not cause problems, because after all, “many of the most common genetic diseases of the human race occur because babies inherit extra chromosomes, or even just extra fragments of chromosomes. For example with an extra chromosome 21 have Down syndrome, and inheritance of extra copies of most other chromosomes is usually fatal long before birth.” (p. 135) The answer, quite remarkably is that
One consequence of this is that identical twin girls are less identical than boys, who have only one X, which both of them use in the same way. Despite its title, this book does not attempt to titillate the reader. There are a few moments, that usually begin with something like, “that reminds me of something interesting,” but there is nothing here that would make anyone roll their eyes or shake their head. It is written for a general audience and requires no special knowledge of science or biology. This is a good introduction to the science of sex genetics, and has plenty of moments where I found myself saying, “Hmm, that’s interesting….” ...more |
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Aug 06, 2021
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Aug 09, 2021
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Jun 07, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1472914090
| 9781472914095
| 1472914090
| 3.74
| 189
| Oct 2016
| Jan 31, 2017
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really liked it
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Okay, yes, this book has the word furry in its title; stop your snickering. It is about applied physics in the animal kingdom. Critters large and smal
Okay, yes, this book has the word furry in its title; stop your snickering. It is about applied physics in the animal kingdom. Critters large and small make use of their senses in amazingly complex ways, the end results of evolution’s continual adjustments to maximize the animals’ ability to exploit their environment. Just as interesting are the stories of the scientists who painstakingly examined those behaviors to figure out what was going on. The book is divided into six chapters: heat, forces, fluids, sound, electricity and magnetism, and light, and each chapter looks at three or four different species to see what they can tell us. There is no math involved, and the closest we come to schoolroom physics is F=ma, so this is definitely a popular science book. The writing style is light and breezy, sometimes a bit too much so. Why do editors of these kinds of books insist on inserting a steady stream of jokes and puns into the text? It insults the readers’ intelligence to assume that their attention can only be held if there is a joke every three or four pages. Some of the animal activities described are well enough known to have made it onto the science section of standard news websites. For example, how some garter snakes pretend to be females in order to get males to rub against them and warm them up when they emerge from their winter burrows. There are also explanations of how bees use the sun in their dances to show the direction and distance of food sources, and how ants use it to unerringly return to the nest even after wandering around apparently aimlessly. Those kinds of stories are fairly well known, but the average website will explain things in one or two paragraphs, and the value of this book is that it takes a deeper look at what is going one, including the early explanatory hypotheses, and the often ingenious experiments that were used to settle the questions. There is also acknowledgment that our understanding of many of these phenomena is still quite limited, and that observation and experiment can only go so far in making sense of how the animals interpret and integrate these abilities into their lives. The novelty value alone of some of these stories makes them worth reading. Dogs and cats lap up water very differently, but it took careful experimentation and high speed cameras to figure out how and why. Mosquitoes biting their victims pump out a droplet of blood from their backsides to thermoregulate so that they do not overheat from the warmth of the body they are attacking. Fire beetles have a sophisticated thermal detection system that can discriminate between actual fires and false positives, and can help them home in on heat sources dozens of miles away, something humans can only do by using refrigerated infrared detection devices. Mantis shrimp use their club-claws to smash the shells of their prey, but they also use cavitation, the collapse of a bubble field, for an even more powerful one-two punch. The description in the book led me to look for videos on the internet, and those little buggers are definitely not to be messed with. If it can crack a crab shell in a single punch, it can certainly break a human’s bones if they get too close. There are pond skaters and seahorses, and a very good discussion of how bees' wings create vortices to give them additional lift. Sorry, Christian fundamentalists who believe bee flight somehow violates the laws of aerodynamics, and they only fly because angels push on their butts or something. The chapter on light has a very good discussion of why giant squid have enormous eyes, the size of dinner plates, even though they live in the virtually lightless depths of the ocean. The reason is because sperm whales, their main predator, create very faint bioluminescence trails as they swim through the depths, and sensitive eyes can give the squid time to react and evade. I enjoyed this book. Even with those frequent jokes, when it comes to describing the science the authors avoid the gee-whiz approach, and let the scientists and their experiments speak for themselves. This is the kind of book I would give to a young person trying to decide what they want to study in college; it just might sway some of them toward careers in science. ...more |
