Twelve Black Code Monkeys

A recent paper in the journal Tissue Engineering suggests the possibility that meat could be produced in the lab by taking samples of animal muscle tissue and growing it out, as an alternative to the conventional method of raising cattle. While this is not a reality yet, it seems like this has been accomplished on the small scale, so if there was truly a market, it could be expanded into a real option for consumers in the not too distant future. Although it does seem quite futuristic, no? Then again, GM crops seem pretty futuristic as well.

I’m a bit torn on the whole idea. On the one hand it would do away with the claims that meat is bad for the ecology (something I feel is mainly true for factory-farmed meat, not more benign organic/grass-fed/free-range). On the other hand, the idea of meat grown in a lab is surprisingly weird. It’s odd how this is somehow more objectionable to one’s senses (well my senses anyway) than actually slaughtering a live animal, but I think it speaks to hundreds or thousands of previous generations who went out on the hunt. Not that I would be able to do that myself unless I was truly in survival mode, but it still seems more natural than cooking up meat in a lab, even if that meat comes from a cell of a real animal originally.

The scientists who created it suggest they could create a variety that includes more Omega 3 and less Omega 6 than the current meat we find in supermarkets. My question is how? Wild game and cattle that are grass-fed are supposed to have a significantly higher level of Omega 3 (and other great nutrients like CLA). Factory farmed meat get fed a diet of grains, something that are not part of the natural diet of a cow, but is dirt cheap and allows the cow to put on lots of weight (including a lot more fat mostly in the form of saturated fat). The question is how do you feed these cells? I don’t pretend to understand how you would do this in a lab, but my guess is that you’re not going to feed it grass OR grain, but something that can somehow be absorbed by the cells without a digestive track! How will this effect the meat is a big question mark. Will it taste, act, smell, and digest like real meat? I wonder!

In general, I’d rather not go messing with nature unless we’re damn sure that what we are replicating is a true replication, which seems a little unlikely when you are producing something in a completely different way than it is actually grown. My bet is still on the replication technology that was suggested in Star Trek The Next Generation (and I’m sure in many other places), that would basically create an exact digital copy of an original “pattern” of matter, be it meat, precious material, or live humans. But that technology is still fantasy despite some recent work in quantum mechanics that hint at some possibilities. This lab-grown meat may yet become the new GM crop, and we know how controversial that has become, despite the fact that it’s become ubiquitous in our food supply (at least as far as grains and soybeans are concerned).

I am curious to hear what others think about this possibility. Does it weird you out? If you are vegetarian, would you eat such a product, given it was proven safe and healthy for you? I’m curious in particular how vegetarians come down on this. There seem to be a collection of different reasons why vegetarians become vegetarians, including animal welfare issues, religious reasons, ecological reasoning, and even simply tastes issues. I myself only ate fish for about six years in my 20’s in an attempt to progress to be a vegetarian, which I could never quite do. I did this only because I had read it was more healthy, but when I started reading Protein Power and other books and information about nutrition that weren’t all just about low-fat, I decided that meat was a part of a healthy diet. I was able to make that logical decision even after not eating meat for 6 years that because my decision was based on health and I no longer believed the premise behind that decision, that I should reincorporate meat into my diet. So I just wonder how vegetarians would react to a meat that is offered in such a way that it might eliminate the premise behind their becoming vegetarian?

Like many of my readers, I’m sure, I’ve had an ongoing battle with weight, but I also have done extensive reading on the subject. I’m not just talking about diet books, but also studies, articles, and interviews, debates, etc. on diet, nutrition, health, and even anthropology. I can’t call myself a scientist because I don’t have the hard-core grounding in proofs and research skills, but I can at least claim to be somewhat educated on the differing points of view surrounding these topics, in addition to simply being a fairly good observer of attitudes of those around me regarding this stuff. That being said, I thought I would ramble a bit about what I see as the issues we face but more importantly how to try to get around them. It’s a multifaceted topic to say the least. If it were simple we might have already nipped it, but it is complex and fraught with confusing contradictions and competing interests. I hope this litany will at least start to delineate individual items of attention and separate some of the major areas to work on.

