Saturday, May 10, 2008

Evolution as a Religion by Mary Midgley

This book by a prominent professor of philosophy in England is tremendously insightful. Her refreshing perspective on religion as a historical and universal phenomenon and her common sense view of how people think and create a world-picture ring true.

But the best parts of the book deal with science. Science narrowly defined cannot speak to values and morals and systems of thought, but scientists like Dawkins do speak this way while denying that they do. She carefully and effectively quotes them, heaping the most scorn on the "selfish gene."

She defends science that is defined broadly and admits its metaphysical underpinnings. She is not a Christian, though raised in a Christian family, but she thinks religion is a part of human nature. She cares deeply about animals and the environment. She writes that Darwin himself avoided the dangers of his followers and had a better view of science than some who invoke his name. She demolishes Spencer and his ilk. Her feud with Dawkins is decades long and her attacks so vigorous she once had to apologize to him. For my part I find her criticisms of science making religious statements intriguing and her rejection of some scientists' denials that they have metaphysical presuppositions utterly convincing. Scientists who hold this view have a mountain of disconnected "facts" and nothing more.

A Way of Life by Sir William Osler

This is a collection of essays by Osler, considered by many to be the finest physician ever. He was a lover of books and a student of the classics. His lectures are brimming with erudition.

He has wonderful quotes from the sages of old and adds his own, such as "It is astonishing with how little reading a doctor can practise medicine, but it is not astonishing how badly he may do it."

Or, "But when one considers the unending making of books, who doesn't sigh for the happy days of that thrice happy Sir William Browne, whose pocket library sufficed for his life's needs, drawing from a Greek testament his divinity, from the aphorisms of Hippocrates his medicine, and from an Elzivir Horace his good sense and vivacity."

His favorite book of thousands was Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne, about which and whom he was a world authority. Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton was another favorite. The essay on Servetus is very interesting, and unsettling as our revered Calvin sentenced him to death.

The essay A Way of Life is revealing and instructive and evokes a past era of medicine and family life but has much to commend it, particularly living in the present moment, not the past or future.

A brief essay on the bookworm (insect) is a propos and clever.

The Equation that Couldn't be Solved by Mario Livio

This book is about symmetry, a concept purported to be as basic as anything in mathematics and perhaps in physics and biology as well. This concept is approached and understood through the mathematical concept of groups. What might be dry and convoluted is made compelling and arresting by the story of the centuries of search for the solution of higher-order polynomial equations finally solved by using symmetry. The discovery of groups is described in the bizarre life and tragic death of Galois. Except for a diversion into musical symmetry and quantum mechanics and string theory, which rarely interest me, the book is delightful and even surprising. Livio has a gift for explanations that don't seem simplistic though I am sure he is having to restrain himself throughout the book not to launch into an aria of equations. To make group theory interesting is no small achievement. A book I might like to own.

Six Degrees by Duncan J. Watts

This is an interesting, accessible discussion of networks (graphs). I had started Watts's Small Worlds and found it much too hard, and thankfully happened on Six Degrees, which covers many of the same ideas in a clear engaging way. This is a connected age, he says, and we need a science of networks. He covers random networks, small-world networks, scale free networks. He discusses small world searches, epidemics, computer viruses, social cascades.

The book is about the meeting of the theoretical and the practical. It is about a mathematics rooted in relationships, which as such is interesting, essential, and intractable.

The Question of God by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr.

Nicholi teaches a course at Harvard Medical School about Freud and Lewis. This book is an outgrowth of years of presenting this course.

Though approaching the great questions of life from opposite directions, these two great men show interesting similarities.

We found the parts about Freud even more interesting since we knew less about him and though we agreed more with Lewis's views found Freud a surprisingly sympathetic figure.

Though Freud espoused sexual liberty, he himself lived a very conventional monogamous life. Freud suffered prejudice and racism. He lost many of his loved ones, including children, and he had a painful mouth cancer that tormented him for years, eventually causing his terminal illness. He died from physician-assisted suicide.

Lewis had suffered the early death of his mother. His father never recovered from her death. Lewis had extremely terrifying war experiences in the trenches of World War I.

May 2007

The Book Nobody Read by Owen Gingerich

Subtitled "Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus." Gingerich writes about his quest to find every first and second edition of De revolutionibus by Copernicus. The book covers astronomy, cosmology, printing, and the tracing and collecting of rare books. Gingerich has learned everything imaginable about each remaining copy of Copernicus's book by traveling throughout the world, examining, measureing and photographing every known copy. The book is filled with interesting stories of books lost and found, stolen and recovered, and special emphasis is on annotations by readers who proved the title of this book false.

The Language of Life by Debra Neihoff

This book held promise of an exploration of "language" in communication among bacteria and organisms, and among cells in an organism. Here and there in the book there are glimpses of this. However, all in all the entire book is just a use of the metaphor of language to explain or describe in a quite engaging way how living things work. The author uses this metaphor and her considerable rhetorical skills to keep our interest through the maze of complexity.

This book caused me to hope for a far better, much more difficult feat: to tease out what is really communication and to explore lexicon, syntax, and meaning. Do bacteria "speak" to each other? Are there messages that are more than a key in a lock or a concentration gradient?