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Jul 2021
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Jul 05, 2021
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Feb 22, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1615196498
| 9781615196494
| 1615196498
| 4.25
| 65
| unknown
| Apr 28, 2020
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really liked it
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I rather suspect that this book was written for the benefit of young adult readers, but I enjoyed it and learned a few things. It looks at insects par
I rather suspect that this book was written for the benefit of young adult readers, but I enjoyed it and learned a few things. It looks at insects part by part and function by function, so there are sections for wings and antennae, reproduction, metamorphosis, instar, and others. To keep the reader from having to guess at what is being described, the book is also well illustrated, with both pictures and detailed line drawings, such as the mouthparts of an insect: labrum, mandibles, maxillae, hypopharynx, labia. Insects evolved from arthropods about 350 million years ago (MYA) and are the only winged invertebrates that have ever lived. About 300 MYA the atmospheric oxygen level rose to about 30 percent, almost twice what it is today. Insects don’t have lungs, and breathe through pores in their skin, so more oxygen meant they could absorb more and grow large, very large. Think of dragonflies the size of seagulls and centipedes over two meters long. Eventually, and fortunately, oxygen levels dropped and insect size decreased in time for the first dinosaurs to evolve about 240 MYA. The book includes in a number of interesting facts. For instance: - The United States, with its huge land area, has about 91,000 described insect species, some 10 percent of the total...The UK has some 24,000 described species, while Australian has about 75,000 named species and probably at least 100,000 that are yet to be described. (p. 41) - The cells that make up animal bodies are, on average, the same size, regardless of the actual size of the whole animal. Each gram of animal tissue contains about 1 billion cells, so a honey bee weighing one tenth of a gram has some 100 million cells in its body. (p. 286) - All insects begin their lives as a single fertilized cell, so the number of cell divisions that they go through during their lives is astronomical. The rate of division in the earliest life of an embryo is extremely rapid – in fruit fly embryos, one cell has become 6,000 within about three hours of fertilization.” (p. 292) - The heaviest insect is the Little Barrier Island Giant Weta, which can weigh 2½ ounces. The longest is the extremely spindly stick insect Phryganistria chinensis, which can reach more than 24 inches length. The Hercules Beetle is the longest-bodied beetle at up to 6 2/3 inches, more than half of that length made up of its enormously long thoracic 'horn' The smallest insects are male wasps of the family Mymaridae, which can be just 0.14mm long.” (p. 324) - There are somewhere between 10 trillion and 10,000 trillion ants alive on Earth today, making them the most abundant insect group in terms of numbers of individuals. Their total biomass is about the same as Earth’s human biomass.” (p. 327) I’ve never considered myself a bug guy, but there is some really interesting information here. I picked up the book in part because I had read that pill bugs (aka: rolly pollys) are in fact not insects at all but the only existing terrestrial arthropods, gill-breathing distant relatives of shrimp and crayfish, with an evolutionary pedigree stretching back hundreds of millions of years. Considering that modern Homo sapiens evolved only about 300,000 years ago, those little bugs scurrying around under my garden mulch are worthy of some passing respect. Anyway, I enjoyed this book and intend to look for another by the same author: How Birds Work. I expect to be similarly entertained and informed. ...more |
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Mar 11, 2021
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Mar 13, 2021
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Feb 22, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1468317024
| 9781468317022
| 1468317024
| 4.25
| 1,040
| Jul 05, 2018
| Mar 26, 2019
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really liked it
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This book was not on my reading list. I installed a new e-reader app, Bluefire, to replace the wretched and unstable Adobe Digital Editions for readin
This book was not on my reading list. I installed a new e-reader app, Bluefire, to replace the wretched and unstable Adobe Digital Editions for reading books in the epub format, and needed something to test it. I browsed through my library’s selections and saw Elemental, downloading it sight unseen. Fortunately, Bluefire works fine, and the book turned out to be worth my time. I got off to a bit of a shaky start with it. First, it is very short: even with appendices it is only about 130 pages long. It also seems to have been written for a target audience of young adults, and sometimes borders on the silly. For instance, the author’s description of compounds is, “It works a bit like a singles’ bar. Each person is unhappy on their own so they link up with others to form stable pairings. At the end of the evening, most individuals have formed compounds leading to greater stability all around. Only a handful of elements like gold, which doesn’t mind being single, remain in their native state.” (p. 10) But okay, I’m not too proud to read a kid’s book if there are things I can learn from it, and I learned a number of interesting facts from this one. Once I adjusted to his writing style, I started to enjoy the author’s ability to describe the physical world with memorable images, such as:
