The neurological mechanics of reading revealed in Proust and The Squid

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

Of the many gifts with which evolution has blessed us, none are as consequential as humanity's ability to adapt. Our physiological capacity to endure the cold and the heat, the dry and the damp, the grim and the barren, have ensured the continuance of our species, but even these achievements pale in power next to the might of neuroplasticity, the ability of the human brain to literally re-program itself in response to the necessities of the individual. In the event that areas of the brain are damaged, malformed, or even underutilized, neuroplasticity allows the brain to re-task its other regions in order to regain necessary skills. It is a wonder that has saved and empowered humanity countless times, and yet, little did we know the critical role it has played in our capacity to read. Maryanne Wolf explains in her engaging work.

Without the written word, we would not have civilization. It's a grand claim, and yet, there can be little arguing it. After all, the written word has been, throughout our history, the most stable means by which to transmit information from generation to generation. Oral traditions served admirably well in the many millennia prior to the advent of alphabets, but such a means for knowledge transfer is highly unstable, subject to misremembering and misinterpretation, not to mention genocide. More than the accumulation of knowledge, though, the written word has given us complex mathematics with which we've built up a world capable of delivering us to the stars. A substantial achievement for something that does not come naturally to the human brain.

From signs to messages, from magazines to novels, we read every day, largely without conscious effort. And yet, in Proust and The Squid, Ms. Wolf argues that this fundamental element of our daily existence is, to us, an unnatural process, one that we have trained ourselves to perform. Drawing on her own research, as well as work from neuroscientists and linguists, she describes how reading is an outgrowth of the brain's capacity to recognize patterns and to extract meaning from them. This evolutionary talent, no doubt the result of the necessities of survival, is, in the reader, cultivated, over some 2,000 hours of intense training, into a system by which the individual can associate shapes with letters, letters with sounds, and sounds with language, creating a closed, linguistic circuit that allows us to not only communicate with our fellows but to imbibe knowledge from the troves of information left to us by the countless members of humanity who have come and gone.

Proust and The Squid is more than a rumination on the mechanics of reading, however. It is an examination of the many manifestations of this talent, how languages based on alphabets and hieroglyphs make different neurological connections, and how these connections can sometimes go astray. The most famous of these maladaptations is dyslexia, a disability Ms. Wolf has clearly studied at length. For these disabilities, and the social and emotional price they exact upon their sufferers, inject passion into the author's work here, transforming it from a thing of pure science to something of a call to arms, to understand and to eliminate such challenges.

While Proust and The Squid is, at times, fascinating and inspiring, it is plagued by a troubling narrowness of perspective. Ms. Wolf uses several admittedly potent statistics correlating reading with personal success to argue that it is a talent that must be cultivated for a full and informed life. But this advocacy seems to run completely counter to her fundamental premise, that reading is an unnatural cultivation of a neurological system that isn't designed to actualize it. Is it truly possible for reading to be so profoundly important when it is clearly not intrinsic to our natures? Is it not possible that reading is, rather, the most obvious means of knowledge transfer for the present? Ms. Wolf is alarmed by the propensity of our newest generation to immerse themselves in a world of touchscreens rather than books. And yet, touchscreens seem to be far more in line with the brain's natural visual systems than reading is. Perhaps, in the future, we will discover other means of knowledge transfer that are more efficient than the laborious programming of alphabets.

In this vein, that Ms. Wolf completely ignores those who read through listening is deeply disturbing. Entire industries have been created to service the many communities that either prefer or depend upon audiobooks for learning. In fact, I read Proust and The Squid as an audiobook because I lack a visual means to consume it. By Ms. Wolf's logic here, I too am cause for concern because I've chosen another way to learn. The author's alarmism over new technologies is a rejection of the very glory that gave us reading in the first place, our ability to adapt. Trust seems in order here, not dismay.

An interesting read, but one that is far more interested in providing encouragement to the dyslexic than it is in recognizing and mitigating its author's own lack of foresight... (3/5 Stars)

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A fascinating, educational takedown of atavistic thinking in Paleofantasy

From The Week of November 4th, 2013

While most of us look forward to the hope of tomorrow, its implicit promise that life will continue to improve, there are some for whom progress, in all its forms, is anathema. For these unchanging few, the world as it was is how it should be today, a place where man lives in harmony not only with the land but with himself and the countless generations that preceded him. There is value in this philosophy; after all, it is within our nature to be reckless, to adopt both technologies and social systems with an eagerness that defies both prudence and patience. The instinct to fall back, re-group and re-trench is one that should be cherished as inherited wisdom. But sadly, too often, this becomes an excuse to eschew progress, to continue forever as we were, out of some outmoded deference to tradition. This is not wisdom. It is wishful thinking. And that truth Marlene Zuk makes wonderfully clear in this engaging examination of humanity's past.

There can be no doubt that man is getting fat. As machines increasingly take up the burden of manual labor, and as our food continues to be charged with fats and sugars, there seems little hope for the expanding waistlines of humans the world over. Dieting offers some recourse to slimming down, but selecting the right one from the sea of options can be both daunting and aggravating. And even then, often the diets fail to yield the desired results. While most accept this as a fact of both existence and genetics, others see it as an outgrowth of a deeper problem. After all, if humanity has lived one way for hundreds of thousands of years and then, over the span of no more than a few millennia, suddenly revolutionizes every aspect of his traditional existence, from food to running, from society to population control, is it not possible that our physiological ills, from cancers to obesity, are outgrowths of this radical change? Evolution is surely too slow to make the adjustments we need to harmonize with our modern, agricultural, technological environment.

Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist, begs to differ. Deploying examples of notable evolutionary changes that have required only a few thousand years to become mainstays of human genetics, she strongly goes to bat for evolution, arguing that the proof of its swiftness lies in the very creatures with whom we share a planet. Insects, for instance, require sometimes only 20 generations to adopt or discard fundamental traits. Translated into human years, this would represent a mere five centuries, well within the window of time with which humanity has lived the very agricultural lifestyle that is supposedly so harmful to all and sundry. Perhaps the problem is within our minds and not within our pasts.

Adopting a lighthearted tone that does little to damage its credibility, Paleofantasy is an excellent takedown of the atavism that underpins fads like the Paleo Diet. And it is the thinking that is Ms. Zuk's target, not the diet itself. For such dieters are basing their assumptions of the effectiveness of their methods on what they consider to be scientific truths about humanity and evolution which the author argues are patently untrue. Throughout these 300, breezy pages, Ms. Zuk systematically disassembles the contentions of these paleoists, leaving little doubt in the minds of all but Paleo's most staunch supporters that, whatever it is, whatever it does, it is not scientific. Which takes us to the work's subtle but enduring theme.

Just because we can reason our way to a sensible conclusion doesn't mean the conclusion is right. On the contrary, history is littered with ironclad frameworks of logic that proved to be completely false, eugenics being both the most obvious and the most supposedly scientific example. Science, nay life in general, is strewn with false positives whose truths either contain so much beauty, or so much obviousness, that they simply had to be right. In fact, this is the very reason why science exists and is so important to the human endeavor. For if our instincts and our guesses were correct far more often than they were wrong, then we wouldn't need the scientific method to understand the truths around us. We could simply arrive at them through reason. This is clearly not the case.

This is not some mean-spirited polemic seeking to ravage the spirits and the hopes of those seeking answers. If it were, it would be no better than those it aims to discredit. No, it is an attempt to warn people that wanting to believe something is true doesn't make it so. And on the way, it is an excellent introduction to evolutionary biology, its fascinations, its glories and its frustrations. Excellent and engaging work... (4/5 Stars)

The Story Of Earth by Robert Hazen

From The Week of October 30, 2012 How does life begin? We live on a world teeming with plants and trees, insects and eagles, microbes and whales, a world on which life has coalesced in the depths of the oceans and on the peaks of our mountains. It is so prolific, so constant, that it has made it impossible to imagine its empty opposite, a barren rock, home to nothing more than ice and stone. But how did all of this begin? And what are the necessary conditions to ignite the wonder that lives beyond our doors? As much as it pains the mind to conceive of something blooming from nothing, Mr. Hazen challenges us to do precisely this in his epic examination of the origin of planet Earth.

Birthed during the violent tumult produced by the solar system's formation some 4.5 billion years ago, Earth is something of a miracle. For not only is it currently the only world in the known universe to support life, it survived comets, asteroids and even planetary collisions to become so much more than an icy rock. Certainly, its fortunate position in the so-called Goldylocks Zone, that advantageous band of cosmic real estate far enough from a star not to be fried and close enough not to be frozen, helped its cause, but this is far from the only necessary virtue for life's evolution. There must also be tides to stir the oceans, planetary rotation to evenly bake the surface in sunlight, a molten core to spur volcanic activity, and mechanisms for capturing and releasing carbon dioxide and oxygen in a beneficial, self-sustaining cycle. And even these are but a few components to providing life a warm and comfortable cradle.

However, the factor we consider least is the most important to Mr. Hazen, time, time for acids to learn how to become bacteria, for bacteria to learn how to be multicellular, for multicellular organisms to spread out and diversify, and for that life to populate the oceans and finally the land with the varieties of the ecosystem we see today. Time... For the planet to evolve, for our star to strengthen, for our moon to grow more distant, for our species to build upon millions of years of fortunate mistakes. Through rocks and mathematical modeling, from the mirrors on the moon to the fossilbeds in our seas, Mr. Hazen examines the fullness of that time, charting life's growth through Earth's successive eras, most of which would have been hostile to human existence. For even if we managed to survive the poisonous atmosphere, we would have surely been trampled by creatures out of our nightmares, manifestations that are now nothing more than ghosts trapped in ancient bones. These are the many faces of our Earth, an Earth that isn't really ours after all.

Though at times soupy with statistics, The Story of Earth is, in the main, a delightful journey through Earth's largely unrecognizable past. Drawing upon a career spent studying Earth's many and varied rocks, Mr. Hazen, a researcher at Carnagy-Mellon University, highlights the major eras in Earth's development, challenging our minds to imagine the strange and deadly faces that Earth has worn in eons past. For while we naturally think of Earth as a possession one, an ancient creature claimed by propagation and technology, it has existed infinitely longer and in infinitely harsher environs than we ever will. Mr. Hazen drives this home in a human-ego-deflating demonstration of research and discovery, mathematical modeling and reasonable imagination that, while occasionally numbing, is never thoughtless.

