I started this book in March, the second selection for the 2010 Freethinker’s Science Book Club.  It was just before the semester became a long series of deadlines and the book was recalled by another patron of my local library.  Once the semester ended, I checked it out again and finished it in a little over a week.

Remarkable Creatures is a collection of short biographies of “adventurers,” starting with Alexander von Humbolt, the Dutch naturalist whose Personal Narrative describing his explorations of South America inspired Charles Darwin.  Darwin’s chapter was mostly a rehash of material I’ve read elsewhere, which I would expect given my field. But the remainder of the book, even the chapters on Eugène Dubois (who discovered Homo erectus) and the Leakey family (who combined discovered the majority of hominin fossils in Africa) – whose discoveries I teach in my intro physical anthropology classes – presented richly detailed portraits of some of the pivotal figures in the field of evolutionary biology.

One of the more interesting chapters for me was “The Day the Mesozoic Died,” the story of the discovery of the K-T boundary in the fossil record. Disclaimer: I am an anthropological geneticist, but one of my undergrad degrees is in zoology. I was one of those kids who went through the dinosaur fascination phase, and later considered being an astronaut. So this chapter, with the mystery of the “end of the dinosaurs,” and the radical notion that it had come from outer space, was right up my alley. The formidable accumulation of evidence of an extraterrestrial source of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, and rejection of other hypotheses (volcanic eruption), is an elegant account of both the transdisciplinary and skeptical nature of science.

The final two chapters discuss the tension between paleoanthropologists and molecular anthropologists in the quest to understand human origins, and are now dated, due the recent work on the Neandertal genome.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Despite that, the book is a great introduction to breadth of research subsumed in evolutionary biology. The life stories of these remarkable scientists will hopefully inspire a new generation of researchers.

***

There are also children’s biographies of some of these explorers (and others), for those who might want to encourage their little scientists.

• Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution
• Dragon Bones and Dinosaur Eggs: A Photobiography of Explorer Roy Chapman Andrews
• Dinosaurs Of Waterhouse Hawkins
• Mary Leakey: Archaeologist Who Really Dug Her Work (Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Inventors and Scientists) (Their series on artists and musicians is fantastic, I can’t wait to get these for my younger kids.)

***

July’s picks for the 2010 Freethinker’s Book Club are

Happy reading!

[T]wo subjects which moved my Father perhaps more deeply than any others were cruelty to animals & slavery – his detestation of both was intense, and his indignation was overwhelming in case of any levity or want of feeling on these matters.  – William Darwin

The trick to finishing books this year is getting up early, apparently.  I managed to get through the last four chapters of Darwin’s Sacred Cause this weekend while the baby slept. In the process, I’ve had to come to terms with  the disquieting beginnings of my own discipline and the bloody and violent antecedents of the town I’ve called home for the past dozen years.

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln share a birthday, but they also share a tumultuous period in history. I’ve always been struck by the realization that Origin of Species was published just a few short years before the Civil War. After reading Darwin’s Sacred Cause, I get the idea that it was not coincidental.  Yes, Darwin sat on his big idea for 20 years, publishing travel journals, works on geology, and a four-volume monograph on barnacles. Why barnacles?  First, to document the amount of variation present in species, which natural selection requires to operate; and second, to establish himself as a knowledgeable naturalist in the eyes of the Royal Society, and provide the credentials needed to discuss his theory. In addition, describing the complete lineage of these marine arthropods provided an example of common descent. Barnacles were a proxy for a much more controversial topic – human variation.

Not science

Human variation is what I study as a biological (or physical) anthropologist. Physical anthropology has its roots, at least in part according to the authors, in phrenology. That’s the pseudo-science of determining temperament from the shape of the skull.  Not surprisingly, given that phrenology developed in Europe, Europeans were said to have the most refined skulls, and phrenological findings were used to justify slavery, something Darwin’s entire family was against.  Darwin would not have been impressed with the physical anthropologists of his day, especially in America, where differences in skull morphology were seen as “proof” of a polygenic origin of humans. According to the polygenists, each human “race” had its own pair of progenitors and were separately created, an idea used to justify all sorts of atrocities, since non-Europeans were seen as less than human. Darwin held the monogenist view, and saw all peoples as descended from a common ancestor, meaning they were all worthy of being treated with dignity and respect, and slavery was unjustified.  Actually, he took it farther than that, and saw a common ancestor for all living things.

