Friday Fun: Chapter-by-Chapter reading notes for two famous books

A couple of blogs out there are doing notes on the blog author's chapter-by-chapter reading of a famous book. One is underway and the other is just starting and I sincerely hope both are able to get all the way to the end. Both are well worth your attention.

On the fun side, Kate Nepveu is re-reading J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings with the notes on the Tor web page.

From a more scholarly perspective, John Whitfield is blogging Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species on a new ScienceBlogs blog, Blogging the Origin. This project is just getting under way.

One interesting point, one which may deserve a post all it's own, is that Tor is basically using a multi-author blog as it's home page. They do have a page dedicated to their books, but the blog is really front and centre, filled with interesting and engaging content of all types, not just about the books they publish. I wonder if there are any lessons the library world can learn from this?

(I first heard about the first project on Uncertain Principles and the second on A Blog around the Clock.)

Catching up on reviewing science books

A few books that I've read in 2008 that haven't quite made it into their own reviews:

Gawande, Atul. Complications: A surgeon's notes on an imperfect science. New York: Picador, 2003. 288pp.

This is a very fine book that I recommend without hesitation. Gawande has to be one of the absolute best popular writers about medicine of all time. This book is a collection of essays that were published in other places, mostly The New Yorker. The theme of the first section of the book is the fallibility of doctors, how they need to learn about their craft by basically practicing on us, and the ethical and practical dilemmas that all of us face because of this simple facts. We all want to be operated on by the most experienced surgeons, of course. But how did those surgeons get experienced in the first place? The rest of the book more or less picks up on those themes as it covers some medical mysteries and some things that the medical profession doesn't really understand yet.

This is a must-have for any academic or public library and I can imagine medical libraries building whole exhibits and and other collection focus activities around the work of Atul Gawande.



Shermer, Michael. Why Darwin matters: The case against Intelligent Design. New York: Holt, 2007. 199pp.

Another very fine book. Noted sceptic Michael Shermer basically demolishes the Intelligent Design and creationist paradigms from start to finish, but he also does it in a rather ecumenical way, taking care not to burn bridges or overly offend. You can get an idea of what he covers from the chapter titles: The Facts of Evolution, Why People Do Not Accept Evolution, In Search of the Designer, Debating Intelligent Design, Science Under Attack, The Real Agenda, Why Science Cannot Contradict Religion, Why Christians and Conservatives Should Accept Evolution and The Real Unsolved Problems in Evolution.

Shermer also weaves in his own personal story about how he evolved from being a Christian creationist himself to his current position supporting evolution, as well as his experiences at the Dover trial.

A solid, informative book, even if it's occasionally marred by Shermer's own descents into theistic gobblydegook, such as on page 43, "If we think of God as a thing, a being that exists in space and time, it constrains God to our world, a world of other things and other beings that are also constrained by the laws of nature and the contingencies of chance. But if God is the maker of all things and all beings visible and invisible in heaven and earth, God must be above such constraints: that is, above the laws of nature and contingencies of chance." A good rationalization for believers, I guess, but it does undermine some of his other arguments.

Overall, I'd recommend this book to most public libraries and any academic library that collects popular science.

I would like to close with another quote, from page 161.

Darwin Matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from and where we are going.

Angier, Natalie. The canon: A whirligig tour of the beautiful basics of science. New York: Mariner, 2008. 293pp.

Natalie Angier is a well-known science writer for the New York Times and in this book has produced a very fine explanation of what science is all about. She also covers an awful lot of territory giving an overview of the current state of the art in various of the scientific fields.

But the most important contribution of the book is the first few chapters where she basically gives an layperson's introduction to the philosophy of science. She talks about the scientific method, the role of probability in science and the role of measurement, all very important topics in understanding what science is. I think it's important to mention that her approach is in sharp contrast to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which tended to use a more historical narrative, concentrating on the eccentricities of the various scientists he profiled to give colour. Bryson really didn't discuss any philosophy or have any extensive discussion of the scientific method, to the book's great detriment I believe. Angier seems to have learned from Bryson's mistakes, both in giving that philosophical and mathematical underpinning as well as not portraying scientists as freaks and weirdos.

The rest of the book is given over to a quick overview of physics, chemistry, evolutionary and molecular biology, geology and astronomy. It's quite dense and perhaps potentially a bit dry, but she mostly avoids that with a lively sense of humour sprinkled with quite a bit of flashy wordplay. This aspect of the book came under a fair bit of criticism from other reviewers, but I think it works quite well. Granted, she does goes overboard on occasion -- sometimes it seems that every paragraph needs to end with a little zinger.