While we seem no closer to an answer on precisely how life, like the universe, kindled into being, Mr. Hazen infects his work here with a delightful sense of childlike awe and excitement that one imagines he has never lost. The thirst for discovery combined with the thrill of understanding provides the work a heartening momentum. Science and imagination mix together here into a well-spiced stew that is worthy of being sampled and appreciated. (4/5 Stars)

The Moreau Series by S. Andrew Swann

From The Week of October 08, 2012 Playing god is a tricky game. For as much as we have summoned the technical and cognitive powers to master various scientific disciplines, we are in no way divine. We lack that wealth of wisdom and understanding, of patience and vision, possessed by such theoretical beings. And yet, our expertise in the sciences has given us the keys to unlock the doors to the properties of the life around us, to alter the very genes upon which these organisms live and grow. Are these not the powers of god? And if so, do we not owe it to the life that we create that we take on the responsibilities of parenthood, of stewardship? These are vital questions we will all be forced to confront in the decades ahead, decades defined by genetic engineering and depleted resources. They are questions Mr. Swann confronts in his fascinating if overly bombastic series.

By the middle of the 21st century, war will have utterly reconfigured the world we know. From japan to India, Asia, including the Middle East, will be a wasteland, the devastated gestalt of several disconnected conflicts now known simply as the Pan-Asian War. Refugees from that consequential conflict have found their way to Europe and North America, further fraying the already decaying social safety nets present in those marginally healthier regions of the globe. Worse than the refugees, though, are the Moreau, genetically engineered soldiers from the Pan-Asian War which have flooded into the still-standing cities of the west.

The result of experiments designed to bestow upon the human form the many gifts of the animal kingdom, the Moreau are halfmen, humans crossed with strains of feline, rodent, ursine and canine. Blessed with speed and skill, claw and tooth, these fearsome creatures, made for war, have bred with one another, producing offspring who, while possessed of genes engineered for combat, have never experienced the depravities of the battlefield. No, these second generation Moreau know only the ghettos of the west into which they were born. These so-called Moritowns are 21st century slums, places of death and disease which have been scarred by neglect and exploitation. For other than the purposes of relieving their fetishistic urges, the humans who created the Moreau want nothing to do with them now that the wars are over. After all, the Moreau are walking, talking reminders of the abandonment of their own morality and forsaken responsibilities.

Into this tangled web of corrupt geopolitics and twisted science are dropped a loosely connected group of three genetic experiments, each of whom have found some kind of home in this challenging environment. Nohar Rajasthan is the son of a martyred deserter from the Pan-Asian War. A tiger strain, he rolls his talent for finding people into a career as a private investigator which lands him in the heart of a strange and explosive conspiracy. While clawing his way to the truth, he befriends angel Lopez, a young, Peruvian rabbit breed left for dead in the slums of Cleveland where Nohar was born, and encounters Evi Isham, an government asset formerly of Israeli intelligence engineered to be the perfect human soldier. Together and separately, they pry apart bits of a massive, multi-pronged coverup, the exposure of which is bound to completely transform human civilization.

Though infected by its own strain of over-the-top blockbusterism, The Moreau Series successfully imagines a near-future world contorted by human arrogance and selfishness. Mr. Swann, who went on to pen an excellent trilogy that build on this dystopian foundation, allows Nohar, Evi and angel to each feature in their own volume of this chronicle, a decision which permits us to become intimately familiar with the quirks and needs of the various forms of Moreau. Mr. Swann may not have the most creative prose, but what he lacks here in the way of polish he more than makes up for in inventiveness. For he's constructed a plausible, if grim, world, welded atop this morass of crippled ethics and broken dreams a vicious conspiracy, and wrapped this lethal package in layers of Hollywood thunder and 1940s-style whodoneits which hold together passably well. It's a conglomeration of styles and influences which neatly mirror Mr. Swann's Moreau who are themselves a hodgepodge of various genetic sources.

To whatever extent The Moreau Series is flawed in execution, it more than amply earns the benefit of the doubt by asking thoughtful questions that will inevitably make themselves the centerpiece of mainstream discourse in the years ahead. The Moreau are sentient weapons. They are things created by humanity to serve a single, destructive purpose. When that purpose is completed, they are abandoned, unwanted, subjects of an ugly chapter in history that humanity is ashamed to even acknowledge, let alone admit to. This is, of course, the natural result of innovation without wisdom, of creation without understanding. For all of the issues the Moreau face would have been perfectly obvious to their creators if they paused for a moment's thought. But no, driven by the necessities of war, and unhindered by conscience, they blazed forth and created a new race of beings that quickly discover their gods are profoundly flawed. We should all hope that, when our future selves inevitably grapple with precisely these dilemmas, they are not so shortsighted.

