She Has Her Mother's Laugh

She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
© 2018 Carl Zimmer
672 pages

Overhearing discussion of heredity a few hundred years ago would have meant only one thing:  being in the presence of noblemen, who stood to inherit their fathers' titles, lands, rights, and responsibilities.  Heredity quickly became a scientific concept,  and is now more commonly associated with biology than law, but genes aren't all we inherit. She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a meaty exploration of the history and present tracking of inheritance, genetic and otherwise.

Much of the book is a history of attempts to figure out heridity, beginning with mental impairment and the suspicion that it was something which could be passed down from generation to generation. This came of age when interest in biological inheritance was white-hot: Darwin and Huxley were at work, and various animal fanciers were creating ever-more elaborate breeds of pigeons and the like by monitoring traits from generation to generation and promoting the birth of different  variants.  It wasn't at all difficult for people to decide that imbecility was a distinct trait which could be controlled against, if all its present carriers were prevented from reproducing. This 'effort' was initially conceived as sterilization, but in the 1940s those efforts took on ghastly and murderous proportions Hitler's regime.

Aside from the outstandingly massive moral problems of controlling other people, including their ability to beget life,  there's also the scientific problem that "imbecility" is not one thing, created  by one trait. Mental impairments are diverse, and stem from all manner of biological hiccoughs. Many people in the Victorian age who were 'imbeciles' merely suffered from a metabolic disruption: they were unable to process a substance common in foodstuffs, and ingesting it slowly poisoned them, giving their skin an odd hue and eroding their mental faculties.  Children who were diagnosed early with this syndrome could be put on an appropriate diet, and be perfectly healthy members of society. Biology is chemistry in action, but the genes aren't the only chemicals in the solutions: they're constantly interacting with the substances of their mother's body, or the outside environment. Even if eugenicists had won, we would still have sick and infirm people, because there are so many variables. 

Other 'inheritance' issues are similarly problematic.  Take race, for instance; the human eye might look at a Norwegian, a Nigerian, and a Chinese citizen and declare them to be three obviously different kinds of people, but if that same eye were to look at their genes it would be unable to tell much of a difference beyond ordinary individual distinctions. Humans, for all our passionate in-grouping and out-grouping,  are far more alike than we are different -- biologically.  That doesn't mean our in-grouping and out-going is irrelevant; it  probably won't ever go away, because crucial to understanding human inheritance is realizing we are fundamentally cultural creatures. We don't come out of the womb sniffing wine and venturing opinions about the ballet, but we're as hungry for teaching as we are for food. When compared to chimpanzee juveniles, human youths are far more imitative.   Heredity cannot only apply to genes, or even biology (we also inherit bacteria from our parents):  it has to apply to culture, as well,

Zimmer also includes a chapter on CRISPR, and the admittedly scary potential that puts in our hands. Yes, we can eradicate genetic disease. We  can also turn our children into gross experiments, tinkering with their bodies to produce barbies or ubermensch. Society needs to think long and hard about the implications.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a steak of a book, of obvious interest to anyone with an appetite for human biology.

Some of my highlights:
"In Morgan’s own research on flies, he had learned to respect the power of the environment. His students discovered one strain of flies that developed normally if they were born in the summer but tended to sprout extra legs if they were born in the winter. It turned out that the researchers could get the same outcomes in their lab simply by changing the temperature in which they reared the fly eggs. It was thus meaningless to talk about the effect of their mutation without taking into account their environment."

“It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights,” Pearl [Buck] wrote. “Though the mind has gone away, though he cannot speak or communicate with anyone, the human stuff is there, and he belongs to the human family.”

"To eliminate imperfection would demand eliminating humanity itself."

"We were three people of African, Asian, and European descent from three corners of the world. Three races, some might say. And yet we shared far more than what set us apart."

"Textbooks say that the human body has about two hundred cell types, but recent studies have rendered that figure a laughable understatement. No one can say how many cell types there are, because the more scientists examine cells the more they break down into more typed. Immune cells may all carry out the same mission to save us from pathogens and cancer, but they are an army with hundreds of divisions. All our cell types are seperate branches on the body's genealogical tree, like rival dynasties descended from a first monarch."

A Crack in Creation

A Crack in Creation:  Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
© 2017 Jennifer Doudna and Sam Sternberg

"No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities." - Carl Sagan

A few years ago I tuned into the middle of a science-news podcast and encountered a panel of otherwise sensible people caught up in an enthusiastic conversation about...crisper? Crisper drawers?  I'd missed something.

What I'd missed was a story about CRISPR, a gene-editing tool with enormous and explosive potential for  medicine and agriculture.  The outgrowth of attempts to use bacteria as microsurgeons,  CRISPR allows for fine-tuned genetic manipulation with reproducable results.  The first half of A Crack in Creation delivers the story of how CRISPR as a tool was discovered, and this history of scientific investigation is followed by the author's thoughts on the implications. While optimistic about the tool's applications for agriculture and medicine,   she admits that the potential for abuse in modifying the human genome itself is high.

Humans have been manipulating domesticated populations' genomes for millennia, of course, but with clumsier methods:   finding animals with expressed traits we favor, and breeding them while taking the rest home to cook.  We have toyed with forcing mutations with chemical and radioactive agents, but the results thereof are unpredictable.  Now,  nearly two decades into the 21st century,  we have the ability to make fine-tuned adjustments, with applications both serious and trivial.  An internal biological weapon used to disarm viruses  and effect cellular repair can instead be used as a tool to remove  and supply whatever genes we desire.

  We've already created mosquito populations which have been stripped of the ability to propagate malaria, and -- depending on trials and the weight of government oversight --  may use pigs to grow human organs for use in transplants.   As Doudna warns, however,   modifying humans -- modifying ourselves -- takes us into an area fraught with ethical quandaries.    She speculates that we may wish to discriminate between germ cells (sperm and egg cells, which would be capable of reproducing whatever edits we make) and somatic cells, which constitute the rest of the body.  Unless, of course, eugenics makes a comeback and we decide to create a race of supermen, a la Khan Noonian Singh. Then, germ cells would be fair game. (Okay, the bit about Khan is just me. As one of the principle discoverers of CRISPR, Doudna is seriously concerned about the ethical implications, to the point that she's had a literal dream about Hitler contacting her with an interest in learning how to use CRISPR.)

