Aug
31
Posted by jns on
August 31, 2005
Two selections from today’s reading in Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2004), mostly to confound fundamentalists and creationists:
The Ethnographic Atlas of G.P. Murdock, published in 1967, is a brave compilation. It lists particulars of 849 human societies, surveyed all over the world. From it we might hope to count numbers of societies that permit harems versus numbers that enforce monogamy. The problem with counting societies is that it is seldom obvious where to draw lines, or what to count as independent. This makes it hard to do proper statistics. Nevertheless, the atlas does its best. Of those 849 societies, 137 (about 16 per cent) are monogamous, four (less than one per cent) are polyandrous [females having more than one male partner], and a massive 83 per cent (708) are polygynous (males can have more than one wife). The 708 polygynous societies are divided about equally into those where polygyny is permitted by the rules of the society but rare in practice, and those where it is the norm. [p 208]
The anteaters don’t seem to have made it into North America, but three genera survive in South America, and very unusual mammals they are. They have no teeth at all and the skull, especially in the case of Myrmecophaga, the large gound-dwelling anteater, has become little more than a long, curved tube, a kind of straw for imbibing ants and termites which are chivvied out of their nests by means of a long sticky tongue. And let me tell you something amazing about them. Most mammals, like us, secrete hydrochloric acid[*] into our stomachs to aid digestion, but South American anteaters don’t. Instead, they rely upon the formic acid from the ants that they eat. This is typical of the opportunism of natural selection. [p. 215]
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*In particular, I want to draw towards this point the attention of those Splenda alarmists who are so concerned that a tightly bound chlorine atom in the sweetner is going to get loose, shoot through their bodies, and mutate them out of existence. The human body, to which salt (sodium + chlorine, recall) is essential and hydrochloric acid is in everyday use, is rather adept at dealing with a chlorine radical should it actually manage to get loose.
Aug
29
Posted by jns on
August 29, 2005
A few days back I finished reading How to Write: Advice and Relfections, by Richard Rhodes. Although I’m frequently drawn to read them, books about writing are rarely satisfying, interesting, or useful. Rhodes’ book managed all three, and I can recommend it.
Here are three passages I made note of as I read that I wanted to copy into my blog, which also serves as my commonplace book.
People lost in a wilderness have been known to find their way out guided by the wrong map; orienting is apparently a function only loosely tied to locality.1 [p. 30]
Not everyone liked the arrangement.2 Dixie Lee Ray, the eccentric former chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and governor of the state of Washington, reviewed The Making of the Atomic Bomb for the Washington Times. My war scenes were too graphic, Dr. Ray complained. Everyone knows that war is terrible; why go on about it? Worse, she wrote, the book jumps around. [p. 108, italics in original]
A less global structural problem was deciding at what level to pitch scientific explanation. I’d read enough popular science to be impatient with explanation that depended on fanciful analogies. Besides being condescending, comparing an atom to a watermelon wastes half the analogy. Fortunately, nuclear physics is largely an experimental science. Reading through some of the classic papers in the field, I realized that I could explain a result clearly and simply by describing the physical experiment that produced it: a brass box, the air evacuated, a source of radiation in the box in the form of a vial of radon gas, and so on. Then I and the reader could visualize a process in terms of the manipulation of real laboratory objects, not watermelons, just as the experimenters themselves did, and could absorb the culture of scientific work at the same time–the throb of the vacuum pump, the smell of its oil. [pp. 109--110]
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1He had been discussing memory and the occasional difficulty of coming up with just the right word. He discusses the use of dictionaries and thesauruses to help, and how he frequently finds words that were “just right” but weren’t what he was looking for.
2“The arrangement”, that is, of his masterly The Making of the Atomic Bomb, in which he uses historical narrative to follow several threads in science and politics, carrying each one to some stopping point before going to previous times to pick up a thread put down for awhile.