Books for the Future

In new nonfiction books I have a prejudice: I look for books that may tell me the future.  Books that might contribute to a better understanding of the most important factors likely to govern the future, and that suggest action and attitudes to make a better future, and certainly to forestall a much worse one.

Environmental topics are prominent among them.  I've reviewed here and elsewhere some of the major and also some of the lesser known but worthy books specifically on the climate crisis.  Here are glimpses of several more pertinent books:

Small, Gritty and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World by Catherine Tumber (MIT Press) is a model of the most valuable books for the future: it is on a specific but under-appreciated topic, it is very current and above all it is a laudable combination of thorough and relevant research (and reporting on such research), and it is well-organized, well written and readable, with useful notes, bibliography and index.

Millions of people live in these smaller cities, mostly in the northeast and midwest, that have rich histories but are neglected and generally ignored.  Tumber makes the case that these cities can not only be saved, but can be vital elements in the low-carbon future we must have if civilization is to have a continuous future at all.  These are cities like Syracuse, Youngstown and Hartford, but some of her findings and ideas can apply to the larger industrial cities now in various stages of confusion or deterioration.  Tumber stresses that this is a personal and even idiosyncratic book, involving personal experience as well as history and journalism.  Yet she comes up with very specific ideas on how these cities can contribute to a clean energy economy.

Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering by Clive Hamilton (Yale). However they reflect the moment, some of these books are destined to become reference works for the near future.  This is certainly one, for intentional climate engineering (as opposed to the unknowing kind that has been going on for more than a century, and still goes on even as we know better)  is still mostly a set of early ideas.  Yet because those ideas and research are being funded largely by the loose billions of fossil fuel and related companies, there is much impetus behind the scenes.  At the same time, Hamilton writes, "There is almost no information on public attitudes to geoengineering for the simple reason that almost no one has yet heard of it."

 This current research is apparently intended to offer technological fixes that won't require a switch from fossil fuel energy. Geoengineering projects are roundly criticized for their ineffectiveness and especially the foolhardy dangers they pose to the global environment.  Hamilton divulges who is doing what right now, and raises the practical and ethical issues involved.  Because such powerful interests are behind geoengineering, and also because some aspects of it may not require much technology or expenditure (and could even become a form of terrorism), this is a necessary book, a primer for the near future.

The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science by Akiko Busch (Yale)  For a long time the observation and even experimentation applied to the natural world was conducted by amateurs, by monks in gardens and part-time naturalists.  They were motivated by curiosity and wonder, and often by an intense involvement and fierce love for the nature in the place they lived.  Busch updates this impulse to the computer age, in the course of describing her involvement with her home grounds of the Hudson river valley.  As a physical book it feels good in the hand, with paper and print meant to last.  Therefore it serves the savoring kind of reading it deserves.  Her fundamental point is itself important: it is the citizen scientist--like indigenous ancestors--who are vital to the future of nature, and therefore to the future.

Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World by Stephen R. Kellert (Yale).  Kellert is something of an expert in the relation of humans to the rest of nature, and in this book he explores ways in which humans at various stages in their lives are naturally affiliated with nature, borrowing E.O. Wilson's term of biophilia.  His observations are wide-ranging, and the book includes personal observations of nature and scenarios of possible futures.  This relation of humans to the rest of nature is essential to our well-being, to who we are.  But we are in danger of destroying our own birthright.  Kellert makes a comprehensive case for why we must be conscious of this and act with it in mind to make sure future generations can claim this birthright.

Those who assume an apocalyptic future often do so based on an interpretation of evolutionary science and natural selection.  It is true that the dominant interpretations have stressed individuals engaged in a selfish survival of the fittest, and those manifest aspects of animal life that counteract this dominant view have been ignored and under-studied.  But new research is redressing the balance.

Two new books from MIT Press are good examples of these newly robust areas of study.  From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality, a collection edited by Frederick Bouchard and Phillippe Huneman  reviews research within the context of the move away from organisms as the primary agent of evolution, taking into consideration however not only constituents of what we describe as organisms, but groups.  What makes individuality turns out to be a lot more complicated in biology as philosophers, psychologists and other social scientists have found applied to humans.  This is a nice sized book, sturdy and illustrated with drawings and charts.  This seems an exciting academic field right now, with important implications for our general understanding, and our approach to our future.

The same may be said of Cooperation and Its Evolution, a collected edited by Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott and Ben Fraser.  Topics range from microbiology to human philosophy, and while animal cooperation is explored, the emphasis is on the human.  With more than 500 pages of text in a hefty but easy to handle volume, many current issues and arguments are explored.  This is the latest contribution to bringing research together to see where we stand.  In general, the idea that there is an evolutionary basis for cooperation is becoming more and more acceptable, and freed from the constraints of seeming heresy, how cooperation and conscious decision-making for a better common future can be achieved is an exciting area for creative research and theories.

Within the world of political action, there are books about under-appreciated elements of the present that are forming and in some cases threatening the future.  Occupy the Future, a Boston Review volume published by MIT Press, is a group of essays edited by David Grusky, Doug McAdam, Rob Reich and Debra Satz.  It emerged from the Occupy Wall Street movement, but the book is not about the movement itself.  It describes the current major income inequality in America--the vast proportion of wealth in the hands of a very few--and its current and future implications.  It looks at the causes and effects, and suggests remedies.  In nearly 250 pages of text, it goes into some detail, and at the very least is informative about today's workplace and the effects of computerization, globalization etc.  The breakdown of chapters is well organized, and some individual chapters go into detail.  It's longer than the Boston Review books I've seen, but it's still a handy paperback size, though a sturdy hardback.