Although I'm still trying to understand the mechanics of it (as much as I like biology, genetics is a definite weak point for me),  the potential for this excites me. Medicine is going to go very interesting places in the decades to come.

This Is Your Brain on Parasites

This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Brains and Shape Society
© 2016 Kathleen McAuliffe
299 pages

Are you under the influence?  There’s a chance that you may be, even if you haven’t darkened the door of a bar in years. Our bodies are home to a multitude of microbes,  many of them allies of a sort:  in exchange for a moist roof over their heads, they help us digest food, or take up space that would otherwise be available to the disease-causing riff-raff.  Other,s however, are the riff-riff, and they can exert a bad influence on those who let them hang around.  By and large we’re familiar with bacteria that can cause disease, but there are microbes which have more subtle effects --  seemingly causing shifts in our mood, our metabolism, and our ability to think and process information. This is Your Brain on Parasites argues for a parasite-centered perspective on health and evolution,  told in four parts.    She opens by establishing the ubiquity and variety of microbes,  moves to demonstrating how some species can directly manipulate other species’ behavior,  argues that human beings’ mental/emotional state can be likewise influenced by microbes, and finally argues that much of human civilization is indirectly driven by parasites in that an obsession with cleanliness has driven us to create religions, laws, etc.

Whew! That’s a lot to take in in one book. The first two sections are paths well traveled, from 10% Human to Gut. The second section addresses an utterly fascinating aspect of nature, the ability of some species to manipulate others. The creatures documented here aren’t all microbes: parasitic wasps show up hijacking spiders and roaches and putting them to work, the first as a shelter-creator and the second as a beefsteak on the hoof.  The mechanisms for manipulation are not always known. Microbes aren’t comic book villains with glowing towers: they do their work with secretions of chemicals,  sometimes using our own bodies to produce it for them.  By subtle means can one parasite prompt grasshoppers to move en masse toward bodies of water, drowning themselves  Part of the difficulty of studying parasites is that their manipulation of one host is only one part of their life stage, and they usually have a series of hosts to go through to get back to where they can spawn. One parasite common to humans arrives  in the intestines, matures, works its way to the exit, raises hell to make us itchy, and then relies on a probing finger scratching the itch to carry their young out into the world to restart the cycle.  That’s more indirect manipulation, but the author also includes cases in which the presence of certain bacteria are strongly correlated with instances of depression, and others with dangerous, near-deadly behavior.

The last part, attributing everything from sanitation to religion to racism on human attempts to ward off parasites, is...interesting, but an example of how specialists in one field tend to view everything from their particular angle.   The fact that religious dietary laws often barred the very species which carry the most risk for internal parasites is insightful, but  human culture and evolution are rivers fed by many streams. Attributing the motherload to parasites, or cooking, or power, usually tells more about the author’s interests than the actual subject.  On the whole, however,  This is Your Brain on Parasites smartly marches through a lot of linked territory and makes itself of interest to general science readers.

Related:

• Parasite Rex, Carl Zimmer. A more in-depth treatment of parasites in general, and an inspiration for this book according to the author.  I read this back in 2008 but that was back in days when I posted one great big wall of text about every book I'd read in that week, and few of the 'reviews' were more than the same kind of abstract you'd find on an Amazon publisher' s description. 
• I Contain Multitudes, Gut, 10% Human. 

Gut

Gut: The Inside Story Of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ
© 2015 Giulia Enders
271 pages

Through the teeth, past the gums, look out stomach, here we come! Gut is a tour of your innards, of the surprisingly clean but bustling twists and turns of the digestive system. "Wait a second," say you, "I've had this tour before. Mary Roach did it in Gulp!". Well, yes, and she did take you the entire way -- from the mouth right out the other end, none the worse for the wear. Gut is different, however. The author is a touch more serious, for one thing; while never lacking in humor, she doesn't provide a constant effusion of fart and poop jokes. Enders provides more of a thoughtful study of how the gut impacts us, particularly in our microbiome. This is a mix of Roach's Gulp and I Contain Multitudes: a study of our intestinal habitat and the fauna thereof. I bought this primarily because I was interested in the ways our gut can influence our psychology. I've heard reports of there being neural cells active within the gut, and while there is a chapter on the "vagus nerve", it wasn't as extensive as I hoped. The author conveys the impression that the nerve collects and conveys feelings of general un-ease and distress within the body, providing the brain with its first reports of problems within. More extensive are the chapters on the bacteria within us -- how they change depending on our diet, how they can contribute to our health or diminish it , that sort of thing. This ground was covered more extensively in 10% Human and I Contain Multitudes, but a review of this subject is perfect in a book on the gut: 90% of our bacteria live there, after all.

If you're interested in the digestive system -- and who isn't, really? -- Gut is a quick, fun read that takes its reader more seriously than Gulp, and includes more concrete information from an actual M.D.

Related
10% Human 
I Contain Multitudes 
Gulp 

I Contain Multitudes

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes WIthin Us and a Grander View of Life

© 2016 Ed Yong

268 pages

For much of the 20th century, microbes were equivalent with germs – invisible threats that needed to eradicated.  As we move further into a new century ,however, there is some small and growing popular appreciation that microbes play  important roles in human biology.  Microbes aren’t bit players, though, they’re the actors, the support staff, the conductors, and even the orchestra.  That has been amply illustrated by books like 10% Human, which  demonstrated how thoroughly vital microbes are to ordinary physiology.   I Contain Multitudes looks more generally at microbes and their hosts as dynamic ecosystems that are constantly changing.

Microbes had the planet entirely to themselves for most of Earth history, and long after plants and animals have seemingly taken over, they’re still in control.  Microbes are present in the oceans,  allowing coral to flourish and fish to find their way in the dark; they’re within insects,  often a vital part of their maturation process; they’re in human babies from the word go, receiving them with their mother’s milk. (Actually, a lot of human milk seems to feed not the baby, but microbes inside the baby, which then secrete something that the baby digests. Thus even breast-feeding mothers employ bacterial wet-nurses…)   That’s only part of the story, though.