The Issues:

1) Mind over Matter? As many of us know from countless attempts to lose weight, only to regain it later, the goal of losing weight and keeping it off is a very challenging one. For those who haven’t had to deal with obesity, a very easy assumption may be to blame the dieter for simply being too “lazy.” There are certainly those who can overcome the desire to slack and keep weight off for extended periods, so these exceptions to the rule are held up as the paragons that everyone could and should strive to emulate. However, despite the desire to simplify issues (which I’ll examine more closely below), it’s not always simply a matter of personal responsibility or will power. This isn’t an effort to make “excuses” but to look at the reasons why things have become so difficult.

a. One part of this is the so-called evolutionary argument that it is in our genes to overeat whenever possible. Hunter-gatherer ancestors dealt with a constant threat of starvation. Up until the agricultural age when humankind learned to preserve food with salt, and eventually bottling, canning, refrigeration, vacuum packing and irradiation, the only way we could “store” food was to eat it and have it accumulate in our personal biological “stores” of fat tissue. Because of this, some would say, we are compelled to eat as much as we can even though there is no threat today of starvation. Some of us have been able to override this urge most of the time, but given the opportunity, as with the “all you can eat” buffets, it can often be incredibly challenging not to stuff yourself.

b. Part of this may be due to simply not doing it “right.” In other words, the effort to work hard at losing may be there, but the results do not show. This may be because the dieter is doing something that they were TOLD was the correct way to eat and/or exercise, but it turns out to actually be deleterious to their goals.

c. Yet another issue is societal and cultural realities. Current U.S. (and perhaps at least some other westernized countries) suburban culture creates lifestyles that make it extremely hard to eat healthfully and get a decent amount of exercise. The car culture of the U.S. makes regular exercise something that one has to make time for instead of being an integral part of one’s day, and the busy lives of many makes this increasingly difficult. The prevalence of fast-food makes it much more appealing than the more time-consuming method of preparing one’s meals from scratch from whole foods, and such meals are not readily available ready-made, or when they are, they are considerably more expensive than the less healthy alternatives. Finally, while we have come to have a much greater awareness as a society of dieting these days, there is still a great adherence to eating things based only on what tastes best regardless of how healthy it is, and this can help erode the will of any dieter.

2) Simplicity

a. We crave simplicity – easy answers to complex questions. We hear about laziness a lot when it comes to people not wanting to do the “hard work” of exercise and eating right that are supposed to make weight loss possible. While there may be a very small subset of those who simply don’t want to do anything “hard,” I think much more prevalent is laziness when it comes to thinking about how to lose. Part of this is an educational issue where people unquestioningly accept whatever crap they read, whether it’s in a supermarket tabloid or the New York Times, without doing any critical thinking of their own. Many simply don’t have the tools to go about such thinking, but others do and simply decide to believe in one dogma or the other without questioning it or trying different approaches.

b. One Size Fits All – thankfully this attitude is slowly starting to change, but it is still something that most people believe applies in one way or another. Certainly we can agree that there are some universal truths that certain things are healthy for 99.9% of us and other things are unhealthy for a similar percentage. But the field of genetics has shown us that people do metabolize foods differently and have sensitivities and other issues particular to their ethnicity/genetic makeup. Instead we are given guidelines that are supposed to work for everyone. Even given one individual, they will react very differently to the same diet and exercise plan at different periods throughout their life based on many factors, such as how many times they have dieted in the past, what kind of health issues they have developed or haven’t, or simply their age. These concepts seem to be too confusing for many, or at least those who write books or articles have decided that they are too confusing, and so they dumb everything down into simple rules that over time harden into unchallengeable “fact” when they are really nothing of the kind.

