books

I'm back home now from a week on family vacation, catching up on news from the last few days. I have been dismayed to read about Jane Goodall's book debacle. She has been accused of plagiarism, fabricating meetings and interviews that did not happen, and spreading misinformation about the safety of genetically modified organisms. Michael Moynihan, who played a key role uncovering the plagiarism and fabrications of science writer Jonah Lehrer last year, has written the most in-depth account of Goodall's alleged transgressions: "Jane Goodall’s Troubling, Error-Filled New Book, ‘Seeds of Hope’"

There is a sense in many of the reported accounts that Goodall’s co-author, Gail Hudson, is to blame. This is, of course, possible (Hudson did not respond to an email request for comment), but if Goodall had read her own manuscript—the one with her name on it—would she not have noticed the quotes from interviews with people she hadn’t spoken to? Wouldn’t a noted scientist double-check her source material? She is, after all, the person who accepted the publisher’s check and Seeds of Hope is written in the first person.

Pat Shipman's reactions largely mirror my own: "Betrayal and Disappointment".

Naturally the plagiarism is disturbing. But the shameful part is that poorly-researched and specious anti-GMO arguments in the book probably would not have been scrutinized without these charges of plagiarism. I see this lack of scrutiny as akin to the continuing science illiteracy of mainstream media, which I noted earlier this year: "Recantation of a former genetic know-nothing".

The Guardian hosted a conversation among several authors with new trade books on science last year, including Steven Pinker, Brian Greene, James Gleick, Joshua Foer and Lone Frank: "Science writing: how do you make complex issues accessible and readable?" They share many experiences and insights about the need to make scientific concepts clear to a general audience.

I liked this answer from Steven Pinker about the limits of analogy in science writing:

Analogy is enormously powerful. In fact, one could argue that we understand everything except for the physical world of falling objects by analogy. If you look at our language it's almost all metaphorical. But, there is a difference between literary metaphor and scientific analogy, and that is in a literary metaphor the more connections there are between the figure of speech and the thing in the world the richer and more wonderful it is, and in the scientific analogy if there are too many ways in which you can relate the analogy to the world, that makes it a bad analogy, not a good one. Analogies have to be chosen and explained carefully. You've got to point the reader to the correspondence, point for point between the thing in the world you're explaining in terms of your analogy. To be whipsawed between one analogy and other so you don't know what point is doing the work, that's what can make an analogy misleading.

Also, this response from Joshua Foer is provocative:

What you're supposed to be doing in a science book or popular article is distilling, finding what is essential and communicating that. That's not just an act of storytelling, it's an act of thinking and it requires a kind of clarity of communication that not just the scientists but academics in general have moved away from and I think it makes them think less clearly.

I agree with that. The act of writing here on the blog generally clarifies my thinking and makes me a better analyst. The beauty of blogging is that writing more about a topic really does build a better conceptual understanding of it, even if you are writing for nonspecialists. What I find frustrating is that I don't have time to write about everything I'd like to understand better!

I was enjoying a Nature discussion of "radium age" sci-fi literature, when this line caught me by surprise:

In Jack London's post-apocalyptic The Scarlet Plague (1912), a race of barbarians descended from San Francisco's brutalized underclass roam the city's devastated remains after the fatal pandemic of 2013.

Wait a minute, Jack London wrote a zombie story?

Well, it's more Postman than zombies, but it's available on the Kindle for 99 cents: The Scarlet Plague (Annotated - Includes Essay and Biography). (UPDATE 2012-09-23: A reader notes that the story is also available for free from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21970).

Here's the description:

The story takes place in 2073, sixty years after an uncontrollable epidemic, the Red Death, has depopulated the planet. James Howard Smith is one of the few survivors of the pre-plague era left alive in the San Francisco area, and as he realizes his time grows short, he tries to impart the value of knowledge and wisdom to his grandsons.

They've apparently reverted to a Stone Age lifestyle, which does explain the Jack London element. I also love discovering that When the World Shook was written by H. Rider Haggard, better known for King Solomon's Mines.

On the ebook review site, Download the Universe, I have a new review of the app version of Kevin Kelly's book, What Technology Wants. The link to my review: "Telegraphing What Technology Wants".

Sure, humans are coevolving with technology. We've done so now for more than two million years. Does that make technology-enabled humans into a "new kingdom of life"? That fundamentally misrepresents what a "kingdom" means in biology. Kelly argues for a much more deterministic view of evolution than biologists accept, and worries about an impending population crash. His beliefs in these cases are not without basis, but stripped down to mere theses they utterly fail to convince. Meanwhile, the section on the Amish -- so characteristic of Kelly's approach to understanding the social role of technology -- seems out of place here in the app. Its deeper overall context has been lost.

So the app left me with a mental mismatch. As a reader who experienced both versions, I appreciated the synoptic view. It clarified my resistance to some of Kelly's ideas. Hopefully, many readers approaching the app for the first time will be motivated to investigate more deeply in the original book.

I think Kelly's ideas about the nature of technological change deserve more critical attention from anthropologists, who seem to be sitting on their thumbs when it comes to technofuturism. We are adapted to technology, and we continue to change under its influence. That process of adaptation left castoffs, so that today's humans are a limited subset of our past potential. I happen to think that subset is a pretty good one, but as the process of adaptation continues, will that still remain true? Or will we recover lines of potentiality that may have appeared closed in the past?