Previously,  people thought of the immune system in military terms: our white blood cells were soldiers on guard, watching out for any intruders. Yong suggests we appreciate our immune system more as a park ranger, one that monitors the status of its microbial wards,  encouraging and protecting some and weeding out or barring others.  He suggests further that our immune system in doing this is working more on the ward-microbes’ behalf than on ours, for microbes too contend with one another.  They’re constantly jostling for space, and humans unwittingly participate in the battle:   with every meal, we alter our micro-biome.  In the name of healing, w occasionally carpet-bomb our bodies -- but the body is its own ecosystem, so dependent on microbes that many illnesses  should be viewed as a mismatch of populations than an invasion.

It is as grave a mistake to regard microbes as an easily-manipulated friend, says Ed Yong, as it was to regard them as an implacable enemy who must be hunted down and killed.  Although symbiotic associations are rife in nature, and abound in our own bodies,  they are not relationships.  Many microbes live inside us, and we depend on many of them as they do on us – but we are not ‘friends’. Instead, like nation-states working together, we merely enjoy a collusion of interests, and occasionally that collusion lapses.   In the macro world, for instance, tickbirds that ride on large mammals and groom them for ticks occasionally nip their rides, too. Further, no one has 'a' population of microbes; the pool of microbes in our guts and in our orifices fluctuates widely from hour to hour,  depending on our activities.

Reading this book made me marvel, literally. The image Yong conveyed of the dynanism of our bodies made me think of the sun -- an ongoing nuclear explosion that is maintained by the sheer weight of its ingredients. The contests inside us for dominance, the side effect of these material struggles on our brains and feelings, boggles the mind.


Note:  I read this book much earlier in the year, but never posted my review for reasons which escape me. I decided to publish this week given that I've been in a science mood.

A Devil's Chaplain

A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
© 2003 Richard Dawkins
263 pages

Charles Darwin mused that a devil's chaplain might write quite a book on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low, and horridly cruel works of nature.  A Devil's Chaplain is not quite that book, however, though it does include a mention of fantastically inefficient bio-planning on nature's part, as well as a paragraph or two on parasitic wasps.   Dawkins uses the title to collect various articles, prefaces, and reviews he has written, all pooling in either biology or skepticism. Those familiar with Dawkins will find no surprises: he writes on the role of wonder in science,  champions skepticism and evidence-based thinking, addresses religion with teeth bared in the wake of 9/11, and expands on his notion of cultural ideas being transmitted like genes, as "memes" -- an originally serious word that is now applied to pictures with words on them, from captioned cats desirous of cheeseburgers to political commentary.  There's also a considerable section dedicated to the then recently-late Stephen Jay Gould,  with whom Dawkins had professional disputes. (Dawkins defends their relationship as more professional than adversarial.)   Because the collection is so varied, it's rather hard to rate;  here's a chapter on genes and wasps, there's an appraisal of a novel set in Botswana.  Most of the book is on biology and critical thinking, and there he had me;  when he moves to morals and culture, however, I found him wanting.

I raised my first eye when Dawkins praised Peter Singer, who sees no reason to value a room of babies over a room of puppies,  and asserts that religion only sustains itself by having its adherents instill the beliefs in their children.  Of course, religions like any other cultural element are maintained through that kind of transmission -- language, for instance. They also sustain themselves, however, by providing something people need or want: meaning at the individual level, and tribal cohesion and (in some cases) some degree of public morality at the social level.   Dawkins' understanding of religion as expressed here is simplistic, but part of his argument is fair: material facts should be believed on the basis of evidence, not desire or authority. Dawkins writes at the beginning that one bit of an advice a devil's chaplain can provide, looking at the spectre of nature red in tooth and claw, is that while we are composed of selfish genes, we are not limited by them. Our intelligence gives us the ability to overcome the amoral logic of the jungle (or the savannah, no less savage). On the whole, however, amoral logic seems to have the edge; if a man can't favor a room of babies over a room of animals,  there's something vital missing.

A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

The Canon: A whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science
© 2007 Natalie Angier
293 pages

Science is amazing! Why is so much of the writing about it so lame?   Natalie Angier's The Canon first reviews the principles of scientific thinking before talking - nay, gushing -- about the basics of physics, chemistry, cosmology, biology,  astronomy, and geology.   But this isn't just a science primer like Almost Everyone's Guide to Science, or Theories for Everything. It is written with a conscious desire to seem fun, so the author is borderline bubbly and generous with cultural references and wordplay.  It's sometimes distracting, but I enjoyed it on the whole.  The personable approach to science also manifests itself in the way Angier works in little stories about her life that relate (like being thunderstruck by an earthquake in her normally placid residence in  D.C.), or interviews with scientists in the field, whose own love and continuing wonder for their subject is part of the delivery.   This is definitely a layman's approach to science -- there's no graphs, equations, or tables to be found, no terrifying mathematics -- but what made a winner for me, from the get-go, were the opening chapters on thinking scientifically. Angier sells the scientific method to readers by connecting it to what they already do: for instance,  the act of troubleshooting a technical problem is similar, as we attempt to narrow down problems by focusing on one variable at a time. A reader who reads Brian Greene with ease may find Angier's lively -- manic, even --  romp through the lab to be silly, but I found her enthusiasm welcome and the wordplay diverting.  A sample from her chapter on geology:

The planet we inhabit, the bedrock base on which we build our lives, is in a profound sense alive as well, animate form from end to end and core to skin. Earth, as I said earlier, is often called the Goldilocks planet, where conditions are just right for life and it is neither too hot nor too cold, where atoms are free to form molecules and water droplets to pool into seas. There is something about Goldilocks, beyond her exacting tastes, that makes her a noteworthy character, a fitting focus for our attentions. The girl cannot sit still. She's restless and impulsive and surprisingly rude. She wanders off into woods without saying where she's headed or when she'll be home. She barges through doors uninvited, helps herself to everybody else's food, and breaks the furniture. But don't blame her. She can't help herself. Goldilocks is so raw and brilliant that she has to let off steam. Like Goldilocks the protagonist, Goldilocks the planet is a born dynamo, and without her constant twitching, humming, and seat bouncing, her intrinsic animation, Earth would not have any oceans, or skies, or buffers against the sun's full electromagnetic fury; and we animate beings, we DNA bearers, would never have picked  ourselves up off the floor.   The transaction was not one-sided, though. The restless, heave-hoing motions of the planet helped give rise to life, and restless life, in turn, reshaped Earth." 