It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another.–We consider those, where the cerebral structure/intellectual faculties most developed, as highest.–A bee doubtless would when the instincts were. – Charles Darwin

He spent a number of years studying pigeons, just to demonstrate that all the fancy breeds (“races”) descended from a common ancestor. Another proxy for human variation.

Darwin’s Pigeons – from Variation in Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), with the common ancestor, the rock dove, in the center.

The tension between these two worldviews played out in my hometown, before the Civil War even started. In 1856, Sheriff Samuel Jones led a pro-slavery posse into Lawrence, Kansas, which had been established by abolitionist settlers two years before, sacked the town, burned the Free State Hotel, smashed the presses, and killed an antislavery supporter.

The ruins of the Free State Hotel

Darwin’s mentor and friend, geologist Charles Lyell, who encouraged him to publish his ideas on natural selection, was a Southern sympathizer. The Anthropological Society of London was founded in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, with three Confederate agents on the council, whose sole purpose was to push a pro-slavery agenda.

Plaque marking the site of the Free State Hotel, downtown Lawrence.

That’s what Darwin was up against.  Not just other naturalists, but Victorian society. No wonder he waited two decades to publish.

My discipline has come a long way since Darwin’s day.  The American Anthropological Association’s “Statement on Race and Intelligence” states in part:

WHEREAS all human beings are members of one species, Homo sapiens, and

WHEREAS, differentiating species into biologically defined “races” has proven meaningless and unscientific as a way of explaining variation (whether in intelligence or other traits),

THEREFORE, the American Anthropological Association urges the academy, our political leaders and our communities to affirm, without distraction by mistaken claims of racially determined intelligence, the common stake in assuring equal opportunity, in respecting diversity and in securing a harmonious quality of life for all people.

And the American Association of Physical Anthropologists has their own “Statement on Biological Aspects of Race,” which says:

Physical, cultural and social environments influence the behavioral differences among individuals in society. Although heredity influences the behavioral variability of individuals within a given population, it does not affect the ability of any such population to function in a given social setting. The genetic capacity for intellectual development is one of the biological traits of our species essential for its survival. This genetic capacity is known to differ among individuals. The peoples of the world today appear to possess equal biological potential for assimilating any human culture. Racist political doctrines find no foundation in scientific knowledge concerning modern or past human populations.

–

Image Credits:

Ryan Somma’s flickr stream

Wikimedia Commons

Dr. Steven M. Carr’s website

So we’re coming to the end of February, and I’m still reading Darwin’s Sacred Cause, having rechecked it from the library – twice.  Not able to get as much pleasure reading done as I had planned, especially this semester.  I’m taking three classes (Epidemiology, Biostats II, and Grant Writing), plus developing my own research projects and participating in a faculty development program.  I’m also in the process of prepping for two conferences this Spring, and writing up portions of my dissertation for publication (looks like 4 articles). All great things that I’m thoroughly enjoying, but I still have a couple of chapters to go on January’s book.

Not that I haven’t gotten any reading done.  I have a bit of a commute, so I’ve tapped into the audiobook offerings at my local library, and this month I listened to Emma by Jane Austen, and Full House by Steven Jay Gould.  I wish more of the books for this year’s book club were available in audio format, as it would make better use of my time.

Going forward, I think what I’ll do (at least until summer) is choose two books for the month, and pick one to read.

The picks for March are:

Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species

Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers

***

Speaking of Spring conferences, the first one is coming up next week.  I’ll be tweeting from the Interdisciplinary Exploration of Migration (#kumigration).

One of the other things I missed while trapped in dissertation purgatory was reading books. Actual full-length books not related to my research. A quick search of the blog shows I read exactly 2 books in 2009. Pathetic. Especially from someone who was known for always having a book with her, even in the shower (paperbacks only). The woman who used to joke that it was a good thing she didn’t smoke, because she didn’t have enough money for cigarettes AND books, and who boasted that the only room in her house without a bookshelf was the bathroom.

My previous relationship with books.