Did I learn anything? Yes, I did. Quite a bit really. On the frivolous front, it seems that Angier and I share the same passion for collecting bookmarks. Who knew?

I would recommend this book to any academic or public library. Even high school or middle school libraries would be able to find readers for this book.

Darwin: The Evolution Revolution

The family and I all finally went down to the Royal Ontario Museum yesterday to take in their Darwin: The Evolution Revolution exhibit.

Overall, the exhibit was fantastic. We all enjoyed it tremendously, especially the two science fans among us. Even the no-so-enthusiastic science fans thought it was great. It's odd, because I've seen quite a few fairly harsh criticisms of the show online in various places -- mostly saying that it was too long and wordy and boring. Yes, it is a bit heavy on the reading rather than the "experiencing" we would expect from a grade-school oriented science centre exhibit, but that's completely natural. It is an exhibit aimed at adults rather than kids and we would expect adults to be able to deal with a more intellectually demanding experience that 8 year olds. In fact, if you have younger kids, do not take them to this exhibit. I would say about 11 or 12 is the minimum age to be able to really appreciate the experience, preferably even 14 or 15. My 12 year old enjoyed it but found it a bit long. My 15 year old just loved it.

Like I said, it is a bit long -- you need to give yourself 90 to 120 minutes to really absorb the contents and it would definitely repay a second visit. You could manage in 60 minutes but would have to skim a bit. We did it in about 90-100 minutes and it worked out pretty well. We also dropped by the tremendously improved dinosaur galleries afterwards before leaving.

Did I find anything disappointing? Yes. The gift shop. Now I'm not a big fan of shoving gift shops down the throats of visitors as they leave an exhibit but if there was any case where I was positively disposed to picking something up, this was it. The Darwin shop was fairly small and mostly concentrated on trinkets and little doodads, most too cute and/or overpriced. What few books they did have seemed rather randomly selected. For example, they had volume II of the Janet Browne set but not volume I. And that in hardcover rather than paperback. Considering how directly the exhibit is aimed at countering creationism, I was surprised that they didn't have more instructional books on evolution or any of the recent spate of anti-creationism books. The only one they did have was Shermer's Why Darwin Matters. Also I was quite disappointed in their lack of tshirts or other clothing. And not one DVD of any of the recent Darwin/evolution series.

Chapman, Matthew. 40 Days and 40 Nights. New York: Collins, 2007. 288pp.

Full title: 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, Oxycontin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania. (Post title field isn't big enough.)

This is a loosely connected sequel to Matthew Chapman's previous book, Trials of the monkey: An accidental memoir in which he revisited the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of the 1920s. That was a great book, interweaving as it did Chapman's own colourful life story with the story of the trial as well as his visit to the original Tennessee town where it took place, Dayton.

40 Days and 40 Nights, on the other hand, is Chapman's chronicle of the latest battle between creationists and the reality-based community in the US -- the Dover, PA trial of 2005.

Chapman uses some of the same strategies in the Dover as he did in the first book on the Scopes Trial. He tells the story of the trial as a story about people: the lawyers, the defendants, the townspeople, the media. And a colourful lot they were, making those aspects of the book very entertaining and compelling. The weakness of the book is related to those colourful characters -- the chronicle of the trial itself never really seemed to come alive for me in the same way that his telling of the Scopes trial did.

It was also a bit of a disjointed narrative, switching back and forth between more character-based sections and trial description that just didn't work for me as well as the first book. Perhaps the thing that I missed the most was Chapman's own story. In the Scopes book, Chapman was everywhere, it was his story as much as Dayton's or William Jennings Bryan's or Clarence Darrow's. 40 Days and 40 Nights needed to be more of a personal story, to engage me on a personal rather level rather than just as a spectator at at a car crash.

Overall, however, it is a pretty good book, one that I would recommend for any public library and any academic library that collects popular science.

Intelligent Design on Trial Preview

Here's a quick video preview of the upcoming PBS show Nova: Intelligent Design on Trial. It's a documentary about the Dover, PA trial from a couple of years ago.

The show looks extremely interesting. I can't wait to catch it. It starts airing on November 13th. Via Greg Laden's Blog.

