Evolutionary biology
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On redemption and Christianity in The Book of Strange New Things.
So, I read a couple reviews that didn’t like Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things. The problem was, in the reviewers’ eyes, that the novel as science fiction was bland (e.g. this piece from NPR). And I’ll admit, I wasn’t having fun for most of the time I spent reading it. But at…
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On perspective, and whether you, Dear Reader, are a chameleon.
One major difficulty for me, in writing my book, was trying to inhabit perspectives that, due to an unfortunate spate of research reading, I don’t really sympathize with. But I had to learn to do it — and do it with the understanding that almost everyone, within the context of their view of the world, is trying to…
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On the origins of war.
Recently someone suggested Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Blood Rites” as a companion piece to read alongside Karen Armstrong’s “Fields of Blood” (see a recent post inspired by the latter here). Which seemed reasonable enough; both works attempt to explain war and where it comes from. And although I hadn’t expected to be overly fond of Armstrong’s work…
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On the creepy parallel between gene duplication and oppression – as inspired by a passage from Karen Armstrong’s “Fields of Blood.”
“If, as has been shown for ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers, women in the most meat-dependent foraging societies spend less time procuring food and more time engaged in the production of technology and performing nonsubsistence tasks, then Clovis women likely spent the majority of their time not gathering plants. In this sense, equating women solely with plant…
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On Y chromosomes, surnames, and reproduction.
For me, the most interesting section of Christine Kenneally’s “The Invisible History of the Human Race” was the section on Y chromosomes. Because, sure, if I’d spent a moment thinking about it I would have realized that sons of sons of sons carry the same Y chromosomes as their forebears… but it isn’t something I’d…
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On evolution and League of Legends.
Okay, here’s something that I feel like the Cosmos show did nicely – when they showed a tree representing evolutionary lineage, humans were on a branch jutting out seemingly at random to the side. Whereas many popular science presentations of evolution depict humans as the pinnacle – we’re here at the top, and if you…
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On personhood, in the Ramayana and in court.
I’ve been working on a modern retelling of the Ramayana. Mostly because the myth provided a framework for approaching a number of issues that I wanted to discuss, like free will: numerous commentators think the Ramayana is primarily a story about fate, and the structure of Valmiki’s telling, in which an episode of the gods…
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On toxoplasma.
I was talking to K and she pointed out that I missed the point of this whole “internet” thing. Apparently the goal of writing for the internet is not to sound like a pedantic stuff-bucket? This is something I hadn’t yet realized – I mostly use the internet to watch videos of Louis Scott Vargas…
Frank Brown Cloud 