The luxury of long showers disappeared when I had children, and my leisure reading time evaporated over the last couple of years, partially from the demands of grad school, and also from the development of my other hobby, knitting, which gave me a much needed sense of accomplishment when analyses weren’t going well or I couldn’t face revising another chapter. A new baby put the brakes on knitting, though, as it’s difficult to hold pointy needles with a baby in your lap. But a book, I might be able to do, and it would be more educational than watching the latest on demand comedy special while the baby nurses and naps.

Inspired by MaryMac at Pajamas & Coffee, I’m starting a book club for 2010 here at Freethinker’s. While Mary is doing the NY Times Top 10 Books of 2009 in 10 weeks (10 in 10 in ’10), I’ve chosen a dozen of the best science books published in the last year, and can’t come up with a catchy acronym. After scouring the best book lists from a variety of sources (see below) here are my picks:

• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (A, R, C, S, T, Y)
• Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (I, N)
• Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species (A, E, F)
• Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World (F, N)
• Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human (N)
• Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers (P)
• The Natural History of Unicorns (N, W)
• Boyle: Between God and Science (D)
• First Principles: The Crazy Business of Doing Serious Science (P)
• The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
  (A, P, N, E)
• Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention
  (W, N)
• Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics
  (N)

I’ve decided to read these in chronological order from the date of publication, which means that Darwin’s Sacred Cause is up first. From the jacket: 

There has always been a mystery surrounding Darwin: How did this quiet, respectable gentleman, a pillar of his parish, come to embrace one of the most radical ideas in the history of human thought? It’s difficult to overstate just what Darwin was risking in publishing his theory of evolution. So it must have been something very powerful—a moral fire, as Desmond and Moore put it—that propelled him. And that moral fire, they argue, was a passionate hatred of slavery.

To make their case, they draw on a wealth of fresh manuscripts, unpublished family correspondence, notebooks, diaries, and even ships’ logs. They show how Darwin’s abolitionism had deep roots in his mother’s family and was reinforced by his voyage on the Beagle as well as by events in America—from the rise of scientific racism at Harvard through the dark days of the Civil War.

Leading apologists for slavery in Darwin’s time argued that blacks and whites had originated as separate species, with whites created superior. Darwin abhorred such “arrogance.” He believed that, far from being separate species, the races belonged to the same human family. Slavery was therefore a “sin,” and abolishing it became Darwin’s “sacred cause.” His theory of evolution gave all the races—blacks and whites, animals and plants—an ancient common ancestor and freed them from creationist shackles. Evolution meant emancipation.

In this rich and illuminating work, Desmond and Moore recover Darwin’s lost humanitarianism. They argue that only by acknowledging Darwin’s Christian abolitionist heritage can we fully understand the development of his groundbreaking ideas. Compulsively readable and utterly persuasive, Darwin’s Sacred Cause will revolutionize our view of the great naturalist.

I’d like to invite my readers to join in the fun.  Feel free to read along with me, or choose your own favorite science book.  We’ll read one a month for 2010, and all be more science literate at the end.

If 12 books a year is not an achievable goal, for whatever reason, please consider the Science Book Challenge 2010. To participate:

1. Read at least three nonfiction books in 2010 related to the theme “Nature & Science”. Your books should have something to do with science, scientists, how science operates, or the relationship of science with our culture. Your books might be popularizations of science, they might be histories, they might be biographies, they might be anthologies; they can be recent titles or older books. We take a very broad view of what makes for interesting and informative science reading, looking for perspectives on science as part of culture and history.
2. After you’ve read a book, write a short note about it giving your opinions of the book. Tell us what you’d tell a friend if you wanted to convince your friend to read it–or avoid it.

Yay for science literacy!

Sources:

• The Best of 2009: Amazon Editors Picks in Science (A)
• The Royal Society 2009 Longlist (R)
• The Economist Books of the Year (E)
• Financial Times Books of the Year (F)
• Christian Science Monitor Best Nonfiction Books of 2009 (C)
• New Scientist Best Books of 2009 (N)
• Physics World Top 10 Books 0f 2009 (P)
• Washington Post Best Books of 2009 (W)
• Salon Best Nonfiction Books of 2009 (S)
• The Independent Best Biographies for Christmas (I)
• Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2009 (T)
• SEED Magazine Year’s Best Books (D)
• New York Times 10 Best Books of 2009 (Y)

– Image Credits: Chocolate Geek
austinevan

I finished The Pluto Files this weekend, the latest book by Neil deGrasse Tyson.  Astrophysicist and Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Tyson is also a fervent advocate for science and making science understandable to the public.