This book would be a good choice as a gift for a young person who shows an interest in science, but it is also a nice, quick read for anyone looking for entertaining descriptions of some of the wonders and mysteries of the world. ...more |
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Feb 02, 2021
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Mar 03, 2021
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Dec 07, 2021
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| 160598499X
| 9781605984995
| 160598499X
| 4.15
| 396
| Mar 06, 2014
| Mar 06, 2014
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really liked it
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When I picked this book up I did not realize that it was by the author of Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean Worl
When I picked this book up I did not realize that it was by the author of Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath our Feet, which I had read and liked. Dr. Martin is an ichnologist, a specialty that I had never heard of before I read that book, which deals with trace evidence that creatures leave behind, such as tracks, burrows, and nests, but also footprints, toothmarks, stomach contents, feces, and anything else that we can use to understand the biology, lives, and behavior of ancient creatures. We are all conditioned to think of dinosaurs through their bones, but there is a lot that trace fossils can add to that picture. Burrowing, for instance, seems pretty boring – just a hole in the ground – but it turns out to be a key to understanding which species survived and which did not in the great die-offs, “burrowing is a behavior present in every major group of vertebrates that made it past the mass extinction: birds, mammals, crocodilians, turtles, lizards, and amphibians.” (p. 144) The shelter of burrows may have provided the thin margin of safety that saw some species survive when so many others did not. In Marcia Bjornerud’s Reading the Rocks she writes that “In both the end-Permian and end-Cretaceous apocalypses, no animals larger than cats made it through the doorway into the next era.” Dr. Martin also punctured a long-standing misperception of mine. I knew that oil did not come from dinosaurs, since the Carboniferous era was from 395-299 milllion years ago, and the first dinosaurs evolved around 240 MYA, in the aftermath of the Permian extinction event. However, something I probably read as a child that had stayed with me was that oil formed from buried and compressed forests. Alas, not so, “It turns out that nearly all petroleum is from algae, most of which were deposited and buried in marine environments; no dinosaurs contributed their bodies to the original organic matter, and they had no role in helping to bury it, let along [sic] mature the organic compounds sufficiently that these later became oil and gas deposits.” (p. 354) Ichnology can be applied to any biological traces, and in his first book the author takes readers all the way back to the fossilized burrows which are the only remaining indicators of some of the earliest animals. As it applies to dinosaurs, ichnology is like a forensic analysis of a crime scene: what evidence exists, and what can you deduce from it? Footprints can tell not only how they creatures moved, but also how they hunted, how fast they ran, and whether they were solitary or lived in herds. Nests show that not only did some dinosaurs use vast nesting grounds, but also exhibited parental care of their offspring. Coprolites, fossilized dinosaur dung, are apparently quite common, and I remember once seeing some pea-size examples for sale in a shop at my local mall. Examination of coprolites can reveal a great deal about about what dinosaurs ate and some things about the environment in which they lived. There are also gastroliths, stones which some species swallowed to help break down and digest food, a trait which exists to this day in some reptiles, birds, and even mammals such seals and sea lions. Even the absence of gastroliths among the bones of a dinosaur skeleton can tell a trained observer something about the creature’s biology. Many trace fossils are faint and weathered away, and in some cases can be hard to distinguish from naturally occurring geological forces. Creationists love to trumpet the discovery of supposed human footprints alongside those of dinosaurs, but in every case where they have been examined by trained professionals, they have been found to be cases of mistaken identification, if not outright fraud. One thing I noted in his previous book is that Dr. Marin likes to lighten up his discussion with jokes and humorous asides, and I am sure he is a very popular professor at Emory University, where he teaches. Sometimes I found his style a little distracting, but it is also a reminder that even professionals have their own quirks and moods. In discussing one particular potential, but disputed, discovery, he writes, “Paleontologists who do such research could be assured of making a big splash with it, while also going against the flow of others’ prejudices. Afterwards, they will be flushed with success, and their colleagues pissed off.” (p. 263) So, I liked this book. It expanded my understanding of paleontology, and Dr. Martin is a confident, capable guide. So many books about dinosaurs are written either for kids or for professionals working in the field, so it is nice to find a genial introduction written for the general reader. ...more |
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Feb 05, 2021
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Feb 09, 2021
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Nov 03, 2021