TBR: And Then There was One

Dear readers,  we approach the end for the To be Read Takedown Challenge!

Richard Francis' Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World proved disappointing, not because of the quality of content but the focus thereof.  Although Domesticated sells itself as a work on animal domestication, and does provide natural histories of various animals like pets, horses, camels, pigs, and rodents, a section on human evolution consumes a fourth of the book, and there's not a non-mammal species to  be found.  Why devote sections to guinea pigs and creatures that aren't actually domesticated (raccoons) and ignore the 2nd most common foodsource on the planet, the chicken?  The answer lies in Francis seeing humanity as domesticated, too, albeit self-domesticated, and he uses the examples of species like the raccoon to argue that we selected 'tame' traits in ourselves, like prosociality.  He mixes the science with entertaining personal accounts, like his misfortunes attempting to ride a camel, and similarly clumsy but appreciated attempts to mix in some cultural history.

If you've been playing at home, you'll know the official TBR list is now down to one item: Trucking Country: the Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy. There's a bonus round of sorts consisting of the books I didn't add to the list at the start, in part to preserve some mystery and in part so it wouldn't look so daunting.  The bonus round has a mix of law, history, religion, and tech.  The only heavyweight is Trucking Country.  There are some reviews pending.


Taken down!

Liberty, Defined, Ron Paul
Big Box Swindle, Stacy Mitchell
Saving Congress from Itself, James Buckley
Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security, Richard Clarke
When Asia Was the World, Stewart  Gordon
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet,  Andrew Blum
The Orthodox Church, Kallistos (Timothy) Ware
Green, Blue, and Grey: The Irish in the American Civil War, Cal McCarthy
Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff, Matt Kibbe
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left, Yural Levin.
Freedom and Virtue, ed. George Carey
 The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday.
Literary Converts, Joseph Pearce
Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World,  Richard Francis
10% Human, Alanna Collen.



Coming Attractions
Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy, Shane Hamilton.

10% Human

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
© 2015 Alanna Collen
336 pages

Walt Whitman wasn't thinking of bacteria when he mused -- "I am large, I contain multitudes" -- but Alanna Collen could have gotten away with quoting him. She opens her book with the bombshell that ninenty percent of the 'cells' in our bodies are actually independent mcirobes, living their own little lives, and devotes the rest of it to exploring what effect that has on our health.  We are less discrete, self-contained individuals, and closer to mobile ecosystems,  in which microbes are an integral part and not just germy villains.  Microbes are not only essential parts of the human body -- slimy oil that keeps the body's engine running smoothly,  aiding in digestion and manufacturing essential elements like Vitamin B12. In some cases, like our own cells' mitochrondia, we've even adopted microbes into the family.  But there's more to the story of microbes and health, and Collen credits our overzealous germaphobia with many modern diseases.

Semmelweis did humanity and medicine a great favor when he realized the cause of childbed sickness was sloppy sanitation, but we may have taken his prescription too far in treating all microbes as 'germs' to be eradicated.  As mentioned, many are necessary to our bodily functions: babies receive helpful bacteria with their mothers' very milk.   Animal testing has indicated that bacterial species can have intense effects on their host: mice have changed personalities when their respective strains were switched, becoming more outgoing or more reserved; similar effects were observed in populations of lean and chubby mice.  That last is especially of note to an increasingly overweight global population, but there are no easy answers. (While some microbe species allow for the uber-efficient metabolization of food, stealthily increasing our caloric  intake, others produce byproducts that put fat cells on overdrive.)  The fact that our bodies contain many different types of bacteria is important, because they compete with one another. When we disrupt the balance of power with erratic courses of antibiotics, or abruptly and dramatically alter our diets,  nasty strains can dominate to our detriment. Collen attributes a number of 'western' or modern diseases to microbial havocincluding allergies and autism.  The section on autism has fantastic human interest: after one four-year old boy suddenly developed it after an ear inefection, his mother devoted herself to research, research the boy's sister continued decades lafter when she grew up and went to grad school.

10% Human is one of the more engaging pieces of biology writing I've ever read, and immensely importance from a personal and public health perspective.  Collen's' writing is very personable, never intimidating. She even sneaks in the tiniest bit of toilet humor when she refers to 'transpoosion', or transferring one person's fecal bacteria to another person's intestines to rebuild a ravaged microbial pool. (The  body has a bacterial backup in the appendix, but sometimes reinforcements are necessary.)  It should be obvious after a half-century of mass dieting and treadmill running than the simplistic calories in vs calories consumed model isn't adequate for explaining our weight woes, and here I suspect Collen will find a lot of appeal for people.  For me,  10% Human reminds me yet again of how we are not static creatures, built of DNA legos, but dynamic creatures -- constantly being remade, not only by our experience, but by the guests in our innards.

Related:

• Why We Get Sick: the New Science of Darwinian Medicine; Randolph M. Nesse, M.D; George C. Wiliams, Ph.D.
• Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, Richard Wrangham
• "How Gut Bugs Make you Sick or Well", Time article from 2012 which mentions the mother-daughter research team. 