As engaging as it is hampered... The Moreau Series is not Mr. Swann's finest work, but there is much here to keep fans of ethics, science and combat well-entertained. (3/5 Stars)

The Hour Between Dog And Wolf by John Coates

From The Week of July 16, 2012

Of them any virtues bestowed upon us by curiosity, the desire to understand root causes must be considered one of the most consequential. For it has driven us to tease out the secrets of our universe, from the composition of the stars that shine in our skies to the meaning of the lives we live here on Earth. And it is precisely this desire to know, to understand, that has lead civilization on a steady march out of the ignorance of our past and into the hopeful promise of our technological future. But is this relentless search always to the good? For instance, does it guarantee us the right answer, or just an answer? And if it's just an answer, might we not be mislead by our conclusions, seduced into looking past the obvious to fixate on the data we've unearthed? I fear that this is precisely what Mr. Coates has done in this, his scientific analysis of the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Sparked by fears the world's largest banks might be holding billions of dollars worth of nearly worthless subprime mortgages, the 2008 Financial Crisis nearly dismantled our modern-day financial system. As fear of these bad securities spread through Wall Street, the credit markets, upon which investment banks depend on to make payroll each night, froze, causing the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the shock waves of which further churned up the already white-capped waters of the financial sector. Within a matter of months, the cancer spread not only to other American industries, but across the globe, a metastasization that would eventually lead to controversial federal bailouts of industries from insurance to automotive. This dour outcome has not only lead to the electoral overthrow of governments, it not only lead to the ignition of political movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, it has fostered a widespread distrust of the financial sector which is no longer viewed as operating in the interests of society.

So just how did this problem come about? What lead bankers to securitize -- that is to create a tradable commodity from -- dubious mortgages? Moreover, what caused otherwise self-interested traders on Wall Street to believe in these securities to the extent that they bet their fortunes and their futures on their longterm health? Mr. Coates, a Wall Street trader turned scientist, grapples with this consequential question of human behavior in The Hour Between Dog And Wolf, concluding that man is far from the commanding creature he considers himself to be. Drawing upon several studies, some of which he himself authored, Mr. Coates reveals the extent to which stock-trading causes humans to rely upon primitive fight-or-flight responses that, having evolved to help us survive the assaults of predators like bears and wolves, is poorly engineered for coping with the strange vicissitudes of financial markets. Instead of promoting prudence while on winning streaks or injecting confidence when on losing streaks, this primitive wiring fills winners with irrational and reckless confidence while imprisoning losers in the paralysis of indecision. Either outcome is, to say the least, far from ideal.

While The Hour Between Dog And Wolf is both thorough and learned, while it intensively speaks to the potential impact hormones have on human behavior, it is necessarily a defense of the conduct of the many men, and some women, who, having surrendered to the seductions of greed and selfishness, nearly drove the global economy off a cliff. The author summons every tool of scientific investigation to try to understand and explain the biological forces acting on these individuals, but with each justification, with every passing page, it becomes unavoidably clear that this attempt, for all its nobility, fails to state the obvious.

However much we are influenced by our biology, we remain in control of, and responsible for, our actions. No amount of dopamine or testosterone changes the fact we own all of what we do. For to deny this fundamental truth of human conduct is to call into question the fundamentals of personal responsibility. It is to excuse the actions of anyone who commits what society considers to be a crime. Imagine if Mr. Coates had set out to write a book explaining the biological, neurological and genetic underpinnings of pedophilia. We would have to acknowledge the science, but we in no way have to acknowledge the degree to which, by implication, the science exculpates pedophiles from the harm they selfishly do to those members of society who are too young to make their own choices. The pedophile, like the trader, might well try to argue that the science proves they were being seduced by their own wiring into committing crimes, that they are not responsible. But they must be! TO think otherwise is to not only allow them off the hook, it is to diminish the noble conduct of everyone who resists the urge to commit crimes even though they to are subject to the same wiring.

There can be no doubt that Mr. Coates has penned a fascinating analysis of stress and how humans operate under its influence, but the implication, however subtle, that this liberates them from owning the damage they've selfishly done is on the brink of being offensive. More importantly, it gives the next generation of traders a license to take the same foolish risks their forefathers did, a pattern which, at some point in the future, will force a systematic re-imagining of the financial trading system.

Fascinating but flawed work... (3/5 Stars)

Born in Africa by Martin Meredith

From The Week of March 26, 2012

The myriad mysteries that enshroud the origins of our species hold, for us, an endless fascination. They cause us to reach back thousands of years in search for elusive clues to those critical links in the evolutionary chain that can tell us from whence we've come and, perhaps, even for where we're destined. However, is the search for our origins not simultaneously the most and the least consequential drama of our age?

On one hand, satisfactorily solving such queries might lead to the end of racism and speciesism, cultural blights that have tormented us and our planet for centuries now. Scientific proof might force us all to acknowledge our common origins. But on the other hand, science can never entirely dispel the bigotry that lives on in our hearts. Science has proven that the world is billions of years old and yet the devout among us insist otherwise. Reason does not always reach the stubborn.

Such questions of consequence spin through Mr. Meredith's riveting history of humanity. For, here, he has catalogued our efforts to solve the fundamental questions of the why, the how, and the when from which we've come, He follows the generations of scientists and bonehunters who have combed our world's oldest places, searching relentlessly for answers that might well have eluded us entirely were it not for advancements in genetics. These truthseekers did not undertake such journeys for profit; in fact, most appear to have practically starved, often pouring their last pennies into an effort to glimpse the fundamentals of our species. Largely without external funding, many seekers have been scorned for their discoveries, bone-truths that throw up inconvenient narratives about who we are and from whom we've come. This treatment has nursed rivalries, encouraged frauds and empowered familial dynasties, all of which color this most epic hunt across Africa for the origins of humanity.