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![Essentials of Geology [with GeologyNOW]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356450260l/819288._SX50_.jpg)
| 049501365X
| 9780495013655
| 049501365X
| 4.00
| 2
| Jan 1995
| Mar 08, 2005
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really liked it
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Sometimes, our reading interests take us down unexpected paths. My interest in geology and paleontology began after I moved to California and started
Sometimes, our reading interests take us down unexpected paths. My interest in geology and paleontology began after I moved to California and started taking trips to some of the spectacular sites out West. As I hiked through ancient valleys and across mountain ridges I knew the rocks held stories, but didn’t know how to read them, and sometimes I found fossils that showed other worlds lost to deep time. As a result, I sometimes pick up books to expand my amateur knowledge. Essentials of Geology is a college textbook written for a one-semester general overview of the subject. It is lavishly illustrated with graphics and photos, and runs to about 450 pages, which gives it sufficient length to go into the level of detail that I was looking for. The first half of the book covers the kind of topics a non-specialist would expect, such as the composition of the Earth, plate tectonics, vulcanism, and descriptions of igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks. The next group of chapters fill in some details about how the planet is sculpted by natural forces, including earthquakes; mountain building; “mass wasting,” which is the process by which mountains are slowly eroded away; running water; ground water, glaciers, and wind and deserts. The final chapters describe the ocean floor, geological time, and, lastly, the evolution of life up to the rise of the hominins. The writing is not scintillating, though one does not expect that from a textbook, but it is clear and focused. The authors are enthusiastic about their subject, as shown by the occasional use of exclamation points, some of which were on what seemed to me like simple declarative sentences, but they must hold special meaning for geologists. The only chapter that dragged was the one on Geologic Time, which was page after page of shifting landmasses with unfamiliar names over multiple eons spanning billions of years. It was hard to keep it straight in my mind. A number of interesting facts came up in the book, and following are some of the ones that I found particularly illuminating: - Radiometric dating reveals that the oldest oceanic crust is less than 180 million years old, whereas the oldest continental crust is 3.96 billion years old. (p. 31) - Carbon dioxide from several sources may combine with water and react to form acid solutions. The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen, but about 0.03% is carbon dioxide, causing rain to be slightly acidic. (p. 120) - A good, fertile soil for gardening or farming is about 45% weathered rock material including sand, silt, and clay, but another essential constituent is humus. Many soils are dark colored by humus derived by bacterial decay of organic matter. It contains more carbon and less nitrogen than the original material and is resistant to further bacterial decay. Although a fertile soil may contain only a small amount of humus, it is an essential source of plant nutrients and enhances moisture retention. (p. 125) - About 95% of Earth’s crust is composed of igneous and metamorphic rocks, but sedimentary rocks are the most common at or near the surface. Approximately 75% of the surface exposures on continents consist of sediments or sedimentary rocks, and they cover most of the seafloor. (p. 140) - The maximum temperature at the center of the [Earth’s]core is thought to be about 6500°C, very close to the estimated temperature for the surface of the sun! (p. 195) - the greatest difference in elevation on Earth is about 20 km, which if depicted to scale on a 1-m diameter globe would be less than 2mm. (p. 201) - The volume of water on Earth is estimated at 1.36 billion km2, most of which 97.2% is in the oceans. About 2.15% is frozen in glaciers, and the remaining 0.65% constitutes all the water in streams, lakes, swamps, groundwater and the atmosphere. (p. 245) - Contrary to popular belief, most deserts are not sand-covered wastelands, but rather consist of vast areas of rock exposures and desert pavement. Sand-covered regions, or sandy deserts, constitute less than 25% of the world’s deserts. The sand in these areas has accumulated primarily by the action of wind. (p. 325) - Tides are also complicated by the combined effects of the Moon and the Sun. Even though the Sun’s tide-generating force is weaker than the Moon’s, when the Moon and Sun are aligned every two weeks, their forces are added together and generate spring tides, which are about 20% higher than average tides. When the Moon and Sun are at right angles to one another, also at two-week intervals, the Sun’s tide-generating force cancels some of that of the Moon, and neap tides about 20% lower than average occur. (p.343) ...more |
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Jan 07, 2021
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Aug 24, 2021
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Paperback
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| 0804197997
| 9780804197991
| 0804197997
| 4.02
| 221
| Aug 25, 2020
| Aug 25, 2020
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liked it
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So, what is this book about? It is easier to say what it is not about. Based on the title, you might think, as I did, that it was going to be about ge