Finally, there's the impact of the still evolving universe of computing and cyberspace on the future that is becoming the present every day.  The latest history to provide some perspective is On Computing: The Fourth Great Scientific Domain by Paul S. Rosenbloom (MIT).  But this is more than a history--the author is arguing that computing joins the physical sciences, life sciences and social sciences as a separate domain: information transformation.  The incredible growth of computing has regularly been accompanied by outsized claims that turn out to be both less and more than the truth.  This is a provocative thesis, which will likely occupy speculation and study for awhile to come.

An occupational hazard of books about the fast-changing world formed by computing is instant obsolescence.  Still, reports such as Crowdsourcing by Daren C. Brabham (MIT) are valuable as snapshots of the present (or recent past) and especially as indications of direction for the immediate future, and expression of potential uses.  This is a well organized and thorough treatment of the phenomenon and related research, in a handy-sized volume, a paperback with the publishing quality of a hardback.

Then there are books that reflect an emerging field that makes particular use of computing potential and behavior while advocating for it.  Digital Humanities (MIT) by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp is creative description and manifesto for a view and a field that conceptualizes computing as a transformational technology within the traditional area of study called the humanities. The book includes a "short guide" that defines digital humanities as "an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the primary medium" for the production and dissemination of knowledge. The book, about the size of many children's picture books, contains many examples of such current research as well as directions for future inquiry.

An open version of this book is also available as a free digital download.

E. O. Wilson and Social Evolution

The Social Conquest of Earth
Edward O. Wilson
Liveright

In examining the relationship of humans to the rest of nature as well as human nature itself, Edward O. Wilson has been a defining presence for some forty years. He created the field of sociobiology in the 1970s. He won the Pulitzer Prize for On Human Nature in 1979, and with later titles (Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, and Biofilia) he added concepts (and buzzwords) to scientific and popular discussion.

His work has always been controversial, and assertions in this new book similarly attracted criticism from major figures. His rejection of “kin selection” in human evolution (a concept used to explain altruism that he previously championed) and his adoption of a form of “group selection” have received lengthy rejoinders from psychologist Steven Pinker and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (Dawkins also cites strong disagreement from scores of other scientists.)

  It’s not possible to even summarize these arguments briefly. But I can instead discuss what contending scientists largely do not: this book as a reading experience. Whatever the results of scientific debate, the central theme of this book is a bracing corrective to the run of evolutionary theory since Dawkin’s selfish gene thesis began to dominate. Wilson looks at human evolution, not as isolated every-individual-for-itself battles of one against all (let alone every gene for itself), but by recognizing the reality of humans as social beings. He has a word for natural selection that responds to the social context as well as the rest of the environment: eusociality.

In under 300 pages, Wilson discusses the latest of what’s known about biological and cultural human evolution, and focuses his theories on the origins of morality, religion and the creative arts. Lynn Margulis noted that previous evolutionary theorists failed to account for the role of symbiosis because they studied big animals, not the bacteria and tiny organisms she studied. Wilson uses his knowledge of social insects (his first area of expertise was ants) to challenge prevailing assumptions that might be equally blinkered. Recent science in animal intelligence as well as a more modest view of genes themselves argue for greater complexity than the previously dominant mechanistic theories allowed. So a different approach like Wilson’s fills a need.

Some of his scientific arguments get technical. Some chapters seem more cogent that others (I found “What is Human Nature?” disappointing.)  Clearly his assertions are debatable.  But mainly Wilson’s prose is clear, informative and at times provocative, though at times its directness risks sounding dogmatic. Readers might best approach it as expressing a scientific point of view that is not always as settled as the writing might indicate.

This can also be read as a kind of updated summary work, a set of big picture conclusions, by an elder scientist (similar for example to Jerome Kagan's latest in that regard.)  However controversial, he presents a refreshing and even hopeful synthesis, arguing that knowing our biological history is essential to saving our magnificently unlikely species at “the growing point of an unfinished epic,” as well as the rest of present life we have imperiled.

Empathy: From Bench to Bedside
Edited by Jean Decety
MIT Press

Animal Thinking: Contemporary Issues in Comparative Cognition
Edited by Randolph Menzel and Julia Fischer
MIT Press

  Years of a rigid interpretation of Darwinian evolution tended to suppress study of qualities like altruism, compassion, cooperative behavior and empathy, since they didn’t fit into the model of an every-organism-for-itself struggle for survival and transmission of genes. Empathy was even an aberration, a human concoction of religion and—often enough by implication--silly women. But the evidence for the existence of these qualities were too obvious to ignore forever, and more nuanced interpretations of natural selection helped bring them into respectable scientific study. So much time has been lost however that this research is still just beginning.

The collection of scholarly essays in Empathy: From Bench to Bedside is such a wide-ranging beginning. Though even the term is still ambiguous, editor Jean Decety ventures a working definition: “...the natural capacity to share, understand, and respond with care to the state of others...” Even the word “natural” is a great leap forward. The topics range from the relationship of empathy to evolution and human nature (Allan Young) and its possible evolutionary role (Sharee Light and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler) to empathy and neuroscience (Abigail Marsh, Jamil Zaki & Kevin Ochsner, Daniel Terman), its role in childhood development (Amrisha Vaish & Felix Warneken; Nancy Eisenberg. Snjezana Huerta, Alison Edwards), to its role in social psychology (Stephanie Echols & Joshua Corell, etc.) and medical care (Johanna Shapiro, Charles Figley, Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht & Jean Decety.)

Beginning with C. Daniel Batson on his “empathy-altruism hypothesis,” some articles outline further tests and issues for future research. This volume demonstrates the current complexity in the field, which seems partly intrinsic to empathy itself, but also to an uncertain range of definitions. But the true significance here may simply be that all this research exists and is expressed and documented in one volume.