The Wild Weird World of Biology

So, it turns out The Lives of a Cell has little to do with cells.  I checked it out figuring to learn something about how cells work, since I'm a ways removed from fifth-grade life science, or even freshman bio.  I wasn't just judging the book by its cover -- when I peeked in, there was a paragraph about mitochondria!  As it turns out, though, Lives is a collection of essays sharing the theme of sociobiology. As our cells are a collection of organisms working together for mutual benefit, and our cells themselves work together with other cells again for mutual benefit, and bacteria within us work with us for our mutual benefit, the author attempts to apply this to the human race as as a whole, likening language and other constructs to the vast structures that insects build together. No insect is conscious of what it is doing, but it does it, and it creates something wondrous and vast.  I enjoyed the author's voice enormously, but the actual science is probably dated. It has a seventies charm about it, though,  bringing to mind the fanciful idea that the Earth is one big organism.

(This cover is...fun.)

That was polished off on Friday, and over the weekend I roared through the utterly eye-opening book Unnatural Selection, on how medicine, pesticides, and such are forcing rapid evolutionary change all around us.  Expect a review for it in the next couple of days. I'll be following that up with E.O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth, and after that..golly, I might just give biology a slight break.   There are all sorts of rabbits I might chase next, though I'm laying off new purchases for a little while, so I'll mostly be working from my little stack of unread nonfiction or from my monthly bag-o-books from the uni library.

Here's to wrapping up February with a bang!

Genome

 Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
© 1999 Matt Ridley
317 pages

  The human genome is a recipe book, divided into 23 chapters, but considerably larger than Matt Ridley’s Genome. Were it to scale, he writes, a genuine version of the genome in book form would be closer to the size of a stack of bibles.  Genome visits each of the human cell’s 23 chromosomes in turn to learn a little something about human nature. This is not An Ancestor’s Tale in miniature, as Ridley addresses the entire natural history of human kind in the first chapter.   Subsequent chapters cover subjects as diverse as the genetic basis for language and sex differentiation, and as ambitious as free will.  Health and disease occupy much of Ridley’s attention; after genetic disease is covered by itself,  these diseases  are used to illustrate other subjects.    One oft-used example is that of the prevalence of sickle-cell anemia among people of immediate African ancestry;   carrying one allele for it greatly reduces exposure to malaria, a scourge of the continent.  For the genes, losing a few carriers to sickle-cell anemia is a better bargain than losing a greater number to malaria. In evolution, as in economics, there are no solutions – only trade-offs.  Nothing is simple; many conditions like asthma are caused not by one gene flubbing, but by different genes in different populations. Genetics is a subject that can quickly get too detailed for lay readers to enjoy, but Ridley finds the right balance between narrative and specifics, and he has an sly wit.  In a chapter on the sinister history of eugenics, he notes that the Soviet Union never adopted a eugenics program; they were more interested in murdering clever people than limited ones.  The take-home lesson is the human body is not one thing with a becraniumed control tower;   even our flesh is dynamic,  our genes warring with one another and vying for control between themselves and the brain they forged and maintain.   Though it may lose something in being slightly dated, Genome is an eye-opening bit of popular science that offers plenty of insight into history, as well. There was a reprint in 2006 that may have more current information.

Related:

• Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine,  Randolph Nesse,  George Williams
• The Red Queen, Matt Ridley
• The Ancestors Tale;  The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

The Red Queen

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
© 1993 Matthew Ridley
404 pages

The Red Queen begins with a question: why do creatures have sex? Why did it evolve? The answer, Matt Ridley believes, lies in the principle of the Red Queen. A character featured in Lewis Carroll's  Through the Looking Glass, she announced to Alice that in her world, it took all the running one could do simply to remain in one place. This characterizes the constant struggle for domination between species in the natural world,  a struggle between creatures not only visible to us, but between parasites within our bodies  and our immune systems.  Every move is countered, every success overturned; such is the impetus for evolution. In The Red Queen, Ridley explains his reasoning, and demonstrates how  evolutionary principles subtly drive the expression of human sexuality.

There's a lot of tension in this work, first when Ridley makes his case and somehow incorporates aspects of evolution from disparate camps (gene-centered, individually-driven, species-based) , and in the heart of the book as he examines the implications. This is especially true in the chapters, "Polygamy and the Nature of Men" and "Monogamy and the Nature of Women":  while it is true men have a genetic inclination to sow seeds and women one to invest in a partner,  behavior as studied indicates that things are not to trite. In the last chapters of the book, Ridley looks at sexuality as a possible cause of advanced human intelligence (competition and tension between the sexes and individuals), which is amusing given the power sexual interest has to render victims dumbstruck and seemingly foolish.

Since its publication, The Red Queen has proven influential; I knew of it long before I read it because of its place in the literature, being cited often. That may attest to the science, which is is speculative but sensible based on what he presents. He certainly makes for an entertaining author,  one whose arguments are open to virtually anyone regardless of scientific reading;  he begins with a technical, biological edge before spending most of the book on behavior -- a softer, fuzzier realm for readers.

Paleofantasy

Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Says about Sex, Diet, and How We Live
© 2013 Marlene Zuk
328 pages

Despite its name, Paleofantasy is not a deliberate debunking of arguments for a 'paleo diet' and a paleo lifestyle.  Although Zuk does take aim at paleo proponents time and again, her argument approaches the same ideas from a different tack. Rather than assume that people ought to live the lifestyle our bodies evolved to expect, and then look for the science that informs that lifestyle, Zuk first asks:  what does biology tell us about the way our ancestors once lived, and can that information be used to help us today?  Subsequent chapters are a brief survey of the evolutionary heritage of our diet, our sex and childrearing practices, modes of exercise, and health.  The essential point of Paleofantasy is that evolution is an ongoing process: humanity is not a finished product, nor a monolithic species. What is true for some populations doesn't necessarily hold for others.  Thus, studying the lifestyle of our ancestors isn't particularly helpful, because they had different lifestyles depending on their local climate, and each made micro-adaptions in its own way.  Two populations of mountain-living people ,in Tibet and the Andres, both adapted to living in such thin air -- but in two different evolutionary ways. Her message to those interested in paleo living is this: don't get carried away.  By all means, don't overeat and get in a lot of exercise -- but do it because it makes sense now, not because the ancestors starved and were active.

