Category Archives: Science

Neil Shubin – Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Animals all come from the sea. Spinal cords, backbones, bones themselves, our familiar trunk-and-limb anatomical structure, all evolved from fish. Even today, human embryos briefly have gills early in development, which is something to think about the next time you touch the side of your neck. Lungs and swim bladders are evolutionary cousins, and fish could not have made the move to land without them. Eyes first developed back in our seafaring days, and our lenses are still better adapted to seeing through water than air. As distant and diverse as life can be on Earth, we have more in common than we think. Shubin makes that point as well as anyone, sometimes in amusing fashion.

Matt Ridley – Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

This is an older book, from 1999, and some parts are dated now. It is still excellent. The book has 23 chapters, one for each pair of chromosomes in the human genome. Ironically, this organizational conceit gives Ridley the freedom to take a more scattershot approach. He tells about genes found in each chromosome that affect certain traits. Since our genes were designed without a designer, chromosomes don’t have individual themes, and genes controlling certain traits can be found in multiple chromosomes.

Ridley does what he can with what the material provides him, but this randomness actually makes some of his evolutionary arguments stronger, a fact he takes full advantage of. He also goes on frequent tangents about how a given chromosome’s traits might be useful or not, how they have impacted human history, how they connect various species and common ancestors, how mutations work, and many other concepts in evolutionary biology.

Matt Ridley – The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice races against a red queen. They have to run faster and  faster just to stay where they are. This paradox is a common analogy in science books to the point of being a cliché. But it got that way for a reason. Predators and prey are constantly evolving sharper teeth, adaptive defense strategies, hunting techniques, camouflage, new ways to exploit food sources, and more. The result of all this effort and adaptation is to keep survival rates pretty much the same. A similar red queen story can be told about our immune systems, which must constantly adapt to fight microbes, who are themselves constantly adapting to keep up with our immune systems.

Ridley, a top-notch science writer and something of a polymath, develops the red queen conceit as well as anybody. While The Rational Optimist is his best book, The Red Queen takes a strong second place. Red queen stories, Ridley notes, also appear in public policy, such as in arms races, where governments spend billions of dollars per year building weapons and researching new ones. This is all so they can keep geopolitical dynamics more or less the same as they are now. Elections are the same way, as billions of dollars get spent every cycle for just a few percentage points swing one or the other, which can easily be reversed the next time around. In the private sector, companies have to adapt and innovate just to keep the doors open.

Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

There is something to be said about reading primary sources. In this case, it is surprisingly readable. For a book about theory, Darwin is heavily empirical. Every facet of natural selection he brings up in the book is illustrated by real-life examples from nature, including animals, plants, fungi, and more. In a way it’s an Attenborough-esque nature tour, with more depth and a unifying theme.

The book stands up better than I expected. Science has advanced much in the last 160 years, but those advances are more updates and expansions than a wholesale rebuilding of natural selection theory. The biggest advances have been in genetics; the Origin of Species’ biggest shortcomings are in that area, though that isn’t necessarily Darwin’s fault.

Darwin also had a charming humility. His personality was more shy and retiring than brash and combative, and it showed in his writing. He’s hard to hate as a person, and his lack of dogmatism and certainty would in most cases be disarming. But considering the uproar he caused, that turns out not to have been the case. Darwin went noticeably out of his away to avoid mentioning the God hypothesis, though he does allude several times to the need for longer-than-biblical time scales for natural selection processes to operate. Even so, critics pounced. Even today, some people reject evolutionary thinking, though nearly always for religious rather than scientific reasons.

As with Adam Smith, the ratio of people who have strong opinions about Darwin to the people who have actually read him is very large. As a result, popular conceptions of his views tend not to be entirely accurate. I encourage interested readers to improve that ratio and read the book. The Origin of Species turns out to have literary value as well as scientific, and there is something to be learned from the delivery as well as the content.

Nathan H. Lents – Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

A book that can be amusing, but also points out the limitations of design without a designer. That said, organisms as they are almost certainly far better off than if they were the products of design with a designer. Well worth a read for that reason, but mostly because it’s fun to know about bodily quirks and maladies we all share for no apparent reason. Part of reading this book is taking a bit of delight in our own misfortunes.

We humans are doomed to have bad knees and back problems because the human body is not fully adapted to bipedalism. Our lack of a protruding snout (facial prognathism), such as most other animals have, dooms us to endless colds and sinus infections. We have the same piping back there as other animals, but in us it is compressed and shifted around in ways no plumber would design. This evolutionary quirk is why we get sick so often, even as our household cats and dogs rarely do.

One minor, Seinfeld-esque example I found personally relevant is that some people have the ability to voluntarily control a small muscle near the ear drum, causing a low rumbling sound kind of like muffled thunder. I am one of those people. The weird part is because it’s just a small muscle flexing inside one’s head, nobody else can hear the rumbling, even though to the hearer it can be loud enough to drown out conversation. It also has an involuntary component, in my case triggered by yawning, sneezing, and bright lights–those mouth and eye movements also work the muscle in question. I’ve silently wondered since childhood what causes this; it’s apparently just a random mutation some people have. Other readers will likely have similar “oh, that’s what that is!” moments.