Evidence of just how “natural” empathy might be is found in the chapter on primates and other mammals by Frans B. M. de Waal, a pioneer of empathy studies in general. His work on primates has been instrumental in bringing these qualities into scientific discussion. Why hadn’t other researchers found such evidence in primates before? Because, de Waal has suggested elsewhere, they weren’t looking for it. Instead their assumptions about evolution and about animals prevented them from seeing it.

Animal Thinking is another topic that would have been laughed out of science not so long ago. As editors Randolf Menzel and Julia Fischer write in their introduction, studies have gone beyond the question of whether animals think at all, or whether they have any effective memory to more nuanced issues, like how animals might plan and decide for the future.

The first section attacks a topic for which there is much evidence: animal navigation, from honeybees (Menzel) to birds (Verner P. Bingham.) Animal communication is another topic, even more fraught with problems of definition. While all possible manifestations of animal thinking bear upon the human, and in particular the issues raised concerning empathy and cooperation, the final section of this book, on “social knowledge,” confronts these issues directly, inevitably involving group as well as individual behavior.

These studies raise questions about scientific disciplines and future research. J.R. Stevens calls for a synthesis of evolutionary and psychological approaches to decision-making issues, but that seems good advice in general. He notes the emergence of cognitive ecology and evolutionary psychology as pertinent fields. While Derek Penn suggests that folk psychology “ruined comparative psychology,” scientific research would do well to pay attention to the knowledge of indigenous peoples accrued over centuries of intimate relationships and interdependent culture-creation with animals.

These essays are the product of the Ernest Strungmann Forum, and each topic section includes a synthesis or summary authored by a number of scholars. Both volumes are sturdy, no-nonsense, durable books with clear type. They should stand up to frequent reference and repeated readings, as well they should.

Lone Survivors: How We Came To Be The Only Humans On Earth
By Chris Stringer
Times Books

There’s an illustration I recall from an old schoolbook that still defines the popular conception of human evolution (at least for those who believe in it at all.) It depicted a progression of primates, hairy apes becoming slightly less hairy and more two-legged until the crouching Neanderthals become the modern human, upright and standing tall, poised to invent subprime mortgages. It’s a tale of destiny and inevitable progress, and it’s pretty much wrong.

Chris Stringer is a prominent paleoanthropologist affiliated with the Natural History Museum in London. In this book he attempts a comprehensive survey of the still-changing picture of human species development. He begins with the state of knowledge in the 1970s, when he started his professional work, and he describes in some detail the factors involved in how that picture has changed. He explores fast-moving advances in contributing fields: not only in new techniques for locating and unearthing fossils, but in dating them with exotic new technologies (like the synchrotron, of which a very big example is the Large Hadron Collider.)

  Genetics now contributes in various ways, advancing with stunning speed. The human genome was essentially sequenced just 20 years ago. Now there’s a sequenced Neanderthal genome. Stringer also considers cultural questions based on artifacts such as tools, paints and musical instruments.   I found a lot of this interesting but also frustrating.  Paul Shepard shows--and evidence from contemporary Indigenous peoples as well as their traditions demonstrate--that humans learned a lot by imitating nature and other animals, as well as through their interactions with animals (in the hunt, for example, which Shepard suggests influenced the intelligence of both hunter and prey.)  Some cultural aspects Stringer finds mysterious may become less so if these factors are fully considered. 

Stringer writes a lot about how information was developed, so the big picture emerges in fragments. While all the new data answers some questions, basically it seems to have complicated the story. It’s now considered likely that several of many human species (an earlier book counted 22) coexisted in the same time, maybe in the same place. Modern humans carry some Neanderthal DNA (and before the caveman jokes start, Neanderthals males and females may have been more equal physically and culturally than are modern humans.)

New early humans have been discovered, notably a species called homo floresiensis discovered in 2004. Because of its small size, it was quickly dubbed “the Hobbit.” This species seems to have existed only on a single island near Java, and remains mysterious and very provocative in what it suggests about the vagaries of evolution. These humans existed—and died off--apparently in isolation perhaps just 18,000 years ago.  This suggests the fragility of a species' survival.  But then, for one reason or another, our own existence outside the Africa whence we came may be owed to only a few hundred surviving travelers.

    So how did we become the only humans on earth? Did modern humans develop traits that gave it competitive advantage through natural selection? In some ways that's likely, but traits that survived for no discernable reason (genetic drift) also helped. I’ve noticed that in recent years, historians are taking role of climate more seriously as a causal factor in the rise and fall of civilizations. Similarly, this book describes climate changes as crucial elements in the prehistoric story of human species. It may well be that one reason our species survived is that while other human species battled with extreme and disastrous effects of climate change, our forebearers were in southern Africa, with relatively stable climate.  Ironic perhaps in that this area is now being hit hard by today's climate crisis.

There are still plenty of puzzles, but Stringer concludes that we’re here at least partly by accident, by luck. “Sometimes the difference between success and failure in evolution is a narrow one,” he concludes, and notes that we’ve now got “an overpopulated planet and the prospect of global climate change on a scale that humans have never faced before. Let’s hope our species is up to the challenge.”

Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won’t Work
by Brendan Wallace
Imprint Academic

The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology
by Mark Rowlands
MIT Press

One of the unfortunate consequences of relentless attacks on the Darwinian concept of evolution by religious and political zealots is that scientists and others often respond to all challenges in Darwin’s neighborhood as fundamentalist enemy attacks. But there are legitimate questions from those who also reject creationism and broadly speaking consider themselves Darwinists.