From deserts to caves, from labs to museums, Born in Africa is a wonderfully concise expose of a century-long battle over the story of our beginnings. Divided into two primary sections, part I deals with the dogged and underfunded scientists who have characterized this search. The author unknots their dysfunctional community, revealing how discord contorts life on the fringes of scientific respectability. Part II is a chronicle of what we know so far. After exposing us to the multiregional hypothesis of our origins in part I, here, he lays out the single-origin theory which is now widely accepted in mainstream science. In doing so, Mr. Meredith explains how, despite the fact that modern humans are believed to have migrated out of Africa in a series of waves, beginning some 120,000 years ago, there is evidence of human habitation in Europe and Asia that predate such migrations. The clear narrative leaves little doubt of the theory's solidity.

Born in Africa is a swift and fascinating read that tackles a difficult and contentious subject with intelligence and insight. The rivalries are as engrossing as the science. This is guaranteed to enlighten all but the most primatologically informed. (4/5 Stars)

The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice

From The Week of March 05, 2012

Though there's no doubt that our cultural fascination with the supernatural emanates from any number of subconscious or animalistic sources, the main driver must be our desire for individuality. After all, our lives are characterized by the need to distinguish ourselves from the pack, to stand out, to earn a mate who will help us pass on our genes. Yes, society eventually grinds us down into conformity, but the cumulative effect of this cultural sandpapering cannot touch our formative years. Here, everything is possible. For the passage of time has not yet convinced us that we are not special. It has not yet robbed us of the dream of being unique, of leaving our imprint upon the world. What's more unique than being vested with supernatural powers? What's more special than belonging to that rare other that stands apart from the teeming masses? As a lifelong purveyor of such notions, Ms. Rice taps into this desire and more in her expansive, entertaining and ultimately unoriginal novel.

The 23-year-old son of a wealthy, bay-area surgeon, Reuben Golding is a journalist trying to find himself in a world of possibilities. Infantilized by his overprotective mother and his patronizing girlfriend, both of whom believe him an innocent incapable of wisdom without their intervention, he is a restless and questing soul when he meets the beautiful and elegant Marchent Nideck, a mysterious creature whose seductive powers are augmented by the magnificent mansion she calls home. Here, in the long shadows cast by the Redwood Forest, Marchent introduces Reuben to her world of art and literature, genealogy and inheritance. For she and her two brothers appear to be the last of the long, Nideck line now that her uncle, Felix, has gone missing.

During Reuben's stay at the house, he and Marchent grow close, so much so that Marchent wills Reuben the grand house, knowing that he will be a worthy steward. But no sooner has she completed this act of generosity then she is violently murdered by her wayward brothers, an attack that nearly claims Reuben's life as well. He, however, is spared by a mysterious wolf who avenges Marchent before disappearing and leaving Reuben to recover from his terrible wounds in a San Francisco hospital where his doctors are utterly baffled by his recuperative powers. Even the wolf bite he took from the thing that spared his life is fading, just like all the blood and tissue samples the doctors take from him, vanishing before they can be studied, understood.

Recognizing that Reuben is a changed man, no longer the baby boy they trained him to be, Reuben's mother and girlfriend look on as Reuben draws away from them. Hounded by voices, by urges, he tries to hold himself together until he can resist the change no longer and he succumbs to the Manwolf, a creature of power and grace that is set to turn California on its ear and usher Reuben into a twilight world of friends and foes, power and legend, that humans will never comprehend.

The Wolf Gift is classic Anne Rice. Though it is too damning to contend that all her books are alike, it is, nonetheless, impossible to ignore the tropes here that she herself had a hand in creating. The supercilious women, the majestic mansion and the conspiracy of ancients are all present, energizing The Wolf Gift as much as they did her previous and most famous series. In this, her latest offering is unoriginal fare. Its reliance on long stretches of dialogue, its digressions into splashy passages of violence and self-absorption, and its drive towards a predictable conclusion inhibit any effort to think otherwise. However, this weakness is also the work's strength. For fans of Ms. Rice will be able to indulge in all the familiar rhythms of her literature. And in light of how well the author sells, this will do more than enough to secure the work's profitability.

Nonetheless, notwithstanding the extent to which Ms. Rice helped popularize the supernatural genre, one cannot help but sense the author's desire to wade into a literary space rocked by the Twilight phenomenon and show those who came after her exactly how it's truly done. For, in the end, The Wolf Gift is little more than a glossy, grown-up version of the many vampire/werewolf derivations that have bombarded us in the last ten to fifteen years. The work is not without merit -- its landscapes are lush, its action cinematic, its journey well-paced --, but it is impossible to read this novel and find in it anything original or noteworthy. Instead of imposing her imprimatur upon the werewolf genre, Ms. Rice has only succeeded in summoning a stayed supernatural tale and repackaging it in prettier wrapping. (3/5 Stars)

The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal

From The Week of September 19, 2011

Though we may, at some point in the future, discover that we are not Earth's only highly intelligent species, this much is inarguable. We are the masters of Earth. Perhaps, in the decades and the centuries to come, we will even be the masters of outer space, and the planets we'll find out in that immeasurable vastness. With this in mind, there are surely few academic pursuits more important than primatology, the study of the apes from which we have evolved. After all, short of a gigantic leap forward in our understanding of the human brain, it will be through studying these creatures that we will understand ourselves. And we must understand ourselves if we are to survive long enough to build a better, grander future. To that end, The Age of Empathy does not disappoint.

