The Penguin

I'm generally not one to speculate on the future; I think it's wrong to constantly sit around waiting for everything to get better - almost as bad as sitting around whining about the "Good Ole Days". The present is all we have, and whatever past we have to rectify, or future we plant the seeds for, can only be affected in the Long Now. At the same time, I'm not a Zen hardliner, living only in the moment - I myself feel like our current circumstances are pretty heavy. The kind of heavy where you just shut off the TV and the radio because there's so little you can do about it. That may sound like defeatism, but it's a much healthier response than chewing your finger-bones, venting your spleen online to non-people who can't hear you and don't care, or staying up at night worrying about all the things you can't control. Political awareness is one thing, but mental self-torture is quite another. So why don't we try a little fun exercise inst...

Galileo's Middle Finger Alice Dreger (Penguin) (Note: this review covers some controversial ground, especially in the discussion of transgenderism). From the title, I thought this was another "so you think you know history" book, a glib volume of bawdy historical incidents (like the time Galileo flipped off the Pope, apparently?) What I found instead was at first simply baffling - what the hell did this have to do with the 15th-century astronomer and his erstwhile digit? - But ended up being utterly engrossing. By the end of this book I was amused, outraged, and zealous for truth at all cost...but also unnerved and unmoored by a simple question: how can we believe anything we read - even this book itself? Galileo's Middle Finger is hard to pigeonhole; it seems to lie somewhere between a memoir and an expose, with a bit of personal defense thrown in. Alice Dreger is a bioethicist, author, and part-time activist who specializes in some of the most tendentio...

That's an odd name for a post, and I'm aware that my amateur status opens me up for all kinds of criticism; I'm a dabbler, not a scientist. The reader could also infer a sort of "mammalian chauvinism", i.e. the concept of evolution that divides nature into "higher" and "lower" forms, with the "lower" forms all striving to become more mammal (read: human )-like. This is the sort of 19th-century thinking that produced the "evolutionary dead-end" fallacy about dinosaurs, arguing that the most successful and long-lived tetrapod family on the face of the earth was simply too dim-witted and sluggish to survive. We now know these creatures to have been intelligent, dynamic, and adaptable in their own right - in fact, they live among us today in bird form. Our mammalian ascendancy, when you get down to it, is down to sheer luck. At the same time, as I survey the record of life, I can't help but notice some odd patterns emergin...