These challenges are represented by three books with similar titles: What Darwin Got Wrong (by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, 2010) questions some of Darwin’s own conclusions. Darwin’s Blind Spot (Ryan, 2002) summarizes new science that challenges Darwin’s most dominant scientific descendants, known as Neo-Darwinists (Richard Dawkins, for example.) And this book, Getting Darwin Wrong, challenges a theory in another field that in the author’s opinion misuses or misconstrues Darwinian evolution.

This epic theory has been misused from the start. Even 90 years ago George Bernard Shaw observed that Darwin “had the luck to please everybody with an axe to grind.” The first and perhaps still most influential were the Social Darwinists (survival of the fittest justifies predatory capitalism, etc.) and proponents of what philosopher Mary Midgley calls the Escalator Fallacy of evolution as inevitable progress. These days it can also be the sloppy or cynical use of natural selection to support a supposition, scientific or otherwise.

In this book Brendan Wallace is not attacking the general idea that the human psyche was influenced by evolution, but the particulars of the school of experimental psychology that uses Evolutionary Psychology as its brand name. He identifies it as holding that the brain processes information as a digital computer, and related “cognitivist” theories of mind as popularized by Steven Pinker, for example. Evolution, they say, has bequeathed a rigid “cognitive architecture” with pre-installed programs for dealing with the world. (Ironically, another theorist attacked in Getting Darwin Wrong is the co-author of What Darwin Got Wrong.)

While there’s some metaphorical appeal in such general statements, Wallace argues that the precise theory is a logical and empirical house of cards, and leads to a warped sense of how our minds work—one that turns out to repeat inferential errors of both the Social Darwinist and Escalator fallacies, and the simplistic Neo-Darwinist emphasis on the individual, as opposed to the group and the environment.

In general Wallace asserts that this theory at best oversimplifies both natural selection and the human mind, as well as revealing yet another academic dogma that may have survived not because it is valid but because famous people professed it, and academic departments and careers depended on it.

In The New Science of the Mind, Mark Rowlands argues for an approach to mental processes different from the dominant cognitive science models, without rejecting them. He argues that cognition is “embodied” (it occurs not only in the brain but elsewhere in the body) and “extended” (mental processes “extend out, in various ways, into the organism’s environment.”) He develops his theory of the “amalgamated mind” as “the conjunction of the mind embodied and the mind extended.”

Neither Wallace or Rowlands directly addresses the work of the other; neither even appears in each other’s index. (For those keeping score at home, Rowlands does subdivide the field into Cartesian, non-Cartesian and anti-Cartesian cognitive science. As far as I can tell, he’s non, Wallace is anti.)

Rowlands treatment is more extensive and theoretical (and his book has the more appealing cover and layout) but strikingly, neither he nor Wallace delves into much brain science. Their approach is philosophical, emphasizing close logical analysis (Wallace mostly in dispute, Rowlands mostly in support of his theory.)

While both books are written clearly enough to be read by readers who haven’t followed the ins and outs in this field, they both require a lot of attention and some specialized knowledge (especially Rowland.) Though both eventually include a level of detail that was beyond my interest, I do remember this kind of writing (rigorous, with a minimum of jargon and some humor) with some affection from my philosophy courses in college.

I come away from these books still suspicious of theories of mind based so much on computers (or in Rowland’s case, on ideas that sound as if inspired by GPS and the Internet), but noting the cautious expansion of ideas of mind Rowland espouses. I’m not convinced they are expansive—or accurate—enough to do the rest of us much good, yet.

Earth Day #40: Classics

Stewart Udall, Secretary of Interior in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, died last month. A pioneer in environmentalism before and after the first Earth Day (and a major voice in the excellent PBS American Experience docu, Earth Days), he was the author of a mostly forgotten but very important book, The Quiet Crisis (1963). Following only a year after Rachel Carson's expose of chemical pollution, Silent Spring, Udall's book took a more historical view--chronicling American conservation efforts--and a wider view of the present: "In a great surge toward 'progress,' our congestion increasingly has befouled water and air and growth has created new problems on every hand. Schools, housing, and roads are inadequate and ill-planned; noise and confusion have mounted with the rising tempo of technology; and as our cities have sprawled outward, new forms of abundance and new forms of blight have oftentimes marched hand in hand."

Some books of bygone decades describe problems which the subsequent environmental movement addressed in America, while others--like Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb--dealt in terms now obsolete with problems that are still with us, and have even grown worse. But there are other books, like Udall's, that are of more than historical interest: they are classics both in the sense of being among the first to break new ground, and of enduring value to us now, including as reading experiences. They are classics, not only or not specifically of "environmentalism," but of all that pertains crucially to Earth, and Earth Day.

Udall's book was one of the first public policy books to recognize the importance of Aldo Leopold and his essay on "the land ethic," in the now classic book, A Sand County Almanac. Another writer of that era was Loren Eiseley, and to pick out probably his best known title--The Immense Journey--is to give only one example of his enduring writing, in a number of books.

The next generation of indispensible writers begins with Gary Snyder, in his poems but also in his prose statements, especially the landmark The Practice of the Wild (1990) but also The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work (1980) and A Place in Space (1995.)  These helped to inspire the bioregionalism and rehabitation movements that were and are especially influential in the western U.S.
One of the most important figures in establishing the breadth and depth of the ecology movement--and one of the most forgotten, was Paul Shepard. His essay, "Ecology and Man, A Viewpoint" was a foundation document. Many of the ideas now entering the mainstream through newer authors were even more fully and gracefully articulated in his books, considered radical in their time, particularly the crucial importance of nature to childhood and human development (Nature and Madness) and the idea that "animals made us human" (even the phrase is originally his) in Thinking Animals, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, The Others and other books.