Here & there

A bit of catching up from around the blogosphere:

• Video games: The invisible middleman of the industry by Ted Kritsonis. It seems that Canada is not only a world leader in video game production, but in software shops that build the tools the developers use to build their games.
  
  
• Get a First Life! Reminds me of about a million science fiction stories about virtual worlds where people become so addicted that their physical selves wither away and die. There should be bibliography out there somewhere...
  
  
• Biologists helping bookstores. It seems that people are moving ID, etc, books out of science sections in bookstores and into other sections. Hmmm. Sounds like a good idea. I should make sure we don't have any ID books classified as science in our collection.
  
  
• The Seven Signs of Bogus Science. A bit of an older item, but still well worth reading. Pin it up on the notice board in your library, even.
  
  
• Issues in Scholarly Communication blog. It's new to me, but it seems like a very worthwhile blog to watch.
  
  
• Rebecca at Adventures in Applied Math has a great ongoing series which makes up a kind of Course on Supercomputing. It includes sections on parallel programming, Unix, batch scripts, makefiles and other topics. It's obviously not done yet, but I certainly look forward to more installments. Some of its a bit hairy, but well worth the effort to get the gist.

Chapman, Matthew. Trials of the monkey: An accidental memoir. New York: Picador, 2001. 367pp.

Sometimes, you just get lucky with books. What with the Dover, Pennsylvania trial only a couple of years a ago and the opening of various creationist museums, the evolution vs. creationism controversy is never far out of the news. Of course, I've seen publicity for a lot of books about the issue and Matthew Chapman's 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania is one that I've been looking forward to reading. While waiting for the paperback of that one to come out, I was browsing at the discount table at the local bookstore when what should I encounter, but the hardcover Chapman's first book, Trials of the Monkey, about the original creationist trial spectacle, the Scopes Trial. For $7. My lucky day. So, I bought it. It hung around the house for a few months, as usual, and then one day I just picked it up and started reading the first few pages, on a whim. I had no plans to start reading it seriously as I was about 100 pages into another very interesting book. Best laid plans and all, I was hooked and raced through Chapman's fascinatingly complex and interrelated account of the twistings and turnings of his own life and the story of the Scopes trial.

The book really has three narrative threads going. First of all, Chapman's biography, the evolution of his life, a troubled and mixed up childhood through to odd jobs and finally as a successful Hollywood screenwriter and director. The first parallel thread is his plan to visit the site of the Scopes Trial (Dayton, TN) and attend the annual dramatic reenactment of the trial; this takes two parts, the first being a trip to Tennessee to research the trial and scout out the area and the second to attend the reenactment. The final thread that Chapman weaves into a couple of the middle chapters is the story of the Scopes Trial itself.

A few words about the sections dealing with Chapman's biography. Chapman has a gloriously checkered past. The great, great grandson of Charles Darwin, he first chronicles the devolution of his family line from the lofty heights of the great man to his own mediocrity (ie. What's more mediocre than Hollywood) via the alcoholism of his own mother. His childhood, adolescence and young adulthood were certainly ones of very little accomplishment and many brushes with authority as well as a few bizarre sexual obsessions and entanglements. His climb to a happy family life, albeit struggling with the pressures of Hollywood and his own hard drinking, is a happy way to end this particular thread.

His trips to Tennessee to take in the annual dramatic reenactment of the original trial takes up probably half the book. He visits with many creationists, interviewing them and following them around to gather information and get a feel for the ambiance of the place; the same with some of the local bigwigs. It's very interesting that he really makes no attempt to demonize any of them, almost going out of his way to present their best side as well as their lack of scientific rigour and their eccentricities. He often comes off as liking them personally, almost admiring their convictions. This thread ends rather strangely and I won't spoil the surprise. Needless to say, given his own biography, Chapman isn't able to end the book anywhere near the way he'd like.

The chapters where he describes the history of the Scopes trial begin with the story of George Rappleyea, the local businessman who dreamed up the whole mess as a way of promoting tourism and business for Dayton. It follows with a fairly straightforward description of the trial itself and it's aftermath. Well worth reading for a lot of the colourful interactions between the two camps, William Jennings Bryan and his merry band of creationists against Clarence Darrow and the evolutionists. While it was a bit more bare bones than I hoped, this section will lead me to the bibliography to find other works to fill in the blanks.