So, what is this book about? It is easier to say what it is not about. Based on the title, you might think, as I did, that it was going to be about geology, and there is some geology in it, clearly and professionally described. But geology probably takes up less than one percent of the book, so that’s not what it is about. From reading the publisher’s description it sounds like it might be an elegy for his two lost sisters, who died three months apart, one in childbirth and one a suicide. However, the total time spent on his sisters probably amounts to one or two pages at most, so it is not about them either, at least not directly. If the book can be categorized as anything, it is social history, each chapter using a brief geological introduction as a springboard to other subjects. Melancholy is a motif that runs through the chapters as they recount the ignorance, cruelty, and greed of mankind, as if we ourselves are just another malign force of nature, one of the random evils visited on the world such as would take the life of woman giving birth, or cause a mother to kill herself and leave behind four young children. It is all part of the human condition. As the Buddha said, existence is suffering. In the first chapter, Manhattan is described as resting on a bed on Inwood marble, but then the author switches to the history of the native Lenape tribe and their gradual marginalization and destruction by the encroaching colonists. They were eventually pushed west, and then forced off one piece of land after another when whites wanted it. Today what is left of them are as far away as Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsin. There is a chapter on the Standing Stones in Scotland, which had remained intact for 5000 years before they were largely destroyed either in the name of commerce (it was easier to remove them than to plow around them), or superstitious Christianity. In the chapter on Iceland, which exists at the margin of two continental plates, the inhabitants are buffeted by earthquakes and volcanoes, and the author relates the story of a raid by English sailors in 1627 which captured half the inhabitants of one island to sell in the slave markets of Algiers. The chapter on Svalbard (formerly Spitzbergen) describes the hunt to extinction of their once enormous populations of whales and walruses. The book’s longest chapter deals with the exploitation of the Inuit by Europeans, and arctic explorer Robert Peary comes across as much less the hero than many histories describe. With the typical patronizing attitude of his times, and the certainty that “civilizing” and Christianizing the Inuit would improve them he showed no regard for the havoc he was wreaking on their culture. He took whatever he wanted, including stealing the natives’ only local source of iron, from a meteorite, and apportioning out the wives of his Inuit workers to serve the needs of his crew. While drawing full pay from the Navy, he left his black companion of twenty-three years, Matthew Henson, to scrape by with menial jobs between expeditions. Henson had accompanied him on seven arctic trips and once saved his life, but Peary disassociated himself from him after his final expedition, and only after an appeal to President Theodore Roosevelt was he given a job as a messenger in the federal government. He was brave, resourceful, and the only member of the team to learn the Inuit language. In every respect he comes across as a better man than Peary. The last chapter uses Muscovite, a form of mica which can be sliced into extremely fine layers and was essential to World War II aviation and electronics, to discuss the German concentration camps and the experience of the author’s family in them. There are several occasions in the book where the author adopts a very unusual style, the extended sentence. It made me wonder if he was deliberately imitating Marcel Proust, who is noted for it. The first instance comes when he is describing the Lenape tribe of Manhattan, and is in the form of “who possessed two separate souls; who knew and feared the power of witches; who burned tobacco to direct their prayers to the spirit world; who purified themselves and their objects through smudging, fasting, and the sweat lodge; who undertook the vision quest; who appreciated storytelling….” I was so surprised I copied and pasted the sentence into a word processor to see how long it is: 761 words, divided by semi-colons into 31 “who” clauses. He adopts the same style later in the book when describing Thule, Greenland. There is nothing wrong with writing like this, but it pulled my attention away from what was being described to focus on how it was being described. The book is also extensively, almost obsessively, documented. The main body of text is 256 pages, followed by 101 pages of footnotes. The footnotes frequently cite a dozen or more sources, plus accompanying additional text; one of them is nine pages long. I have never seen a book so exhaustively researched, but based on it I did add several items to my reading list. I learned some history, a little geology, and a lot about the sorrow and the pity of existence. It is a strange book, though written in a clear and engaging style. I guess I liked it, but I never really understood what the author was trying to do with it. ...more |
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Jan 21, 2021
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May 27, 2022
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May 07, 2022
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Nov 18, 2021
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Aug 09, 2021
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Jan 24, 2021
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Aug 24, 2021
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