Today we pursue a deeper understanding of the Earth through the ideas that coalesce around the powerful image of Gaia. Various elements of that understanding come out of books that are still classics, such as the best-selling essays of Lewis Thomas in Lives of A Cell, and Gregory Bateson's Steps Towards An Ecology of Mind. Learning more about the ways in which our human ancestors related to the natural world (another major subject for Paul Shepard), is informed by a deeper understanding of surviving Indigenous peoples. A classic in this regard is Make Prayers to the Raven by Richard Nelson, who used this experience with the Koyukon elders to inform his own intense experiences in The Island Within.

We all have our favorite authors and their books describing their experiences in the natural world, but among the essential authors who combines description of experiences with a greater context, Gary Snyder is one of my favorites, and I revere especially his book, The Practice of the Wild.

Another book that was particularly important to me but which I feel is a classic that fills in an important conceptual area is the relatively unknown Ceremonial Time by John Hanson Mitchell. It is the history of a single square mile of New England, over 15 thousand years. It gives the dimension of time to place, and vice versa.

Finally, there are much more recent books on the most important topics concerning the Earth and its future, particularly in two areas. First is biodiversity and our understanding of both the deep interrelationship of life and the understanding of other species, particularly as we overcome the bias of the mechanistic interpretation of Darwinian evolution. I don't know if there are any classics in these areas yet, though landmark books would likely include Acquiring Genomes by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, and Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb. Books like Beast and Man by philosopher Mary Midgely and books by Elaine Morgan like The Acquatic Ape and The Descent of Woman are exciting to read and shake things up.

The other topic is the climate crisis, and in this area I have more definite choices: An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore remains the classic survey of the subject, Forecast by Stephan Faris is the best account of the present consequences, while Down to the Wire by David Orr is the best book so far on the climate crisis future.

And now that I've been so definite, I have to take it back--these are my choices, books I would recommend as classics, but I haven't read everything so I'm sure I'm missing plenty.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy
Jean Decenty & William Ickes, editors
The MIT Press 255 pages

Why We Cooperate
Michael Tomasello with Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms & Elizabeth Spelke
Boston Review/Yale University Press 206 pages

Science has its own dogmas. Sometimes the dogma is a powerful prevailing theory with a superstar and institutionally well-placed adherents, or more often a set of biases based on a longstanding theory that determines how science is organized and done.

Lately, the prevailing dogmas of neo-Darwinian evolution that continued the bias towards the "struggle for survival" of individual organisms has been challenged in a number of life sciences. The growing power of neuroscience is beginning to shake things up as well. The outcome so far is an impressive if still fairly primitive movement towards recognizing what we call empathy, altruism and cooperation that have long been observed, though those observations were often ignored or discounted.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy collects reports on multidisciplinary research with neuroscience heavily in the mix, as these sciences (including various branches of psychology research) to some extent reorganize themselves. These reports generally support the existence of empathy, often through neurological research, for example following the discovery of "mirror" neurons.

Why We Cooperate presents a report by evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello on his research with chimps and human children, and a series of responses by another anthropologist, two psychologists and a professor of logic and philosophy. Tomasello's basic finding is that altruism and the urge to cooperate exist naturally--not just culturally.

Both of these books seem to be part of a movement--a slow or a fast one, depending on your point of view--away from a strictly individualistic (and perhaps baldly genetic) bias towards recognition of the importance and function of the social in survival.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy is more technical, a bit more densely written though still accessible to the careful reader. However it does appear to be more of an insider challenge, and a resource for scientists and science students. This intent is reflected in the physical book--sturdy binding, slick paper, it's built to last on the office shelf and be passed along through a few generations of students. It is an impressively useful volume, readable in its efficient prose and relatively modest length.

Why We Cooperate is even more accessible to the general reader, and clearly is meant to be. As a book, it is small and handy, about the size of a quality paperback but a sturdy and handsome hardcover. It's the kind of book you want to carry around. The prose within it answers this invitation--from Tomasello's essay to the responses, it's close to conversational, though it's a logical and informed conversation.

Readers will find entering that conversation inviting, or at least this one did. There is some eye-opening research presented in both these volumes, though the limitations of such research are also exposed. Of all the motivations for children cooperating in games, for example, I didn't detect much awareness that they are doing it because it's fun. A game without rules everyone cooperates in maintaining just isn't fun. Lots of animals play. Even scientists. Maybe they could augment their laboratory experiments by playing with children, and later, reading some literature. Lots of science I read in this field seems to be painstakingly and awkwardly coming to conclusions that storytellers came to long ago, and then announcing it timidly, as it is might be received as heresy.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy will interest students of neuroscience and psychology. It's also one of those landmark books that's apt to become a kind of classic in the field, until (and if) the next steps are taken. Why We Cooperate is for an intelligent but at least somewhat wider readership, as well as those in fields of psychology, evolution and child development. Together they are part of a dogma-slaying new paradigm with far-reaching implications for how humans think about themselves and their roles in the world.

A fascinating book on the evolution of Charles Darwin, reviewed below.

The Young Charles Darwin
By Keith Thompson
270 pages Yale University Press

In the 200th anniversary year of his birth, and 150 years after his book on the origin of species, Charles Darwin remains the most controversial and in many ways influential scientist of the 21st century, as he was of the 20th and 19th.

Darwin and his theories are written about endlessly, but this book actually covers new ground: his youth, education and early career. Just a glance at the cover—not the inscrutable bearded face of textbooks and postage stamps, but a slim, young and handsome visage—suggests how foreign this territory is. Here are the foundations of his evolutionary theories, including his fabled five-year voyage around the world aboard the Beagle. But most telling, here is the person who is becoming Charles Darwin.

