The Questioning Librarian

For anyone interested in human evolution as I am, and the enduring question of why modern humans survived and Neandertals did not, the new book by anthropologist and retired Penn State professor Pat Shipman is an essential read . While the last few years have seen a number of excellent books on the question published, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction ,   brings a new perspective to a diverse array of evidence from ecology, paleoanthropology, and beyond. Shipman begins with her assertion that modern humans are best viewed as the most successful invasive species that our planet has ever seen. Using the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park as an example, she relates the science of what happens to an ecosystem when a new top predator is introduced. Not only does this new species increase competition for limited resources, these invaders often deliberately target their closest competitors, as wolves did with coyotes in Ye...

Last evening, I was listening to Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson, whose music is a delight to hear. Most recently, he composed the soundtrack to the film The Theory of Everything , but I have known and listened to his alternately haunting and moving music for years before that. His powers are on full display in his Fordlandia album, music inspired by the failed experiment of Henry Ford, such as this extended piece below. It made me wonder just what it is about the character of Iceland that has crafted artists like Johannsson, like Sigur Ros or Olafur Arnalds. For that matter, what was it about Russia that crafted Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? Not too many years ago, some doyens of English literary criticism insisted that the work of an author was to be analyzed without the context of the author's life, which would also exclude considering the larger culture at the time. This was a paltry view, to my mind, for we are products of our culture and do not exist independently of ...

I have an unfortunate habit when it comes to the written word. Not only do I acquire more books than I can expect to read, I tend to let magazines I subscribe to pile up until there is nearly a year's worth; I then, sometimes, start to read them one after another until I am finally caught up. I'm attempting to get better on both accounts, mostly to diminish the amount of things sitting gathering dust in my apartment. All this is a long and winding path to get to the fact that I'm currently working through several years of old Astronomy magazines. I no longer subscribe or purchase that magazine, not because I don't enjoy it but because there isn't enough time to keep up with every magazine I'd be interested in reading, while still being able to read the books I choose. In one old issue, at the beginning of 2011 (yes, they have piled up for quite a while!) the author wrote about what we can look forward to in the next decade as far as space missions. It really wa...

A few weeks ago I finished The Monkey's Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life by Alan de Queiroz. It was a fascinating read, detailing how the voyage of plants and animals between the continents has changed the world in which we live. Even, de Queiroz asserts, something that is both random and highly unlikely in and of itself is nearly inevitable over millions of years of life, whether it is a new plant colonizing an island or monkeys from Africa crossing into South America. The book made me think once more about how randomness shapes the history of life. If we know anything from science, it is that humans are not the inevitable outcome of evolution. Neither our dominance as a species nor even our existence were assured. Random and improbable events led us to where we are. Think about just a few of the moments where, had something been different, life would have taken another path. Whatever natural disaster caused the human population to bottleneck around ...

It's no great secret that I used to vote straight-Republican in nearly every election. I was proud to vote for the party of individual responsibility and small government, as I saw it then, as opposed to what I viewed as the party of dependency and the nanny state. But the GOP I used to vote for isn't the same one, and I've changed myself. We parted ways several elections ago, and at this point I cannot bring myself to vote for a single Republican in any election, from the local representatives all the way up through to the Presidency. The Republican Party is, to put it at its mildest, a party driven by greed and by hostility to all those who are unlike themselves. They are the party of Avarice and the party of Cruelty, and they show this in their every word and their every action. The singular accomplishment of the modern GOP is the fusion of pro-corporate economics with radical religious fundamentalism. Both are toxic to the freedoms and liberties of the citizens of ...

A few days ago, a friend of mine posted a blog listing the twelve books he recommends for understanding the world. These are, in his words, essential reads. This post made me start thinking of what my own list would be. A list like this is going to be different for each reader, for we are all individuals and different books will impact us in different ways, based on our own tastes and where we are in life when we encounter a work. So what books would I recommend for understanding the world? I read so much, that narrowing it down was a tough call; this list will, I'm sure, certainly change as time goes by. At this point, however, these twelve books are ones that have helped me understand the world a little better in one way or another, books that moved me or enraged me, ones that have helped to transform how I see and think about the world. 1. The Children of Hurin by J.R. R. Tolkien Some of my friends might be surprised that I didn't choose The Hobbit  for this lis...

