Book Review: Tales from Outer Suburbia

This is another book by Shaun Tan, who wrote The Arrival completely without words. Since that's one of my favorite graphic novels I was looking forward to this. It's a collection of (very) short stories, often punctuated with large illustrations, but it is still more about the words than the pictures. I read this one together with Sam and it was interesting -- I don't think he's ever been exposed to fanciful fiction like this before, in which every story is matter-of-factly told, and everything is familiar, except for one outlandish fiction in each (say, an alien exchange student, or a deep-sea diver wandering around the neighborhood). Each story has some deep current underneath it. There's two that still stand out to me -- one in the middle about marriage and one toward the beginning about a sad child. The former is not what I expected from a young-adult book like this but it is very well done. Bottom line: it's like a box of chocolates, and if one story is semi-normal I guarantee the next one will surprise you. Great for introducing what fanciful fiction can do to a young boy.

Symposium Lecture Posted

This summer my colleague in psychology called together a few of us interested in science and asked if we'd like to give a symposium for "Darwin Day" (depending on who you ask, either the anniversary of Darwin's birth or the publication of the Origin of Species). The thing grew to five hour-plus sessions and even then felt like it didn't have enough time. My 15 minutes of semi-fame are in the "biological sciences" section, and I'm in the middle, between Eric Long's talk and Tim Nelson's. I probably am focusing on a scientific audience a bit much but am trying to make my case for a general audience!

I just regret that the Q&A isn't on there (although that's partially my fault -- long story!), because that's where we really addressed the faith/science overlap. Here it's (mostly) all about the science. Discussion of the overlap will come in the upcoming Weter Lecture!

Here is the link to the iTunesU page with all the sessions.

Book Review: What the Dog Saw

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It's very obvious that Malcolm Gladwell tried to get his start in advertising, then "fell back" to writing, as he decribes in the introduction to this, his latest book. He's at his best in short snippets, like ads, just enough to make his point (which usually results from two or three who'd-a'thunk type connections) and then get out of Dodge before the reader starts to think up objections. (This is why this book is definitely better than Outliers.) He's very good and very original, but it would be nice to see him in conflict with ideas rather than promoting them. (The ideas he sets himself up as being in conflict with are usually conventional wisdom "everybody knows" semi-strawmen ... but, to his credit, they usually ARE something everyone knows that he then shows is wrong!)

This collection gets stronger as it moves along. The first few articles feel almost like informercials, but later he has some very good essays, and my favorites usually involve some science. The problem with Gladwell is he's never faced peer review and it shows. In the introduction he says he hates it when someone reads something and says "I don't buy it" because writing's supposed to be entertainment. Well, I've said this before but ... I don't buy it. Every piece of writing is an argument. It's making an argument that you should take the time to read it. And Gladwell's actually very good at making that argument implicitly in his writing! So, sorry, Mr. Gladwell, I still don't buy it, but I will read it.

(Besides, "igon value" instead of "eigenvalue"?! That's just embarrassing.)

Regardless, there are enough good essays in this book that I think I may assign it to my students to buy for a seminar class for which his essays will be good introductions to the topics I'll discuss. But they are only introductions, good for getting the conversation started, surprisingly weak at commiting to practical conclusions that will change the way you go about life. (Maybe it's the underlying philosophical assumptions that mold everything else, assumptions that I may not "buy" into?) As a current article-writer and verbal welder of disparate ideas, Gladwell is unparalleled. Let's just get some real intellectual conflict in there and we'll have real depth.

Free RJP Williams!

A lot of people are interested in the chemical stories of RJP Williams, but mostly they are behind some kind of expensive "wall." But wait ... I just found this 2007 article from the Royal Society and (God save the Queen) it's available free to all (I think ... ). This seems to be a pretty good summary of the 2006 book I reviewed earlier. Check it out here:

http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/4/17/1049.full

Han Solo: Game Theorist?

You have to see this blog post from the Freakonomics blog for yourself. It's about Star Wars Episode IV and Han Solo's decision to fight for the Rebels. I'm trying to figure out how to integrate into the boys' math curriculum. There are advantages to home schooling.

Here's the link.

Book Review: What is Life?

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This is not Schrodinger's What is Life? from before the DNA structure was solved. (The phrase is also used all over the 'net from the diversity of a quick Google search.) It is Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's What is Life? from the mid-90's. (Yes, it's that Margulis, the famous one who proposed the endosymbiotic theory of mitochondria, but no, it's not that Sagan, it's his son!)
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It's also an example of the blessed serendipity of the semi-annual Library Book Sale. This year I went to the book sale and found several books on origins (of life and/or the universe) that I was looking for, for a dollar each: the book by Martin Rees I reviewed earlier and this one topped the list. This is a beautiful edition, big pages with full-color pictures of microbes and rocks. It was deliberately formatted after the "old science books" of earlier centuries, and even has some full-page hand-drawn biological specimens like those old books had. It feels like an old book, and I love that about it.