3) Business and Government

a. We exist in a capitalist society where the “free market” reigns. Many of the large companies in such a system operate with the goal to get bigger which increases their stock and makes them and their stockholders wealthier. In doing so, altruistic motives often become of secondary concern and then only when they can coexist with the goal of making more profit. This situation can lead in more notorious cases to companies like the cigarette companies that profit on the addiction to harmful substances, but just as much to food and beverage companies that profit on the addiction to sugar, fast food, and junk food.

b. The U.S. Government is seen by those on the right and the left as being a spoiler in this area and others. For the right, the Government should have no place in telling people what to eat or how to spend their money. It should not be a “nanny” because it should be up to the individual to exercise their free will and be responsible for their own decisions when it comes to diet and health. For the left, the government is little more than a facilitator for big food companies, giving them corporate welfare and subsidizing huge factory farms that produce way more in the way of food then we can eat or even give away to countries in need. The smaller farmer interested in sustaining the land, producing a product that is healthier and more humane, gets marginalized if not eradicated.

4) Medicine and the Medical Industry

a. Pharmaceuticals have become a huge sector of the economy and due to the realities of the healthcare and insurance industries, the marketplace, litigation, and government regulations; they have turned into monstrosities of a sort. At the same time that they create drugs which prolong life for cancer patients, and even so much as cure other diseases, their drugs are increasingly seen as not having been adequately tested. They basically bribe doctors into prescribing as much of their drugs as possible with the unspoken threat that perks of free dinners and vacations will go away without high enough sales numbers. They need these huge sales numbers in combination with high drug prices that are ultimately paid for by health ever increasing health insurance premiums and the government (and thus your tax dollars), in order to make up for the huge costs of developing drugs and the potential risk of having a dud, or worse something that ends up eventually harming people and thus causing countless legal expenses.

b. Doctors have been accused of not understanding nutrition, and not wanting to pressure patients into eating healthy because they feel their pleas will be ignored. While there are certainly exceptions, many doctors have expectations for patients that are so low, they would rather prescribe drugs or even surgery over really urging a patient to eat better or exercise. Their slavery to the pharmaceutical industry makes it even harder for them to resist the temptation to simply prescribe a drug for a given symptom. Many patients are afraid to do the hard work of figuring out what the underlying cause of a symptom is and experiment with possible solutions (although this is getting easier with the internet and being able to communicate quickly with those who have similar issues), but doctors have much more background in science that should enable them to do this work faster and more efficiently. However, again the realities of the profession mean that it is a lot easier and more profitable to see a patient for a few minutes and sign a prescription for something that will allay some symptoms for a while as opposed to getting to the bottom of the problem.

5) Dieticians, Nutritionists, and “Experts,” oh my!

a. Our growing problem with obesity and obesity-related health issues has not only created a huge market for what most recognize as the today’s charlatan snake oil salesman equivalent of this diet pill or that fad diet, but it also creates a market for those with more recognized certifications and ostensible respect in the professional community. These so called experts dole out advice with confidence and do this in the place of the medical doctor who has largely given up this role.

b. Dieticians and nutritionists, and even personal trainers have generally been giving the public what they have been asking for. An expert to tell them what to do and how to do it. Unfortunately, these professionals practice a “science” which is not hard and fast the way, say, physics is (quantum mechanics not withstanding!). The theories behind weight loss and healthy eating aren’t as simple as these experts make them out to be. Very little if anything has been “proven” in studies, but these studies all the same are used as “proof” to back up the standard party lines. These lines become more solidified and more rigorously defended over the years. As it’s been said, if you repeat anything for long enough, it becomes accepted as fact. When dieters follow the advice of their “expert” but do not see any improvement, the patient is often the one who is blamed for doing something wrong, or even for cheating. Even if the patient convinces their expert otherwise, instead of causing the expert to question their foundation of knowledge (assumptions), they patient is labeled an anomaly (usually genetically speaking these days) and told to pursue a remedy in prescription form. Since their standard advice is useless and they cannot suggest something that goes against that advice.