The Pluto Files tells the story of Pluto’s reclassification, from ninth planet to dwarf planet.  There’s the history of the discovery, along with difficulties involved in planetary discovery in general:

In an embarrassing example from January 1769, the French astronomer Pierre Charles Lemonnier did not discover Uranus six times.

That particular planet had been repeatedly classified as either a comet or a star.  It was not officially recognized as a planet until 1781. As for Pluto, astronomers were searching for a “Planet X” to explain the perturbations in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune (perturbations which later turned out to be the result of poor estimation of the masses of the other planets, and not an undiscovered outer planet).

Tyson’s book describes the remodeling of the planetarium and the decision to classify the solar system by groups of related objects, and what that meant for Pluto in the grand scheme of things.  The second half deals with the public fallout of that decision, from school children wondering where Pluto was in the display of the relative sizes of planets (and hundreds of crayon-illustrated letters to that effect), to other scientists who accused the planetarium administration of going against scientific consensus in grouping Pluto with other objects in the Kuiper belt.  That was until the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to clarify the definition of planet. Currently, a planet is defined as a celestial body that:

1. is in orbit around the Sun,
2. has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and
3. has “cleared the neighbourhood” around its orbit.

While Pluto has met the first two criteria, it has not met the third (hence the name Kuiper belt for the region of icy objects where Pluto resides). The funny thing is, we’ve been here before.  Ceres was declared a planet in 1801, and the number of planets in the solar system climbed to 23 as more were discovered.  We later learned that these objects were actually members of the asteroid belt, not planets at all.  Ceres didn’t have the cultural status of Pluto, though, and that’s what I found most interesting about The Pluto Files.

It’s a first hand account of how advances in scientific understanding can have a profound and direct impact on culture (and state legislatures).  Both New Mexico and California passed laws declaring Pluto a planet, though California’s bill is a bit tongue-in-cheek:

WHEREAS, Downgrading Pluto’s status will cause psychological harm to some Californians who question their place in the universe and worry about the instability of universal constants; and…

WHEREAS, The downgrading of Pluto reduces the number of planets available for legistive leaders to hide redistricting legislation and other inconvenient political reform measures….

What should have been celebrated as an advance in human understanding of the universe was instead decried as desecration of a universal constant (that didn’t actually exist).  And that is what makes people so uncomfortable.  Science can change to meet the presentation of new facts, and that’s a good thing.

The following is an conversation that Dr. Tyson participated in at the LA Public Library following the release of The Pluto Files. He’s an entertaining speaker with a wonderful sense of humor, and it’s interesting to hear his perspective on the controversy.

As an anthropologist, I’ve watched the line between humans and other animals become blurrier over time. At one point, only humans were believed to have the ability to make tools, then Jane Goodall documented chimpanzee tool use in the wild.  Next, only humans have culture, but chimp troops have their own learned behaviors that are transmitted across generations, also, including different tool-making traditions.  And the big one, only humans communicate with language, and language is required for higher cognitive function.

And while lots of work has been done with higher primates, Koko and Washoe being notable examples, very little research has been done on language capacity and cognitive function with other members of the animal kingdom.  That’s where Alex comes in.  An African Grey Parrot purchased at a local pet shop by a scientist with an advanced degree in chemistry and a lifelong interest in our avian bretheren and their ability to mimic human speech, Alex was an emissary.  During his 30 year collaboration with Dr. Pepperberg, Alex did much to knock humans off their undeservedly lofty perch.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A non-primate, nonmammal creature with a walnut-sized brain could learn elements of communication at least as well as chimps.  This new channel of communication opened a window onto Alex’s mind, revealing to me and to all of us the sophisticated [nature of Alex's] information processing [ability].