Which of the threads is the most interesting and compelling? Easily, Chapman's life story is the best part of the book, followed by the story of his visits to Dayton. I often found myself skipping ahead to the next relevant chapter to see what happens next in his various adventures. The story of the Scopes Trial itself is somewhat played down, not given the attention of the other two threads. But that seems appropriate in the context of the story Chapman wants to tell. He covers the details well enough, but just not with the elan of his more personal adventures.

Over all, this is a worthwhile and compelling story, filled with intimate and telling biographical detail and local Southern colour. Not strictly a science book, more of a cultural history mixed with biography. It didn't end up being what I expected at all from the book; I expected more straight reportage and less personal anecdote and cultural commentary. But on the whole, the unexpected combination worked well, being both entertaining and enlightening. If I ended up understanding a little less about the Scopes Trial than I'd hoped, I think I ended up understanding a little more about what makes Southern Christian fundamentalists tick.

I would recommend this book for any public library and any academic library that collects popular science. Of course, any library that has an interest in the evolution vs. creationism controversy can't do without this book. I look forward to reading his second book, the one about the Dover, PA trial, Forty days and Forty Nights.

Skybreak, Ardea. The science of evolution and the myth of creationism: Knowing what's real and why it matters. Chicago: Insight, 2006. 338pp.

The whole raison d'etre of this book is to counter creationists' arguments against evolution. Nothing less than completely uncompromising and hard-hitting, this is a great book. It dissects all the worthless creationist arguments one by one, first presenting their point of view and demolishing it with solid scientific argument. Make no mistake, this book strongly advocates a point of view; it sets out a position and defends it. It identifies positions that it disagrees with and challenges them.

Based on a series of essays in the radical left wing magazine Revolutionary Worker, this is certainly a polemic but it thankfully avoids the highly polarizing post-modern rhetoric of many leftist critiques of science and instead clearly distinguishes the human practice of scientific research and development and the pursuit for how nature really works. She clearly spells out her position than on page 52 when she says, "All ideas are not equally true: some ideas much more closely correspond to the way things really are than other ideas." And how about, "The challenge we face is not so much to ascertain that material reality exists, but to figure out, and consistently apply, methods of scientific investigation which can best minimize our subjective distortions, and systematically uncover what's actually real." (p. 278)

Some of the things I liked about this book? It might be strident and determined, but it's definitely not dry and humourless. Take a look at page 210, where she talks about a "supposedly highly educated Supreme Court Justice, who presumably went to both college and law school, unquestioningly repeating something that is so patently false that it would cause a high school student to totally flunk a basic biology test" or on page 234, "Many creationists like to claim evolution can't be tru because it would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Wow, are you impressed yet? This sure sounds scientific doesn't it? Only one problem: they don't know what the hell they're talking about!"

I also like that it engage creationist nonsense on virtually every page. There are a plethora of extensive, fantastic side bars on topics like "What does the science of evolution tell us about human 'races?'" and "Social Darwinism is not based on science and has nothing to do with Darwinism" and "Are humans still evolving?" In other words, the material is presented so you can quickly find a chapter or side bar to support most any point in a discussion with a creationist. The chapters are organized so that Chapter 1 provides an overview, Chapters 2 and 3 general principles, Chapters 4 and 5 on speciation, Chapter 6 on proven evidence for evolution, Chapter 7 on the evolution of humans and Chapter 8 the capstone chapter, 120 pages demolishing very specific creationist theories and positions, along with a handy taxonomy of creationists. The table of contents is extensive and detailed, making it very easy to find the information you need very quickly, as is the index.

This is a lively, entertaining and even important book. I would highly recommend it for all academic collections: college, university and even high school and middle school. Anyone that passionately cares about science and rationality could do worse than have such a book in their personal collections as well. It could come in handy during arguments at contentious dinner parties or family gatherings, for example.

(Book supplied by publisher.)

More videos -- CERN, Google & anti-ID

I just love these science-y videos:

• Robert Scoble's Scoble Show has yet another cool physics-related video, this time a tour of CERN: CERN Tour: Beginnings of the Web features interviews with Ben Segal and Jean-Francois Groff as they tool around CERN.
  
  
• The Google Librarian Central blog points out that there are lots of Google related videos in Google Video. I already knew about their Google TechTalks but I hadn't heard of their Authors@Google series featuring authors such as Neil Gaiman, Ken Jennings (Jeopardy) and Scott Rosenberg (Dreaming in Code).



• Via Evolving Thoughts, a whole series of video interviews debunking creationism and intelligent design. There are 24 installments, mostly in the 5-10 minute range. Well worth checking out.