Although the book will probably succeed in cooling the jets of the moderately interested, for more ardent practitioners, she will doubtless fall short, and not just because of defensiveness on readers' part. A staple of paleo nutrition is that grains are of the agricultural devil. Zuk's is response is to point out that look, we've evolved a gene that lets us process starch.  We've adapted! Evolution in action.  She does not, however, address the concern of anti-grain readers that while we can eat grain, we shouldn't because of its insulin-spiking effects and the subsequent relationship with diabetes and obesity.  To borrow an example from her book, also used in Sean Carroll's The Making of the Fittest: while there are snakes who can survive eating poisonous toads,  that doesn't mean they should turn poisonous toads into the bedrock of their snake food-pyramid. Likewise, she doesn't address the rationale that palo-fitness people use in pushing for short, intense workouts, namely that a high level of stress for a short time is better at building bone and muscle than a marginal level of stress done for long intervals.  She simply says "Hey, there are people who have adapted to running really long times."

Paleofantasy doesn't necessarily impress, but it does offer a moderating voice to those who can get carried away by the prospect of living like our ancestors to the point of going to bed with a Sounds of the Nighttime Forest CD playing, because that's what our brains expect.

Related:
Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (which includes a section on high-stress short-term exercise)
Wheat Belly, William Davis;  Good Calories Bad Calories, Gary Taubes (on the problems of the modern diet)
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, Richard Wrangham
Sex on Six Legs, Marlene Zuk.

The Making of the Fittest

The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution
304 pages
© 2006 Sean B. Carroll

Sean B. Carroll's The Making of the Fittest examines the genetics of evolution, relating to readers not only how changes come about and are transmitted to the next generation, but how our genes demonstrate the passing of an evolutionary river out of Eden with the same surety that the flattened plains of the midwest testify to the passing of glaciers eons ago. After detailing the myriad ways in which genetics illuminates the inner workings and history of evolution, Carroll casts a critical eye against proponents of intelligent design and creationism.  In the stressful, chaotic world which all organisms inhabit, where circumstances and relations between prey and predator are in a state of constant flux, there is no room for grand designs:  only on-the-hoof and on-the-fly jury-rigging to respond to a given moment's crisis will do. Making of the Fittest supplies readers with both broad principles (the evolutionary arms race, in which no species is ever the 'perfected' winner, only carrying temporary momentum in the battle for survival) and specific practices, like how complex organs are formed by cobbling together smaller ones.  Though a short-enough work, it seems more technical than many other works on biology, probably because it focuses on the nitty-gritty details of genetics: one chapter is called "The Everyday Math of Evolution", and concerns mutation rates. Though of interest to general science readers, a little genetic refresher might be helpful before starting in.  

Gulp

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
© 2013 Mary Roach
352 pages

Mary Roach is no stranger to delving into topics which others find icky -- like corpses. Even her more conventional works flirt with taboo, and in Gulp she embraces disgust whole-heartedly, by treating readers with iron stomachs to a discussion of all things digestive. Gulp is not, strictly speaking, a book about the digestive system. Instead, it's a history of the odder means scientists through the centuries have fashioned to study it, though some of the questions themselves are startling enough (how many cellphones can you pack into a rectum?) Its intent is more entertaining than educational, but readers will glean an understanding of how our body works regardless, and perhaps learn more than they wished they knew. The body's own structure gives Roach an organizational structure her other books might lack: her record of experiments follows the 'alimentary canal', an older name for the digestive tract, from our tongue right through the intestines and out the other side, pausing for a great many fart jokes.  Roach is definitely a 'popular' science writer in that she writes for the lowest common denominator, appealing to as many readers as can be possibly found who are willing to read about spit and constipation.  This is not a work that takes itself seriously; it is disgusting, funny, and informative in that order. Largely entertaining,  but a touch on the gratuitous side.

This week at the library: the cosmos, Jane Austen, zombies, and the Middle Way

-- Minireviews -- 

Some zombies like to lurch about groaning for brains. Some zombies like to ride the escalators, listen to Frank Sinatra, and daydream about their past life. That's R,  a zombie who has forgotten most of his life, even most of his name.  R is of the mobile damned shambling around a ruined Earth, living in a hive of the undead in an abandoned airport. He sometimes goes into the remains of civilization to find someone to nibble on. Brains are especially fun, because eating them allows the diner to experience the memories of the dined-upon. It adds a bit of color to the zombies' dreary, grey not-lives. But when one young man dies saving his girlfriend's life and R munches down on his memories of growing up with her, R unexpectedly develops a crush -- and instead of turning her into a second course, he totes her home and hides her from his moribund brethren.  Such is the beginning of Warm Bodies, a novel of the living and the damned, and the bridge between them.  I checked it out not because I like zombies, but because a friend of mine -- a mature, knows-how-to-manage-her-time-well friend -- stayed up all night reading it. While the premise intrigued me, the humor and earnestness of a zombie yearning for more, even love, snookered me completely. I read it in one sitting, as it's the kind of novel that doesn't let you go away: it continues to rise in intensity until the very end.

                                                             

With Warm Bodies out of the way, you know now that the title does not refer to my reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies again. My Jane Austen reference was to The Jane Austen Book Club, a novel  which covers the stories of five women and one man who get together once a month and discuss a given Jane Austen novel, each taking it in turn to host. As a guy who has read Pride and Prejudice, I thought it might be fun to see another fellow go through it. His responses aren't all that remarkable. I hate to admit it, but this is the rare instance wherein a book doesn't compare favorably to its movie  Admittedly, I saw the movie before reading the book, and in fact read the book after finding out it was the source for a money I thought hilarious. (The Austen-reading man is developed far better in the movie: he's a riot: I screamed in laughter at the faces of the women as he, an SF buff, tried to compare the plot of an Austen title with the development relationship of Luke and Leia through the original Star Wars trilogy.  Great movie, all-right book: I might have enjoyed it better had I actually read more than one Austen novel. It made me feel guilty, actually..