Keith Thomson is an assiduous scholar and an absorbing writer, so this book is a fascinating read. He won me immediately by noting that since the Darwin men had a limited number of first names (“Charles” and “Erasmus” mostly), they were known in the family by nicknames. So Charles Robert Darwin, the fearsome intellect and alarming revolutionary, was called Bobby.

Bobby’s career was hardly a straight line to evolution, even though his famous grandfather (Erasmus Darwin) proposed the basic idea. He studied first to be a doctor, then a clergyman. He was an amateur naturalist who acquired his first fame in geology, which was the first field to offer evidence of change over vast lengths of time, beyond the current Biblical interpretations.

He also fudged a lot of his early life in his own autobiography, and was notoriously lax in giving others due credit—even though one of his first discoveries was stolen by a friend and mentor. Despite his independent income, he worried about his career.

In the process of telling young Darwin's story, Thomson also provides a captivating guide to a unique time, when sciences like geology and the life sciences were really just getting started, and enthusiastic amateurs made real contributions (for much of Darwin’s life, there was no such word as “scientist.”)

This book solves the so-called mystery of why there was so much time between Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and publication of his theory: it took that long to work it all out. Proposing a mechanism for what was supposed to be the work of the Creator required mental adjustments as well as much supporting evidence as possible.

Those theories remain essential to a lot of science and how we see the world, yet interpretations of them are still changing. "Darwin had the luck," said George Bernard Shaw, "to please anybody with an axe to grind." But now with this enlightening book there is a new account of Darwin’s own evolution.

where the fungi hits the evolutionary road 

'>Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life
By Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb
With illustrations by Anna Zeligowski
MIT Press. $34.95

'>Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature
By Keith Thomson
Yale University Press. $25.

by William S. Kowinski

It's the genes, stupid. That's been the battle cry of the orthodox Darwinists (or neo-post-Darwinists if you prefer) in aggressive defense of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

They used it as the simple, all-purpose weapon to defend against the assault from reactionary forces, revived since Darwin's day and especially since the Scopes "monkey trial" humiliated them and (some say) fueled the so-called Christian fundamentalist movement. That well-financed and messianic movement, with no visible twinges of conscience restraining the scorched earth deployment of hyperbole, character assassination, vitriol, mendacity, harassment and even violence, has successfully returned biological evolution---and with it many basic operating assumptions of science---into the realm of ideological politics. School boards are harrowed, and institutions intimidated. Recently IMAX withdrew from exhibition a film that referred to Darwinian evolution, the basics of which are fundamental to most of modern science and the modern description of reality.

In the battles between the "reality-based" or fact-based, and the "faith-based," such a single powerful idea as the supreme gene, was easily employed and zealously defended--a kind of scientific nuclear device. But those questioning it weren't only reactionaries who deny that evolution took place or that the earth is more than a few thousand years old, or even those who obscure a faith-based model in the appealing jargon of "intelligent design." (Though both intelligence and design are open questions, these politically motivated operations seem to seldom be sincere attempts to address them.)

The questioning was also coming from other scientists, who risked being tarred with the same reactionary brush by the more virulent defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy, who sometimes adopted the tenor and tactics of their reactionary foes. For awhile these subversives were held at bay, but perhaps no longer.

Some charged that the simplicity of orthodox claims was supported by an unduly narrow range of evidence. Most evidence, as in Darwin's day, was from large animals. Challenges came from microbiology and molecular biology, from the study of very small life forms. Lynn Margulis was one of those leading the charge with her forceful research, forceful thinking, and forceful advocacy and writing. '>Acquiring Genomes by Margulis and Dorion Sagan is a landmark work, and highly readable.

But challenges were launched from many other directions. '>Stephen J. Gould (who probably disagreed with Margulis as much as captain of the orthodox team, '>Richard Dawkins) took the heat for awhile. Several summaries of various challenges meant for non-specialists appeared, such as '>Alas Poor Darwin by Hilary and Stephen Rose, and the one I found most informative and balanced in terms of reporting and rhetoric: '>Darwin's Blind Spot by Frank Ryan. (There are several other books on the history and controversy cited in the volume under review, including Bowler's '>Evolution: The History of An Idea and Brown's '>The Darwin Wars) .

Now comes '>Evolution in Four Dimensions, which combines detailed descriptions of the science with conscientious and creative attempts to clarify the situation for the non-specialist reader, in the process of producing a real synthesis, and something like the outlines of a new theory in the Darwinian tradition that takes into account the increasing collections of evidence that tends to poke holes in the "genecentric" orthodoxy.

One more motivation for that orthodoxy ought to be mentioned. The hoopla surrounding the Human Genome Project several years ago wasn't all about the wonders of science, as if we were witnessing the equivalent of the first moon landing. Pharmaceutical companies and other corporate interests were salivating like Pavlov's dogs at the prospect of developing and selling gene therapies to offer cures of diseases and conditions as well as a menu of enhancements for their better-off customers. All of that might be possible once the genome was identified, assuming that it is indeed all about the genes. Well, stupid, it's not, and the revolution promised by the genome project is on hold.

The genecentric dogma supported some political views, such as a neo-social Darwinism of the selfish organism composed of selfish genes. Evidence from the human and animal worlds of altruism and empathy and other unselfish behavior got twisted and scorned. The social was supposed to be a kind of illusion, because only the individual's genes really counted. So the idea that culture or learning or even consciousness could combine to successfully create new behavior, perhaps even on levels beyond individuals, was considered hopeless, counter to the biological imperative.