From mirror neurons to Emotional contagion, from Selection Pressure to Targeted Helping, Mr. de Waal, a primatologist and professor of primate behavior, endeavors, in The Age of Empathy investigate the roots and the components of empathy in primates. After all, looked at superficially, empathy, that is identifying oneself with another's pain, ought to be a weakness, not a strength. It causes us to sacrifice our hard-earned resources and privileges to bring aid to others, some of whom are strangers who we may never meet again. For creatures so obviously driven by self-interest, how could such an Achilles heel have been allowed to persist?

Mr. de Waal argues that, far from a weakness, empathy is a vital cog in the wheel that drives human communities. For it is empathy that allows us to connect with our fellows, to form relationships with our loved ones, to bind ourselves with our friends in common and related cause. We only think of empathy as weak because of the extent to which the Social Darwinists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have distorted evolution in order to fit it into their central fantasy, that humans are driven by self-interest because only the fittest survive. This theory has propagated through human culture not because it is right, but because it justifies the ruthlessness with which the few can exploit the many. Mr. de Waal points out that this theory is clearly wrong. Every time it has been tried, suppressing empathy in favor of self-interest, the communities in question have been riddled with coldly calculating creatures who are tragically damaged and incapable of kindness. Given that such communities are, in primates and inhumanity, vastly outnumbered by communities founded on empathy and shared purpose, the theory of rational self-interest must be wrong.

Drawing on his decades of experience observing and learning from primates, Mr. de Waal replaces self-interest with a broader theory of human nature, that, in order to survive, primates became social beings and that humans have only emphasized this trait in their own evolution. For creatures to socially coexist, empathy is essential for the creation of relationships that knit communities together. More importantly, empathy is a stepping stone to trust which is the currency of human relationships, not self-interest. This has been demonstrated not only in experiments with primates, but in numerous examinations of other animals and, of course, countless human experiences.

The Age of Empathy is provocative work. Mr. de Waal is unafraid to extrapolate the lessons he has learned from studying primates and to apply them to both human behavior and human politics. While a sincere admirer of the American spirit, highlighting the United States as perhaps the lone country in the world where achievement beyond ones fellows is celebrated as a great and commendable goal, he is deeply critical of the extent to which the American people have lapsed into an unhealthy distrust of their government. In pointing out how important the virtues of trust and fairness are to primates, he clearly believes that this enmity will only sow discord within the American community and drive away quality people from what are the country's most critical posts. In this, Mr. de Waal connects his academic work to the broader world in a way that transforms the series of fascinating experiments described here into lessons on human nature that could profoundly impact the way we interact with one another. Though the author convincingly dispels the myth of survival of the fittest, he does not convince the reader that he has all the answers. But then, vitally, he never claims to have all the answers. He only endeavors to discover them and opine on their meaning which is its own form of admirable behavior.

This is popular science for those looking to nature for answers to questions about human nature. For those who do not believe that primates have anything to offer us, they will find here only frustration and fodder for polemics. (4/5 Stars)

Kluge by Gary Marcus

Humans have, in less than ten-thousand years, transformed themselves from sparse bands of hunter-gatherers, who committed the whole of their short lives to just surviving in a hostile world, into a global civilization of seven billion souls that has conquered its rivals, its environment and many of its own weaknesses in an unstoppable surge towards a coherent understanding of ourselves and the universe. Everything we use we've invented, adapted. Nothing was given to us. But Mr. Marcus has no time for these inconvenient truths. To hear him tell our tale, we're nothing more than the accretion of evolution's mistakes.

The human mind, Mr. Marcus argues in Kluge is an assemblage of systems cobbled together to defend us from existential threats that no longer plague us. From our contextual memories, to our anxious emotions, to our self-centered worldviews, the reader is escorted on a tour of the mind's major processes. First, plausible explanations are provided for how memory, emotion and reasoning evolved then Mr. Marcus, a research psychologist, suggests how our minds could have functioned had they evolved differently. One example of this is his comparison of computer memory with human memory. The former is comprised of a series of logically numbered addresses, each of which contain discrete and knowable bits of information. The latter, meanwhile, is a hodgepodge of experiences which do not appear to be stored in any logical way.

Kluge makes a number of disturbing assumptions which undermine its argument. While it's true that the human mind has spent infinitely more time adapting to an ape's world of predatory threats than it has adapting to our world of human civilization, and while this may burden us with certain unnecessary weaknesses, this completely misses the point. The primary virtue of humanity is its ability to adapt to anything. Poor recall, emotional fragility, and defective reasoning are not failures of the mind, they are failures of instruction. Our civilization has not yet figured out the ideal way to teach its youngest, its clean slates, how to think, how to be emotionally stable, how to remember. We haven't come close to maximally wiring the human mind, training up its strengths and minimizing its weaknesses. What's more, it's far from clear that we are capable of handling all of the improvements Mr. Marcus so casually yearns for. Certainly, Jill Price would argue that Mr. Marcus' Postal Code memory is a quick way to drive oneself insane. More over, Mr. Marcus failed to convince me that his Postal Code memory would not deprive the human mind of the experience-based insight and intuition we rely upon to make progress in our world. Nowhere in these 210 pages does Mr. Marcus seriously consider the possible, negative consequences of his improvements. He just assumes evolution built the human mind up from the scraps it had to hand, not considering that it may have bestowed the human mind with all it could handle. He may be right, but his failure to consider any alternative explanations, much less to explore the consequences of his improvements, makes Kluge not much more than one man's gnashing over human imperfection. That's novel.