I also read Buddhism without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor, which wasn't as ferociously compelling as I thought it might be, possibly because I've taken Buddhism's extrareligious applicability for granted for a few years now.  Batchelor treats Buddhism as a practice in response to certain realities, and invites readers on meditations to cultivate a sense of compassion within them. Batchelor's philosophical explanations sometimes seemed like vague esoterica (the chapter on emptiness, for instance), others were eye-opening, like the section on no-self. He compared us to clay spinning on a wheel:  the thing that emerges is the result of a lot of actions acting in concert: the constituency of the clay, the pressure, the wheel; there is no ideal Pot that will suddenly materialize there. The same is true for us: there is no ideal Self floating around inside us, or out in the ether: we as beings are being constantly created by drives internal and external.

And on a final note, a book I need to re-read because it's been a few months since I finished it:  The Universe Within reveals the profound connectivity of the universe, exploring the ways our biology has been shaped by astrophysics and geology. But it's not actually about us: his account demonstrates how all of nature is bound together in cycles -- water evaporating into the air, then returning as rain; sea crust being formed at ridges, and dissolved again in volcanic explosions --  and how no field of science can exist without connection to another. A rock can tell you about physics, chemistry, and biology.  Had the book been about the interconnectedness of the sciences, it would have been a triumph. It's supposed to be about how these processes have shaped human beings, though, and the human connection is added in only tangentially at the end.

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Today I also received two books through interlibrary loan: Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, which examines human-plant coevolution, and Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte.  I'm looking forward to both:  Pollan is a weird author in that I'll finish his books regarding them too problematic to recommend, and yet I never stop thinking about them. Neither The Omnivore's Dilemma nor In Defense of Food are never far from my mind.

Look for more food books as the spring matures!

The Humans Who Went Extinct

The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived
© 2010 Clive Finlayson
256 pages

Whatever happened to the Neanderthals? Did Homo sapiens drive our beefy cousins into extinction in the first of many exercises in genocide as we spread across the planet? Poppycock, suggests Clive Finlayson, to whom such a suggestion is the very height of hubris. His The Humans Who Went Extinct paints of a picture of generations of climate change hitting the planet like a rolling barrage, stressing increasingly marginal bands of hominids -- humans and Neanderthals alike. Eventually the Neanderthals succumbed; the difference between the species, Finlayson writes, is that human populations were lucky enough to be in areas where they could adapt to the unpredictable environment. 

I've never had a problem with the Humans Are Homicidal Maniacs theory as applied to Neanderthal death, because we have a proven track record in that regard. Name a living species, and we've probably driven most of their extended family into extinction. Finlayson thinks the idea is rubbish, and while he's at it he also doesn't cotton to the idea of humans being responsible for other mass extinctions, like the mammoths. No, the malefactor was climate change, and climate change alone. Neanderthals weren't the slow, stupid brutes that people like to fancy themselves as having killed off in a feat demonstrating superior ability and intelligence: they were bigger-brained than we were, using tools and creating art just as we did. And their kill sites demonstrate that they were an adaptable and agile species to boot, devouring tricky prey like rabbits and birds.

Finlayson's work is very much inspired by Guns, Germs, and Steel, which he refers to repeatedly: his last substantive chapter leads directly into Diamond's work, which demonstrated the importance of geography in human affairs. In Humans Who Went Extinct, geography and climate are the main actors. He relies both on traditional archaeological evidence and genetic tracking to put forth his case, but the overweening emphasis climate change seemed a bit much for me. I can accept human populations being marginal and strained, but surely we bear some responsibility? In those instances where Sapiens and Neanderthals shared the same area, I find it hard to imagine the two living in peace.  Part of the difficulty for me in accepting Finlayson's arguments wholly is that the evidence is hard to come by, relying in part on inference. The scope of the question also poses a problem for anyone looking for definitive Answer: the drama of extinction played out on a a stage that encompassed most of the "old world", and thousands of years. My biggest beef with Finlayson is  his dismissal of our having any role in killing off any of the ice age fauna, though that's only a sidenote and he may have been referring only to the European species.

The Humans Who Went Extinct gives readers curious about the world early humans lived in something to chew over. Its view of that world as being turbulent and hostile, one that we were lucky to survive in, let alone conquer, is definitely one to consider, as is his depiction of the Neanderthals as people quite like us who had the misfortune of being in the wrong spots of the globe at the wrong time, whose population bottlenecks resulted in extinction.

The Wild Life of Our Bodies

The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasides, and Partners that Shape Who We Are Today
© 2011 Rob Dunn
290 pages

You can take the man out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the man. Such is the lesson of Rob Dunn's brilliantly-written The Wild Life of Our Bodies, which demonstrates to readers the ways in which interactions with other species have shaped human evolution, and the folly of our attempt to sever our ties with the natural world.

I initially thought this book was on the body as an ecosystem, host to millions of other lifeforms; some preying on us, others living in a mutualistic relationship with us, helping us to digest food in return for a roof over their little unicellular heads. That's only the start of Dunn's piece, and even there he turns expectations on our heads. Sure, we need bacteria to help digest our food -- but as it turns out, we need, or at least could use, parasites active in our system to give certain immune responses something to do. Absent of real threats, our immune system will happily turn on us, causing various diseases and disorders. We forget how utterly alien the civilized world is to bodies which evolved in the world, becoming geared to compete and strive and fight, to cope with famine and stress.

No man is an island, nor is any species.  The interactions between species -- as foes, as friends -- drive evolution, giving pronghorns and cheetahs faster legs to outrun the other, and avocado fruits larger volume to attract animals with larger appetites. Humans, in spite of our tendency to view ourselves as separate from the 'animal world', are no different in being shaped by others. Not only have our appearances changed because of relations with other species, but part of our emotional life and even our aesthetic senses have ties to ecology. Take taste, for instance: it's no coincident that fruit bearing seed ready to germinate tastes delightful, while unripe fruits -- those with seeds still readying themselves -- taste bitter. The bitterness is the plant's way of keeping hungry foragers from forcing the seeds into the world before their time. Other species have shaped not only human bodies, but human civilization -- take the lactose-tolerance that prevails in pastoral societies, and the way grasses and cattle have prospered by becoming the staple of many civilizations.

 This is popular science at its best: insightful, with lessons that apply across the whole of human existence, and enterprisingly written to boot. The implications for medicine are especially worth considering, and the book as a whole reminds of the law of unintended consequences.