This orthodoxy also supported the idea that humans were a kind of programmable machine, an android with perhaps too much wetware. So the AI crowd was happy with it, too. The mechanistic and deterministic bias also supported the meme theme craze (mental genes operating as what we used to call fads), leaving little to the imagination, and providing a whif of scientific pizzazz to political p.r. consultants.

Finally, there is the scientific bias for the simple (or "elegant") explanation. However as science gets beyond the more obvious and into the more fundamental, we may find that the fundamental is complex.

In any case, though there may be a biological imperative, we clearly don't yet know what it is. These authors explain how the possibilities have expanded in the areas of heredity and evolution. In addition to the genes, they outline evidence for three other factors involved: the epigenetic (transmission of traits on the cellular level but not involving DNA), behavioral (social learning transmitted through generations, which includes animal behavior) and symbolic (language and other forms of symbolic communication, mostly but not necessarily only operative in humans.)

Simply presenting these four dimensions with illustrative examples and explanations would be useful and provocative. But this book goes beyond that description to suggesting how these dimensions interact, how they may have originated and what roles they may have played in evolution. They also tackle larger issues, including moral questions that follow from this approach.

Though many readers may find this book to be densely technical, but with effort and attention, quite coherent, most readers will learn plenty even without engaging all the detail, especially from the summaries and dialogues (with a kind of devil's advocate) that these authors provide. Because the contents have apparently been road-tested with audiences, this book is a resource, a volume that can be studied and used repeatedly.

This is an important book. It will be a revelation to many, and it is a solid beginning to an important dialogue in science and beyond, with very important societal implications. In broadening evolution beyond genes, it opens up new vistas for many areas of knowledge, and how they interrelate to form our dominant conception of who we are and what the world we're in is all about. It is a vital step in an important shift in conventional wisdom.

For example, I know one of the pioneers of the study of human altruism, whose work was sociological. But one question that his audiences often had, and which bothered him as well, was whether there was a genetic basis for this behavior---whether, as he put it, there is "a gene for altruism." For many people, altruism couldn’t be considered “real” without a genetic basis. With a better understanding of the dimensions of evolution, this question becomes less meaningful. The way is open to showing that altruism is truly part of our inheritance.

Science is troubled territory these days, threatened by political and corporate pressures. One hopeful sign is an increasing diversity among scientists. Women, for example, have made usually unacknowledged contributions throughout the history of western science, but more are becoming prominent in their fields today. These authors, with distinguished careers in related fields of the history and philosophy of science, are prime examples. Since in this book they skewer the theory proposed in a popular book a few years ago that men are by nature rapists (a logical outcome of the selfish gene dogma), I won't engage in gender-based determinism. But the history of science as well as of the emergence of other suppressed social groups suggests that more women in science may bring more collaborative attitudes and greater openness to complexity.


Defending against political and "faith-based" challenges aren't the only reasons why this or any orthodoxy maintains itself. Scientists are human beings, with the same unexamined unconscious fears, needs and motivations as other humans. Despite pieties about evaluating evidence and coming to a conclusion, scientific theories are maintained for all kinds of less rational reasons.

Apart from personal and career motives, from group needs to maintain positions or keep jobs or make money, there seems to be a strong need to believe in the central dogma. We all know at least a little about the controversies over evolution in Darwin's day, though a lot of that little is likely to be inaccurate. But the extent to which Darwin's ideas, and the science that preceded and supported his theories, challenged the basic views of real people at the time, is remarkable. This is the subject of Keith Thompson's fascinating new book, '>Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature.

Consider Dr. Plot, a 17th century Doctor of Laws in England who wrote extensively about the fossils then being discovered, laboring mightily to reconcile fossil evidence with the reigning orthodoxy concerning the natural world, largely derived from the Bible. As his possible explanations for what turned out to be fossil dinosaur bones dwindled, the desperate imagination of Dr. Plot thickened to include the idea that such bones were actually left by a race of human giants, which had the virtue of being mentioned in Genesis.

But while it is easy to laugh at an obscure figure, consider also that Thomas Jefferson could not accept the idea that some animal forms had gone extinct. When mastodon bones were found, there were those who theorized that these animals weren't extinct, but simply were living where no man had gone before. (A plot for many intriguing adventure stories and sci-fi films.) Thomson claims that in addition to the other purposes of their epic journey in the American West, Jefferson charged Lewis and Clark with searching for mastodons.

Thomson's book is timely, entertaining and enlightening. It provides a human dimension to these controversies when they first appeared, and a window on what is to me a fascinating period, when most of the science in these fields was being done by what today would be considered amateurs---people initially trained in another profession, who might still practice law or perform their duties as clerics, but whose obsession with aspects of the natural world, combined with great energy and intellectual rigor, advanced and in some ways invented several earth and biological sciences.

Their intellectual interests were sometimes widely shared, as newspapers followed the latest findings and theories, and fossil-hunting and geological outings on the weekend became fashionable pursuits. In fact it was only when the expanding industrial revolution needed more and more applied science, that specialization and professionalism began. The word "scientist" didn't even exist until the mid 19th century. Before that it was more integrated into a larger sense of knowledge and the nature of reality (which is partly why so many were troubled by contradictions between new discoveries and religious worldviews), and more open to innocent enthusiasm. So as Thomson's book shows, even the conscientious doubters and skeptics played a role, as did the dogged subversives, like Darwin in his day.

Darwin was himself torn between orthodoxy and the faith-based worldview. This book follows that central problem of the subtitle. Even though the Catholic church, for example, found a way to accomodate Darwin's theories, the struggle obviously goes on.