Dr. Pepperberg also chronicles her journey as a scientist, from her undergraduate days at MIT, to the struggle to find funding for her parrot project (The Alex Foundation helped fill the gaps when grants went unfunded), to jealousy from colleagues when the media picked up on her research, to her return to MIT’s Media Lab with Alex in tow.  While the book is disjointed in places, somewhat short (30 years of research is difficult to compress into 227 pages), and occasionally a little dry (Marley & Me was frankly a better read), the importance of her research to the field of animal cognition makes it worthwhile.

As as scientist who’d like to know more about her research, I think I’ll pick up The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots next.

I read Einstein in Love by Dennis Overbye four years ago.  It was an interesting examination of Einstein’s early life, up through his marriage to Mileva Marić.  Einstein: His Life and Universe was written after the release of Einstein’s archives, and is a more complete biography of the man.  It makes a nice companion volume, revealing much of Einstein’s life in his own words.

I listened to the audio version of this book, read by Edward Herrmann.  He did justice to the German pronounciations, and made listening to the unabridged 21 hours a pleasure.  Having read other biographies of Einstein, I knew the basic outline of his life.  What was interesting about Isaacson’s treatment was his placement of Einstein’s theoretical work into historical context.

For example, I was aware that he knew Marie Curie, but not that he had a long-standing friendship and correspondence with Schrödinger (of cat fame), nor a cordially contentious relationship with Bohr.  I knew of his encouragement of FDR to develop the atom bomb, but not of his pacifism.  And I’m still wrestling with the idea that he was a determinist, and therefore didn’t believe in free will.  On top of all that, he did thought experiments in his head to figure out the properties of light.   And while he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, it wasn’t for E=mc² or relativity, but rather for his discovery of the photoelectric effect.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The one required undergraduate course I took was stodgy and didn’t cover anything as modern as Einstein. Despite that, I have a soft spot for the history of science, and this book satisfies it very well.

Of the “Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century,” the American Library Association notes that 43 have been challenged and/or banned:

• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• The Color Purple, Alice Walker
• Ulysses, James Joyce
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• 1984, George Orwell
• Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
• As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
• A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
• Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
• Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
• Native Son, Richard Wright
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
• Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
• The Call of the Wild, Jack London
• Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
• All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
• The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
• The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
• In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
• Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
• Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
• Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
• A Separate Peace, John Knowles
• Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
• Women in Love, DH Lawrence
• The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
• Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
• An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
• Rabbit, Run, John Updike

Of these 43, I’ve read 19% of them, many for my freshman honors history class in college.  My favorite was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And now I have a few more novels to add to my TBR list.

How many have you read?

Spook is the third of Mary Roach’s books that I’ve read this summer. As with her other two books, Spook examines the scientific approach to the paranormal phenomena, such as hauntings and psychics. The history of paranormal investigation is fascinating, including exposure of mediums at the turn of the century. Some of the claims made (a woman giving birth to rabbits?!?) read like Weekly World News headlines.

Mary tackles the topic from the perspective of genuine curiosity, not blind belief or rigid skepticism, which I appreciate. She explores possibilities, such as the effects of infrasound and electromagnetism on human perception. While Bonk is still my favorite of her books, Spook is a pretty good read.

John Hawks, a biological anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, has a recent review of Spook as well.

After reading Bonk, I was curious about Mary Roach’s other books, so I reserved them at the library. I chose to read Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers first. Basically, Mary was exploring the options of what to do with your body when you die.

Burial is certainly the most common choice, but for those that donate their body for research, there are a myriad of options, not just being a cadaver in an anatomy lab. She went to the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm to find out exactly what happens to a human body after death, when left to its own devices. Some can end up in the embalming lab at mortician school, or as practice heads for plastic surgeons, or as crash test dummies. She found others in the Harvard Brain Bank, and thought that might be a possibility:

My reasons for becoming a brain donor aren’t very good at all. My reasons boil down to a Harvard Brain Bank donor wallet card,which enables me to say “I’m going to Harvard” and not be lying. You do not need brains to go to the Harvard Brain Bank — only a brain.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What she wanted was to be a brain in jar, a la Abby Normal in Young Frankenstein. She was disappointed to discover the brains sliced and stored in rubbermaid containers in a lab refrigerator.

While this book is not for the squeamish, it’s definitely an interesting read, and gives the reader plenty to think about. Instead of embalming, how about compost?