This is engaging and provocative work, but its over-eagerness to point out how the human brain could be improved leads it to breezy and shallow conclusions. (2/5 Stars)

Life Ascending by Nick Lane

From The Week of January 23, 2011

We might as well toss out all of the dreadfully boring, high school biology textbooks students slog through every year and replace them with this incredibly dense but admirably compelling description of the evolution of life on Earth. Yes, for those of us who slept through biology, it's a 400 page, information-rich, data dump which may need to be read several times before all its concepts are fully grasped; but unlike with high school biology, this time, devotion will pay off with enlightenment. I've never read a book that did more to advance my understanding of the basics of science and, as readers of this blog can attest, I've read a couple books.

The genius of this book is its structure. Whereas my education in biology had no o organizing principle, no founding premise, to elevate information into knowledge. Students learn about hearts and eyes and muscles and tissue, but there isn't a narrative, a why. We're humans; for those of us who lack a mind predisposed to enjoying science, we need what we're learning to connect to something. We need it to fit into the larger picture of life. In starting out at the beginning of life on our planet, then deploying each subsequent chapter to describe an advancement made by that original life, all in the name of evolving, of growing, of propagating, the reader gains an invaluable glimpse of that larger tapestry. Bacteria was locked into the depths of our world, unable to break free, until it figured out a way to save up the energy to propagate. Once it managed that, it needed a code to carry instructions if it was going to ever be more than bacteria. And so DNA gave rise to more complex organisms which, of course, needed to be able to move around to survive. And so muscles were developed. Circulatory systems for better performance, brains for organization, eyes for precision in navigation, sex for reproduction... It's all so painfully logical!

I imagine that some will criticize Mr. Lane for streamlining the development of life on Earth. I'm sure, in reality, there were many more fits and starts, trials and errors, than those related here, but we work from what we know. And the truth is that we will probably never have a complete picture of life's development because too much of it has been permanently lost to the billions of years required to advance from bacteria to New York City. And so, though Mr. Lane's reconstruction of life's ascension is at risk of inductive reasoning, it simply makes too much sense to be less than authentic. Yes, it's heavy; yes, it sometimes feels as if there's too much here to fit inside a single skull and that, at some point, ones brain will give up and go on strike, but the joy that comes from glimpsing the big picture overwhelms the difficulty. This is a wonderful achievement. Creationists, beware. (5/5 Stars)

PS: My apologies to the biology teachers the world over. You do wonderful work. I blame the curriculum.

Babylon Babies by Maurice G. Dantec

From The Week of October 03, 2010

There's a kind of genius in science fiction. No other genre depends more upon the ability of its authors to speculate on the future's social, technological and scientific trends. Consequently, it is a genre which often produces both works of wonderful imagination and works of staggering miscalculation. Though Babylon Babies has an intriguing premise, it has more in common with the latter camp than the former.

The year is 2013 and the world is about to change. Marie, a young woman, recently liberated from a genetic experiment conducted in Siberia, carries inside her the next evolution of humanity. Marie, who is a schizophrenic, needs to hook up with allies expecting her in Montreal, Canada, but she can't reach them on her own. Enter Hugo Toorop, a war-scarred antihero whose mercenary talents were honed in the Balkan wars. Toorop agrees to shepherd Marie to Montreal, but along the way he learns far more about her, and the future, than is safe to know. In a world of gangsters, government agencies and information dealers, Toorop is tasked to keep Marie alive until her destiny is complete. But is he willing to exist in a world where her promise is made reality?

Mr. Dantec is clearly a deep thinker. His speculation on the nature of human consciousness and intelligence and their relationships with schizophrenia is fascinating and disturbing. This, coupled with musings on the consequences of genetic manipulation and the nature of the next great leap forward in science, provide the story a solid, Sci-Fi platform. Meanwhile, Toorop and Marie are fully realized characters shouldering weighty burdens. Not only have they each suffered a dark past, they have a vital role to play in giving birth to the next evolution of humanity, Marie to give it life and Toorop to decide if it is worthy of coming into existence. Together, premise and protagonists ought to be enough to actualize this story, but dislocated subplots, inconsequential digressions, and too much damn weirdness clog up what ought to be a quality tale. Of the 520 odd pages, at least half is nonessential padding which, rather than add to the story, only succeeds in diminishing its impact. Promisingly incisive, but profoundly flawed. (2/5 Stars)

The Next Fifty Years by John Brockman

From The Week of October 03, 2010

Unless someone has secretly built a time machine by which they can experience the future, no living person can possibly have a clear picture of what life will be like in 50 years. Futurists have made valiant attempts, and I'm sure corporations have launched investigations into the question as a means of anticipating business trends, but in a world evolving this quickly, in a world populated by more experts in more fields than ever before, life in 2050 is simply too vast, shaped by too many variables, for any one person to grasp. Okay, so, screw it. Let's all go home, right? Not so fast. Maybe one mind isn't up to the challenge, but what about many minds, each with specialized expertise?