Solutions

Ok, so, as you can see, the situation is a complicated, convoluted mess. Can we make any sense out of it? As cynical as I may sound above, in the sense of the upcoming New Years’ resolutions, here are just a few personal and collective goals I can suggest. Some of them will be hard, if not all but impossible but I don’t see anything wrong with having such goals as long as there are others that are more achievable or achievable faster. The harder ones give you something to work towards after all the easy things are out of the way!

Suggestions for the individual:

1) Stop following and start thinking.

a. This really relates to a lot of the issues above. Really all I mean is to not just listen to what the so-called “experts” are saying, but to do your own thinking. Think about what makes sense regarding what they tell you, and what doesn’t. You’re smart enough and at least have common sense to know that some things that “experts” tell you to do don’t make sense, or at least don’t for you.

b. Get other opinions. Just as with politics, diet, nutrition, and exercise have their fare share of differing camps. Low carb vs. low fat vs. calorie counting, aerobics vs. weights, etc. Read about the different approaches, but more importantly try them out. If something doesn’t work, after giving it a fair chance, try something else. Is this going to be hard for some people? Sure! But there are plenty of communities on the internet that will help you understand the different issues. Instead of relying on a “expert” to tell you what to do because that’s been drilled into them as a party line, talk to your peers and ask them what works for them. Get suggestions and have a dialogue, not a one-way list of orders that you can’t stray from at the risk of dire punishment.

2) Don’t listen to the Government.

a. At least don’t listen to what they tell you as far as dietary advice. Our society, economy, and government are centered on money and commerce. Officials rely on campaign contributions from wealthy individuals or large companies in order to get reelected and so are lobbied incessantly and successfully by factory farms and big food companies, and even by non-profit special interest groups, who all have their own agendas. The part of the government that currently makes dietary guidelines (the much-maligned food pyramid included) is the USDA. That is the US Department of Agriculture. Agriculture as in farmers. The USDA’s raison d’etre is to promote the interests of farmers and the agricultural industry in the U.S. There seems to be an inherent conflict of interest here!

b. The current administration is very pro-big-business at the moment and so they have a bias towards promoting things that help those big businesses, whether they are big food and beverage companies, pharmaceutical companies, or fast-food chains. So we will necessarily see recommendations and even laws supporting these businesses right now. That doesn’t mean you have to support them as well.

3) It’s not simple!

a. It’s not all about weight. Most experts would have you believe that weight is the paramount issue here, but that simply isn’t the case. Excess weight may be perfectly healthy if it is in the form of muscle and not fat. Most scales only measure total weight, at least until recently, and that one measurement has also been simple and convenient for the “experts” to obsess about. Body fat percentage is a much more telling measurement. Even with excess fat, there’s some evidence to suggest that maintaining a steady, albeit above average weight (with that excess weight being fat) over the long haul (especially if regular exercise is part of the picture) is much healthier than gaining and losing over and over even if half of your time is spent at some mythical “ideal” weight.

b. Don’t let the scare tactics get to you when it comes to cholesterol. Very often doctors will urge their patients to go on cholesterol medication because their LDL is too high or even just their total cholesterol is too high. However, there are pleanty of layman, scientists, and even doctors who have come to the conclusion that the current standard methods of measuring cholesterol are at best misleading, and at worst completely meaningless. Given the risks of taking serious medications like the cholesterol-lowering Statins, it’s extremely important to know whether there is a really good reason to take these.