Related:

• Guns, Germs, and Steel; Jared Diamond
• Why We Get Sick: the New Science of Darwinian Medicine,  Randolph M. Nesse, M.D; George C. Wiliams, Ph.D.
• Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan
• The Ghosts of Evolution, Connie Barlow 

The Ghosts of Evolution

The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsense Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms
© 2000 Connie Barlow
291 pages

Grocery stores are excellent places to encounter ghosts. They lurk in the fruit section, feasting on anachronisms.

The biological world is a wondrous web of connections between various animals and plants, and such connections are the source of evolution’s “endless forms most beautiful”. Not only does the contest between predators and prey – a biological ‘arms race’ – drive evolution, creating faster feet, sharper brains, and more discrete camouflage, but the mutually-supportive relationships between species shape them toward one another’s uses, , like leather molding itself into a glove over an offered hand. But what happens to the glove when the hand is ripped away – when one part of a cooperative pair vanishes into the mists of history and leaves its partner alone? Said partner becomes a living anachronism, and such anachronisms and their ghostly partners are the subject of this fascinating bit of science journalism that may be most readers’ introduction to the field of paleoecology.

Like an ethereal spectre waiting at a window for her beloved, every spring trees throughout the western hemisphere produce fruit for animals which no longer exist to consume them. The two American continents once looked very much like Africa,  being home to massive beasts. While some are familiar to us, like the mammoth, others are fantastic (sloths that make grizzlies look like pups?) and still others just seem misplaced, like American species of lions and tigers (andbearsohmy).  Barlow and her associates take a forensic approach to uncovering relationships between extinct and extant species. Although some bits of evidence seem obvious -- fruits and seeds which are too large for the mouth of any living species, but would have been easily gobbled up by the elephant-like gomphotheres --  her work relies on a wide variety of evidence.  Mouth sizes aren't everything: a given animal's intestines must also be taken into consideration. Some fruit require the digestive assistance of bacteria; some seeds need to be softened by stomach acid, or battered by gizzard stones before they can germinate.  So varied are the pieces of the puzzle that Barlow establishes a diagnostic profile for ascertaining if a given species is anachronistic, one that also determines the degree of anachronism.  While some species have found new markets for their produce (so to speak) in the form of horses and cattle brought over from Europe, others see their entire offering of fruit go to waste every year, and have survived the death of the megafauna only because they're exceptionally long-lived species who sometimes get lucky.In addition fruit, Barlow also illustrates how many plants are attempting to defend themselves against the muzzles and digestive systems of animals who haven't been around for centuries


Ghosts of Evolution is one of the most fascinating science books I've read in a long while. Like Sherlock Holmes taking Watson along to investigate a mystery in Victorian London, so Barlow takes the reader through the Pleistocene jungles with a grand mystery of her own. The text isn't as formal as most -- more a journalistic account of Barlow's investigation, and replete with dialogue between herself and a colleague as they puzzle matters through - but it's teeming with interest. Not only does she illustrate the rich biological heritage of the Americas while piecing together the puzzle, but what she does find offers lessons for modern-day conservation efforts. If we can figure out what kind of dynamics kept the landscape healthy in the past, perhaps we can make efforts to restore it. Her epilogue contains information about ecological approaches that have been inspired by work in this field: for instance, the idea that camels should be introduced to the North American desert plains to feast on certain pervasive species of scrub that have been allowed to become overly dominant thanks to a lack of natural predators....a lack created when said predators suddenly disappeared shortly after the arrival of humans in the Americas.

Why We Get Sick

Why We Get Sick: the New Science of Darwinian Medicine
© 1994 Randolph M. Nesse, M.D; George C. Wiliams, Ph.D.
290 pages

Years ago I read an exceptional book on evolution by David Sloan Wilson. I say exceptional because it advocated for freeing evolution from being mere natural history: instead, Wilson argued that we should use it to understand all matters biological, including medicine. He used as his example the case of morning sickness in pregnancies, revealing research that illustrated that far from being a problem to be solved, morning sickness is an adaptive behavior which protects fetuses from foods that might be toxic to them in their highly vulnerable state. This application of evolution floored me, and so you can imagine my delight to discover an entire book on the subject, Why We Get Sick.

For the most part, Why We Get Sick fulfills my anticipation, though its authors are writing mostly to introduce the concept of evolution-informed medicine to the public. Though they share the insights that research with this focus have revealed already,  in any more instances they can only offer speculation, as Darwinian medicine is still quite new. The book covers general health, and explains the science of injuries, nutrition, and sickness. They establish early on that the Darwinian model can help us understand a given disease's ultimate root, and avoid prolonging it in our clumsy efforts to dispels the symptoms. Often symptoms of a disease are actually the products of our own immune system, and if we disrupt those defenses the disease itself is given free reign. Fevers, for instance, are one of our body's ways of disrupting an infection. It doesn't matter to our genes if it makes us uncomfortable: they're more concerned with killing the invaders. But the invaders have their own defenses, and they adapt a lot more quickly than we do -- another reason some diseases to be here to stay, like the flu. The existence of multiple flu strains and our constant attempts to find new ways to kill them are evolution in action, the ongoing biological arms race.  Other physical ailments are hangovers of evolution, like our back problems and heel spurs;  walking upright on two feet is something our bodies are still getting used to. We haven't even started adapting to novel environments, another element of disease: we have bodies accustomed to hardship now living in a world of abundant, cheap food and easy living. Little wonder we struggle with obesity and problems of physical inactivity. And then there are the genetic diseases and strangely adaptive byproducts of mental illnesses...

Why We Get Sick is compact, dense, and brimming with information: the authors are writing to introduce people to the viewpoint,  so there's lot of enticing speculation. If one section doesn't catch your interest, rest assured another will. I for one am quite excited about this novel approach to medicine, and if health or evolution are of any interest to you, this intersection of the two should prove fascinating.

Related:

• American Mania: When More Isn't Enough, Peter Whybrow
• Evolution for Everyone, David Sloan Wilson 
• NPR news article on the "paleo diet" and Darwinian medicine