While the accuracy of their predictions won't be known for some time, the experts assembled here, from environmentalists, to health care professionals, to technologists, do not let uncertainty stop them from opining, in a series of fascinating and entertaining essays, on the future of human life. Will we have robot companions? What diseases will we have eliminated? Will we considerably extend our lifespans? What sort of physics will have been uncovered? All these queries and more are attacked by some of the sharpest scientific minds we have and their answers will at times surprise and terrify. The world they collectively describe may not be a world you wish to live in, but it is a world we will have adjusted to, a world of our own creation. If nothing else is certain, we can know this much. It will be a world that will look nothing like the world of now.

The highlights here are numerous, but my favorite essay is by Judith Rich Harris who composes her entry in the form of a letter from 2050 to us in the present. It's a surprisingly effective device which is filled in with a convincing narrative. Lowlights include essays on philosophy and psychology which, while interesting, come across as far too abstract to edify, but then this has always been the curse of such mental sciences. They must necessarily deal in a world of theories and models which cannot be put to mathematical tests. A good balance between the technical and the superficial and, as such, is a wonderful, edifying read. Bring on 2050! (3/5 Stars)

Genome by Matt Ridley

From The Week of July 18, 2010

Mr. Ridley's breakdown of the 23 chromosomal pairs that comprise the human genome succeeds in its effort to educate and entertain. The clever way in which Mr. Ridley has connected each chromosome to a human trait allows him to not only explore the purpose of a given chromosome, but to investigate its sociological equivalents. Unfortunately, Genome suffers from the flaw of most books of popular science, particularly ones that cover rapidly evolving fields, of which genetics is one. Virtually at the moment of its printing, the book is inevitably out of date, with the latest research challenging what is necessarily an incomplete picture of a poorly understood system.

Mr. Ridley packs so much information into this narrative of genetics that it sometimes overwhelms a mind only conversationally aware of many of its key points. It will likely have to be read twice to be completely understood, but this will be a virtue for the innately curious. After all, this is a tome which discusses everything from the origins of sex and free will, to intelligence and instinct, a boldly broad scope for a single effort. Consequently, there is very little fluff here as the reader learns of the basics of DNA, its codes, its systems, its capacity to proliferate and repair, all necessities for the evolution of life on Earth.

There are glaring omissions. A failure to discuss the role that master genes play in the development of the species leaves out a vital cog in a machine that Mr. Ridley otherwise describes in vivid detail. But while the picture is incomplete, Mr. Ridley is admirably honest about just how little we know of the human genome. Yes, its mechanisms can be understood, but all its outcomes, the impact of its myriad combinations and functions? For that, we will have to wait years. But I would much rather an author admit to a lack of understanding than attempt to pretend as though he has the only true story. None of us have the complete truth of anything. It's an honesty that serves this enlightening chronicle well. (3/5 Stars)

Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean Carroll

From The Week of May 23, 2010

Though Professor Carroll's book is one of the most challenging texts of popular science I've read to date, it is worthy of the time spent deconstructing it. I've not encountered a single book that has gone farther in explaining the mechanics behind the diversity of species that exist on our planet.

Since Charles Darwin lifted the curtain on evolution, biologists have been striving to uncover the essence of life's diversity. Why is a bird a bird and an elephant an elephant? Geography can't be the only factor involved in the evolution of such wildly different creatures. The answer, explains Professor Carroll, a molecular biologist, lies in our genetic structure.

Bodies have blueprints. These aren't plans hidden away in some cabinet somewhere. The plans exist inside the embryo, a set of root instructions for how the embryo should develop and what it should develop into. The executors of this body plan are a set of genes known as Master Genes. Imagine that the body, as it grows, is like an office tower under construction. The genes which build the body are the various crews working on the tower. The Master Genes, meanwhile, are the foremen of these crews, instructing the grunts on where to put the windows, how long the hallways should be, and generally overseeing development. Simply put, every embryo needs a road map in order to develop into something that resembles its parents. The genes that build toes are fundamentally the same as the genes that build fingers. It's the Master Genes that ordethem to build fingers on hands and toes on feet. and so, without the road map, the organism would become a blob of disordered features that would soon expire from sheer chaos. Master Genes give us our shape and, in the process, explain why a bird is a bird and an elelphant is an elephant. Body plans morph over evolutionary time. Master genes mutate, or are overwritten, issuing different instructions to the footsoldier genes which, in turn, create a different body plan.

This is a massively oversimplified version of Professor Carroll's gripping explanation of the basics of both our world and his field of Evolutionary Development, a field which seeks to lay out the fundamental rules of life, its variety and how it evolves from one form into another. He also discusses other components of evolution, their discoverers, their experiments and their breakthroughs, providing a number of photographic aids to help along the newcomer. More over, it is Professor Carroll's determination to stay within the boundaries of common English that allows neophytes like myself to enjoy his work so much. As fascinating for those interested in evolution as it is for those seeking a better explanation for how our planet teems with such a diversity of life. (4/5 Stars)