Suggestions for the medical industry, dieticians, etc:

I’m not sure whether such suggestions (even coming from someone other than myself who has credentials and real influence) could ever affect significant numbers within these professions because of the inherent forces within them that have caused the current status quo. Perhaps the only way of changing things in some cases would be to create competing bodies or professional associations that could somehow challenge the more mainstream ones. Such bodies exist currently in some forms, but sometimes these have their own issues because they are blinded by their own ideology as opposed to real science. In any case, here are my suggestions:

Look at the opposing point of view and look at it dispassionately. Those in the medical industry are supposed to be practicing science, but like scientists in other fields, a status quo is developed and anyone who challenges the ideas of that status quo is ridiculed, but, if their ideas truly have merit there may eventually be grudging acceptance and finally adoption into the accepted tenets of that science. Scientists are supposed to weigh (no pun intended) things dispassionately, but they are still human and as such unavoidably have biases and turfs they feel they need to defend. The growing amount of litigation and cost of insurance only make it harder for Doctors to go against the grain, and the “standard of care” solidifies this practice. But I would argue that doctors also need to look really hard at their Hippocratic Oath and ask themselves whether doling out pills and not suggesting anything that goes against standard orthodoxy is really helping patients, and if it’s not helping patients are you are in fact hurting them because you are preventing them from getting the advice that really would help?

Likewise, nutritionists and dieticians need to look beyond their training which accepts only a narrow dogma with little flexibility. Admitting that things we thought were true are subsequently shown to be false is much less painful than clinging to an argument that has really been proven false over time. It smacks of fear of losing one’s place as an authority and one’s job. With adherence to dogma comes inevitability of obsolescence since with progress we often learn new things that contradict what we thought we knew. Refusing to accept new evidence staring one in the face will only worsen an individual’s or entire profession’s reputation and hasten it’s demise. An old guard defending itself is never to be trusted to advance the interests of anyone but its own.

Finally, to the medical industry, I would suggest creating studies that actually mean something. So many of the “studies” that come out today really don’t prove anything. Part of the fault here goes to the mainstream media who sees a preliminary study on mice and extrapolates it to be proof or at least a strong suggestion of how things work in humans. But scientists should know this and refrain from talking to the mainstream press about studies they know are only going to get hyped into ridiculous simplified generalizations. Even aside from animal studies, there is simply a lack of good human studies especially when it comes to diet and health. Many of the studies I’ve seen are with very small groups for short periods of time, or they aren’t even studies themselves but rather “meta studies” which simply look at other studies and try to argue a point based on hand-picked literature that supports their cause – while ignoring those that don’t. If we really and truly want something approaching objective “proof,” we need to spend lots of money, and not the money of special interests. Perhaps a large fund, like that of Bill and Melinda Gates, could support something that would not allow for special interests to influence the results to any significant extent. Doctors would have to resign themselves to any conclusion, instead of starting with a conclusion in mind and writing off an unexpected result as some anomaly. The numbers of participants should be very large – in the thousands or even tens of thousands. All variables should be plotted, not just weight, height, gender, and age, but body fat percentage, previous dieting and exercise experience, ethnicity, medications, smoking, etc. Ideally participants would have to be confined to an area where there would be a fair degree of confidence as to what the participants reported were true. In other words, all exercise could be monitored and all food intake as well. Not just monitored so much as allocated. Different levels of macronutrients would be allotted to different groups. There wouldn’t be just a “standard group” and a group that differed to a moderate extent in one of their macronutrients like carbohydrates. Instead you would have a group that took in 80% of their calories as carbs, 10% as protein, and 10% as fat, another group which took in 5% of their calories as carbs, 65% as fat, and 30% as protein, and all the different combinations in between. The study would also follow the individuals over at least a three year period, but as many as seven years. As I implied, this would not be an easy or a cheap study, but satisfying all or most of these strictures will be the only thing that will convince the majority of people (experts and laypeople alike) that a particular method of weight loss works best for a person given their very particular makeup (ethnicity, dieting experience, medications, etc.). Perhaps computer modeling and genetic profiling will take a lot of the work out of this in the future, but for now, anything short of this full-on approach will be, as it has been in the past, meaningless except as something for scientists, doctors, universities and/or hospitals to get their names in print.