Camarasaurus - very definitely a dinosaur Last time, I wrote about bad science in terrible creature features. One of the things I noted was the tendency of the actors and writers to refer to anything old and extinct as a dinosaur. Of course, this is a problem in that it displays a poor understanding of what a dinosaur actually is, but this misunderstanding isn't limited to bad science fiction films. It instead reflects a larger societal misunderstanding of what constitutes a dinosaur--any big, dead reptile gets lumped into the category of "dinosaur." But in reality, paleontologists have a very specific definition of what a dinosaur is. In the first place, dinosaurs are diapsids, animals that have two openings in their skull behind the eyes (fenestra). Other diapsids include birds, lizards, and crocodiles, but this characteristic alone separates them from the synapsids (one opening behind the eye), a group that includes mammals, and from the anapsids (no openi...

The list of books I need to read, as always, grows only longer, but this is not a bad thing. This morning, Carl Zimmer noted in his blog  the oddities of the Cambrian, some of the strangest forms preserved in a fossil record that already contains some very strange organisms, from feathered dinosaurs to brontotheres  and the ancestors of humans. These organisms, many of them preserved in the Burgess Shale (famously covered in the work Wonderful Life by the late Steven Jay Gould), represent creatures so fantastical that scientists have trouble connecting them to existing forms of life. Zimmer linked to that book, along with a relatively new book called The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity , available here  from the publisher but also from other booksellers. Of course, given my enthusiasm for weird dead animals, I immediately added it to my to-read list, but the significant cost of the work, and the fact that I've recently indulged myself with a n...

I suppose the occasion for this post is not only the winding down of grad school for me, but also the intersection of two most interesting people. Ken Ham, former biology teacher out of Australia and know-nothing creationist head of "Answers in Genesis", has reissued his old saw "The Lie: Evolution" under a new subtitle, namely "The Lie: Evolution/Millions of Years," no doubt to creationist acclaim. I suspect, however, that the content will be just as stale as the first edition of this man's magnum opus, the same hackneyed arguments that patient scientists and educated non-scientists have deconstructed and debunked for just as long as Ham's been saying them. Not having read this new edition, how can I say this? Quite simply, the book's description on Ham's website contains the same arguments that I've been hearing and reading from the AiG emissaries for years, whether it was from the man himself or his legion of pseudo-scientific proxie...

Welcome to the mind of the shameless, and apparently heartless, Ray Comfort, creationist and so-called Christian apologist extraordinaire (also known as "the Banana Man" in rational company for one of his less-spectacular arguments for the existence of God. Seriously, look it up, it's rather amusing). In a recent blog post, he writes that atheists, who obviously can't "blame God" for the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, must view it as a positive, part of the workings of evolution that is itself a good process bent on improvement. Such a foolish misunderstanding of what evolution is (likely a purposeful one, used to attack his critics, like Oxford professor Richard Dawkins) never fails to get my hackles up. Full article here:  http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/2011/03/atheists-explanation-for-killer-quakes.html First of all, it does not follow that an atheist, lacking a God to "blame" in Comfort's view, would view any such tragedy as a pos...

I'm a glutton for punishment. I was at the library a while ago and, looking at the cart of books being sold, I found the Revised & Expanded Answers Book , with one of the authors none other than Mr. Ham. Immediately excited at the prospect of several hundred pages of his comedy stylings (and those of the odious Safarti) I purchased it for about fifty cents, which means I got a lot of intellectual contortions for my money. Quickly into the book, we hit on the real reason why creationists like Ham don't accept evolution; the alleged consequences of the theory. A nice illustration sums it up; with "Creation" at the foundation, we are shown a wholesome society with "God's Word", "Laws", "Marriage", "Standards" and "Meaning of Life" ascending from that. But when we have "Evolution" at the foundation (cue ominous music and lightning) we have listed "Man's Opinion", "Lawlessness", ...

Before you jump all over me, I do not mean every  teacher; I'm singling out biology teachers on this one after a new survey reported on in the New York Times  showing that the one thing that many biology teachers avoid talking about is the most important subject in all of biology! Full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08creationism.html?_r=1&hpw Only 28% of the surveyed teachers "follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution..." What's more, about 13% of those surveyed admitted to teaching creationism, a non-scientific religious viewpoint. This leaves around 60% who do neither, choosing to avoid controversy in a manner of ways. All I can say is that this, while not coming as a shock, is shameful nonetheless. Can you imagine a similar lapse in our education system? Imagine the outcry if physics were taught without a mention of gravity? Or if astronomy was taught with...