I went down the the UNSW bookshop to buy two books... but ended up with four. Those stands of new books facing the door are a very sneaky strategy to boost sales. Must learn to resist temptation...
These are the four books:
1. Boris Akunin, Pelagia and the White Bulldog.
Akunin's last Erast Fandorin mystery was rather disappointing, so I'm hoping that this 'Sister Pelagia' series will be better. I like a good crime novel, but John Grisham now seems to be writing moral fables, Kathy Reich's keeps copying Patricia Cornwell's plots, and I wonder about some crime authors - what kind of minds can come up with that kind of evil and brutality? And Patricia Cornwell is just too mean to poor Kay Scarpetta.
2. Andrew Drummond, A Handbook of Volapuk.
Battles over universal languages. I wonder if John Wilkins will get a mention? Speaking of universal languages, I saw a book on Amazon which looks interesting - Philosophical Languages in the Seventeenth Century: Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz. Unfortunately, it's US$164.00, so I won't be buying it. Not today, anyway...
3. Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
A coming-of-age murder mystery set around a Great Books course.
4. Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.
I heard Simon Conway Morris speak at Cambridge, and apart from being very entertaining to watch and listen to, he had some fascinating ideas that I'd never come across before. To put it simply, Conway Morris is suggesting that evolution has direction and a destination - intelligent, human-like creatures. So, even if the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs had missed the earth, something like us would still have evolved. And if there is life elsewhere in the universe, it is more likely to be similar to us than different. More on this once I've read the book. Don't hold your breath, though. I've got piles of unread books at home!
5 comments:
Sounds like The Planet of the Apes. (I'm still hoping that they'll make that musical one day!)
If he means that in any ecosystem there is always an ecological niche that an intelligent species can fill, I guess that's true by and large. I might even follow him if he wanted to argue that a sufficiently large ecological niche might function as an evolutionary vacuum, drawing towards it any species that is already sufficiently close. Yeah, I guess that is only a small step from deism. But I really can't imagine what sort of evidence he could possibly present for that sort of interpretation of what, to all appearances, seem to be completely random mutations at the basic level.
Still, sounds interesting!
At Cambridge, he mainly talked about convergence - different evolutionary histories arriving at the same solution, so to speak. Do you know much about this idea of convergence?
He stated something like "From an evolutionary standpoint, the emergence of humans was inevitable."
I need to read the book...
Don't think I've heard it described like that but "convergence" sounds a bit like what Dawkins talks about a bit in The Blind Watchmaker, that we find species with rather different ancestries exhibiting similar phenotypes simply because the ecological niche is there waiting to be filled. He describes the Tasmanian tiger as a "marsupial wolf" and explains how in Australia and South America certain ecological roles are played by marsupials.
Certainly it's easy to describe the Tassie tiger as convergent with the wolf, biblies as convergent with bunnies etc. But when you go to NZ where all roles were filled by birds (until the Maori came) then you need to look at it a little more abstractly. Intelligent life will probably exist on other planets if there are conditions in which life can really flourish, not just get by. But even then, though it shouldn't be too hard for us to recognise its intelligence, it's not likely to resemble us in any other way, just because of all those accidental traits it has accumulated over its very different evolutionary history.
The third title sounds great - what a wonderful idea for a book! Of course, it has the potential to be really disappointing.
Have you read it yet?
Hi John. I have now read Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't the most fantastic book I've ever read. It was a bit like a high-school version of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, but I think the author tried to make it more original by setting it around a 'Great Books' curriculum. The theme books for each chapter didn't always seem to fit, though that could be because I'm not familiar enough with them! Also, the bibliographic references throughout got a little tedious.
That said, it was a good read, and I didn't anticipate the ending!
Post a Comment