Karl's Science Book Blog
Autobiographical Science Books
I recently realized that many of the books that I have enjoyed most
recently seem to fit in a genre that could be called autobiographical
science. Autobiographical science books present a specific research
field from the perspective of the author's own role in the field,
including what drew the author to the research, how researchers'
assumptions, hypotheses, methods, and goals evolved during the
author's career, the author's struggles against skeptical colleagues,
parsimonious funding agencies, dangerous animals, bad weather, war,
exasperated spouses, and other grave obstacles, and the dazzling but
tantalizingly incomplete state of current knowledge. This approach
tells the reader not just what the field is today, but the human and
intellectual story of how it reached this point. By sharing the
author's intellectual journey, the reader experiences science as a
process, rather than a set of static principles.
A Primate's Memoir, Robert Sapolsky
Robert Sapolsky's wonderful account of his career, starting as a child
fascinated by the primate exhibit at the American Museum of Natural
History, and including several decades of field work in Kenya on the
effect of social status on endocrine levels in baboons. Sapolosky
makes the social structure of baboon clans as vivid and engaging as a
soap opera, with lust, guile, cruelty, and affection constantly on
display. His descriptions of the Masai who lived near his field sites
are humorous and insightful. Sapolsky's self-effacing and warm
personality shines throughout the pages. A particularly nice moment
occurs when an elderly, spear-toting, illiterate Masai tribeman, to
whom Sapolsky had been trying to explain the the concept of a map,
suddenly grasps the concept and begins laughing excitedly as he points
from marks on the map to corresponding features in the surrounding
landscape.
Bastard Tongues, Derek Bickerton
Today it is generally accepted that the languages
called creoles are produced by children whose parents share no
common language, and that the similarities of creoles in widely
separated parts of the world are the result of the universal
grammar that all humans share. However, just a few years ago this
view was very controversial, and a few years before that virtually
unheard of. In droll and irreverent language, Derek Bickerton tells the
story of how he became a linguist, then a creolist, and eventually,
after many false starts and in the face of stubborn and bull-headed
opposition, a proponent of the universal-grammar theory of
creoles. Typical observation: the best place to learn new languages is
in low-end bars, because bar patrons speak slowly to make themselves
appear sober, they repeat themselves, and they are often very friendly
to strangers.
The Snoring Bird, Bernd Heinrich
This book is unusual in this genre in that it spans 2 generations. The
author's father, Gerd, was a 19th century-style taxonomic biologist
who devoted his life to an 12-volume exhaustive catalog of the world's
ichneumon wasps. Symbolizing the irrelevance of this work to modern
biology, adult Bernd finds pigeons roosting on his father's magnum
opus in a barn attic. As a young man, Gerd fought in the German
cavalry and as a WWI aviator, surviving numerous brushes with
death. After the war, Gerd led many collecting expeditions into
regions more remote than any that exist in the world today, while at
the same having affairs with his wife's sister, his eldest daughter's
nanny (the mother of the author) and numerous others. After WWII, the
family lived for years in a remote hunters cabin where Bernd's passion
for nature was born. Bernd describes his circuitious path into biology
and his many frustrations trying to find a dissertation topic. But
after finally finding one good topic (heat regulation in hawk moths)
he had one fascinating project after another. Unlike the other books
on this list, The Snoring Bird is a family history viewed through the
lense of science rather than the reverse.
Locust, Jeffrey Lockwood
This book poses an intriguing mystery: what happened to the locusts
that swarmed across western North America in the 19th century,
devastating ranches and fields and nearly wiping out the Mormon
settlement in Salt Lake City? Jeff describes locust swarms in
cinematic detail and somehow makes entomologists and their disputes
into heroic sagas. He describes how his research solved the mystery
just a global warming was erasing the evidence. I'm proud to say that
in the 1990's I co-authored several papers with Jeff (on computational
models of entomological expertise), but I am in awe of Jeff's talent
as a writer.
Linked, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
Not too many years ago, social network was a concept known only to
sociologists. The Internet, which has brought us Facebook, MySpace,
LinkedIn, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the Blogosphere, has made social
networks a household term. Who would have imagined, however, that all
these social networks share a deep mathematical similarity to power
grids, nervous systems, sports leagues, and citation networks? The
discovery of these deep commonalities among disparate networks has
created a new research field with relevance to many different
disciplines, including physics, biology, mathematics
Moral Minds, Marc Hauser
coming soon
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
coming soon
Descartes Baby, Paul Bloom
coming soon