Darwin's Blog Spot

Asked to name the most important scientist of the twentieth century, most people would probably say Einstein, and physics would be the popular choice for the most influential of the sciences. But a case can be made that the most important and influential scientist of the twentieth century was the most important and influential scientist of the nineteenth century: Charles Darwin.

While 20th century science and its technology certainly changed the world in many respects, there is something to the point of view expressed by J.B. Priestly in Literature and Western Man: "The nineteenth century produced the ideas that, after some modifying and vulgarizing, our own [20th] century has transformed into action and history."

And while it is likely that the greatest impact of quantum physics and the chaos and complexity and other theories it helped spawn is yet to come in this century, so far it is impressive how dominant Darwin remains in the early 21st century. Perhaps part of the reason is that few people profess to understand relativity and quantum mechanics, while almost everyone thinks they understand Darwin's theory of "evolution"---even though they disagree greatly on what it is. And that's even before they start arguing about whether it is true or scandalously wrong.

Darwin reverberates through politics and society, and remains a hot button issue in wars of religion. His theories were almost immediately and erroneously used to justify eugenics and predatory capitalism in the 19th century, and common misunderstandings and misapplications of Darwin's theory of natural selection and the consequent meanings of evolution have become part of the conventional wisdom.

The issues are many and complex, but they are also basic to how we see ourselves, our world and our future. Many books in many fields touch upon these issues, and there are many that deal more directly with Darwin's theories, their "evolution" and their ramifications. A few of the ones I'd recommend are Robert Wright's Non Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Pantheon) and his earlier, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are (Vintage) which is explicitly a foray into the new field of evolutionary psychology. For a witty analysis of Darwinism's internal logic and faulty reductionism, nobody can beat Mary Midgley and her newly revised Evolution As A Religion (Routledge.) Her quarrel is mostly with Darwinists rather than Darwin---in fact she dedicates the book " To The Memory of Charles Darwin, who did not say these things."

I have a small stack of other books in the field I've dipped into---some I intend to look at more intently, others seem more problematic, but I am very pleased to be able to say that I have just read the one I've been looking for, that both surveys the essential issues that have concerned and confused me, and adds new evidence from an overlooked area of evolutionary biology---an overlooked area, in fact, of life.

This admirable, essential book is Darwin's Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection by Frank Ryan, published in 2002 by Houghton Mifflin. There are two interlocking areas of contention regarding Darwin these days: in the public sphere, where it involves ethics, religion, and our general understanding of life; and among biologists testing and debating Darwin's theories against new discoveries (especially in genetics) as well as new experimental tests of those theories (thanks to more precise technologies, for instance.) This book surveys both areas with a clarity, transparency and generosity I haven't seen anywhere else. The early chapters of this book comprise simply the best description of what's been going on in both spheres from Darwin's time right into the 21st century.

But it is not just a survey: there's a definite argument here, a point of view, and a number of assertions and judgments. Ryan says what has been recognized as proven, and what he thinks has been proven, though others may disagree. His analysis of the history, though, is itself so cogent, and says so well what I've gathered from my own reading, that I tend to confer the presumption of credibility about the newer research . In any case, he's quite generous in naming other sources, so once again, this book is a great resource.

Much of the rest of the book is about those overlooked areas of life, namely bacteria, viruses, and fungi. They are often implicated in a phenomenon that biologists ignored even in better known creatures: symbiosis. It was ignored partly because Darwin's theories were shaped both for biologists and for the world at large by the prevailing politics of predatory capitalism and the cult of every man for himself. They combined to deny such observable realities as, for example, the fact that almost all trees cannot live without the fungi that clings to their roots.

Research into how symbiotic organisms can transfer or engage genes is also providing evidence for theories that explain the origin of species (which, oddly enough, Darwin could not explain in The Origin of Species)-that is, not change within a species (which natural selection does explain) but changing into a different species.

I also got the impression that another reason today's theorists of evolution ignore viruses and bacteria is that they are beneath them. They're bugs; they cause diseases. They aren't to be studied, just eradicated. The bigger animals were fashionable in the 19th century; now it's the genome. But if Ryan is right, they hold the key to explaining as well as linking both the other ends of this chain.

Ryan spins this out like a mystery, involving lots of detectives. They include well-known names of the past and present, and some obscure figures that emerge as unsung heroes. In the process Ryan creates context. For example, a lot of people have heard of the concept of Gaia, and many may have heard the names of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis associated with it. But usually it's either in the context of Earth Day evocations or the neo-Darwinists' dark mutterings of unscientific heresy and New Age babble. But Ryan describes the actual scientific achievements (and misses) of Lovelock and Margulis in historical context. We get a sense of their personalities, and the politics of evolutionary science.

I think I would be grateful for this book even if it hadn't suddenly appeared in my view just after I had ventured to say in print that the study of altruism, a sticky point in evolutionary theory and a matter of raging controversy today, might find some biological basis in the study of symbiosis. I made that suggestion as a provocation, because it was just an idea I had. (I do know of other scientific arguments in support of an evolutionary role for altruism.) It made sense to me intuitively, as I mused over such phenomena as biomimicry, animal learning and communication, animal use of medicines, and human learning of those medicines from animals, as well as a range of other intraspecies and interspecies learning and communication.

Nobody reacted to that provocation, not to me directly. Yet a few days later there was Ryan's book, where it really shouldn't have been: a 2002 book among a bookstore section of new books published five or more months later. Ryan comes at the subject from completely different places, and while some of his descriptions of symbiosis support my intuition, I've learned to think about the link in a more complicated way.

But even without this impetus, I think I would have found this book accessible and absorbing. If you going to read just one book on the state of evolutionary theory, I'd say start here.