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The topic of the book is a history of life told by Margulis (I gather she's the driving editing force, what with the book's emphasis on symbiosis and reproduction). What I like about it is that the thermodynamics of entropy and energy dissipation is pretty much there, and the vignettes about certain bizarre microbes are wonderful. Well worth it just for those. It complements some of the other stories, like the RJP Williams one I keep going on and on about because so few people can find it!

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Where it goes off the rails in my opinion (and since this is a book review it's all my opinion but let's just re-emphasize) is the final chapters in which man is discussed. The authors argue that Darwinian reductionism and directionlessness is wrong. They bring up Samuel Butler's ideas and expand on them to suggest that there is a direction to evolution and that direction is guided by "choice" -- a property that everything living (able to respond to its environment, I would reduce that to) shares. So this is the "microbiological existentialist's" version of creation. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what this "choice" is and where it comes from. I can't get away from the worry that at its heart it's just randomness magnified, whether a certain environmental element is sensed or not, that organism survives, and goes on to reproduce. That's the "choice" they're talking about, and is it any different from a computer's "choice" if a subroutine that ranks options and takes the best one is included, maybe with a random Monte-Carlo element built in? It's just a question of how much randomness happens. I'll have to think about it more but I can't find any way out of that mess, and I don't see how it's fundamentally different from the position they say is wrong. The central question is: Where does the "choice" come from?

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I see a parallel here with Signature of the Cell by Meyer (although this is definitely debatable and incomplete): in both cases we have a fuzzy concept that's given a quantifiable backdrop, but the core of the concept is not correctly quantified (not for me at least!). Meyer gives probabilistic calculations of "design" that calculate these huge astronomical numbers, but if the starting assumptions are off the numbers don't matter. "Choice" in What is Life? has a similar role, although the authors stay away from quantifying what "choice" is, they argue as if it were quantified or a clearly defined part of the system. But the best I can gather for its definition -- if it is environmental sensing and response -- is that the only "surprising" part of choice would be random error in either sensing or response. That could even improve the system, sure, but it's not really any less "random" than the Darwinism you're arguing against in the first place. Meyer's calculations assume/quantify too much, and Margulis and Sagan's don't seem to assume enough (or they assume their "choice" is different from selection when it seems to me to be random noise).

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Of course, this is off the cuff and I have to think about it more to tamp it down, but I'm not satisfied with either "design" calculations or "choice" philosophies.

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The big difference with starting with chemistry (the approach that appeals to me) is that we start with quantifiable terms: energy, entropy, and enthalpy. (The complexity is in the APPLICATION of those numbers to the system!) The sun provides an excess of energy to the system that the system converts. On the individual level there's a lot of variation. But the way energy moves gives a direction -- perhaps contingent but a direction nonetheless -- to the system, suggesting the universe is "set up" to do this, to have this result.

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Again, off the cuff. I'm probably going to regret the shortcuts in some of these statements, but that's kind of the point. I slap this online as a rough draft and you, dear readers, help me find the holes in it. There will be holes, oh yes.

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So the concept of "choice" that the authors put forward, I "choose" not to integrate it into my thinking.

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And this makes some of the more outlandish statements in the final chapters -- that science is creating a story that will replace the old time religion/creation myths, that man's capacity for self-deception is what sets us apart from animals, etc. -- it makes them ring hollow because I don't know what this "choice" thing is. An emergent property? How is that different from randomness? If self-deception is the key to humanity then why are we here in such a perverse universe? And why is the universe knowable at all if self-deception is our foundation? (Seems like cutting off the branch you're sitting on ... )

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Regardless, this book is well worth it for its beautiful pictures and stories. Just make the "choice" to complete your own synthesis of those and take the final chapters with a big grain of salt.

We Three College Professors

Because the word "magi" leads directly to "magician," it's straightforward to think of the Magi as the 1st-century equivalent of David Copperfield or Harry Houdini. Indeed they were astrologers. But back then there was no such thing as astronomers, and the people who carefully scanned the skies, with surprising sophistication? Those were magi. So I think of them as astronomers, college professors from Iraq, absent-minded and oblivious to political realities, rich and able to travel and risking a LOT to go to this country Israel they really didn't understand. It's easy to dismiss the silliness of academia sometimes, and rightfully so. But God reveals himself to those who seek him, even cloud-headed academics. I take comfort in that. Those who seek, find. So let's keep seeking and knocking.