Bill Bryson is a favorite of mine, having written a bunch of books that are in the genre “travel narrative.” Bryson’s wit and insight not just about travel but life in general, is amazing. But just as wonderful is his voice. Luckily, most of his books he narrates himself with his half Midwestern half Brittish accent. This description doesn’t do it justice; of course, you really have to hear it. It’s not like an affected Brittish accent taken on by some (the head of my high school comes to mind), but just an odd intonation that alerts one to the fact that Bryson probably hasn’t spend his whole life in the U.S. In fact, he moved the U.K. when he was in his early 20’s and settled down there. Back in the mid-1990’s, I believe, he decided to come back to his native country and settled in a small town in New Hampshire with his family. Unfortunately it looks like we’ve lost him again as he has moved back to his adopted homeland.

Recently when I was on Audible.com’s site, looking through new books, I noticed “A Short History of Nearly Everything” in non-abridged format! I was ecstatic. The length was a full 19 hours. Back in July when I saw Bill Bryson had a new book out and it was available for download on Audible, I jumped at it, despite the fact that it was an abridged version. At over 6 hours, it was still a decent length. Now with a non-abridged version available, I felt compelled to snatch it up. Silly me I assumed that Bryson narrated this unabridged version; after all, he’s narrated all of his other books available on Audible. The narrator, Richard Matthews is British, but doesn’t have nearly the pacing and intonation that make Bryson such a pleasure to listen to. Nevertheless, you can still hear Bryson’s voice sometimes through the words if you try. At over 19 hours, there’s of course a lot more detail – mainly a bit fuller explanations and technical details of the science, which can be helpful if there are areas that are hard to grasp without examples, etc.

I would have to say that “History” is one of those books where I find the abridged version slightly better than the unabridged. One could probably say this about many poorly written books that drone on and on and could be actually improved by an abridgement. But this isn’t the reason that I prefer the abridged version, of course, it’s the narration! Matthews narration is by no means bad, but it is the difference between good narration and wonderful. It’s hard to explain, but Bryson’s voice, pacing, intonation, etc. is just so distinct and of course his actual voice reflects that which actually wrote the words down to begin with. Somehow I felt like I learned and remembered more from the abridged version than from the unabridged. Part of this may have to do with the content and that the unabridged version simply fills in some of the details that the abridged version leaves out but still purveys in a general sense that can be understood.

I have also come to the conclusion that in some cases for non-fiction books, less is actually more. When a certain historical event is covered, that’s one thing, but a broad accounting of events throughout history begins to get overwhelming after a while and even with the best of authors can start to feel like a mere log of events and persons. I’m sure the more one is already familiar with the events and people the less this is the case. I have read a lot of science history, so much of this was familiar, but Bryson’s book is tour de force of science, including almost all sciences you can imagine. Kind of a Cosmos of the 21st Century. A nice thing about the unabridged version that I didn’t notice in the abridged (although perhaps I just overlooked it) was that Bryson quotes a lot of other science writers, which gives one recommendations for further reading in most areas of science.

For those who like reading about science or even who just like Bryson, I would still recommend the unabridged version, but I think it should be read in addition to the abridged version, not instead.

As a self-professed “fan” of science, I snatched this audio book up from Audible.com. It was very promising, as it concentrated its 8.5 hours on six renowned scientists, most of whom I’d read about before, but not all.

On the one hand it did have some advantages over the other two types of audio books about scientists I’ve read. For example, although A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is amazingly entertaining, because it covers so much, it gives just tiny tidbits about a given scientist – perhaps the largest pieces on one would be the equivalent of a page or two. Certainly less than five. Then on the other side of the spectrum are books such as Galileo or The Seashell on the Mountaintop, which give you in-depth knowledge of one scientist with maybe a few others thrown in but with only cursory attention. Although this might be great in some ways, it can sometimes be a bit too much information if the scientist is not interesting enough or the book isn’t written well. Six Great Scientists doesn’t have these problems because it divides it’s attention between six, but gives each enough attention that you do not feel cheated either.

Another thing that I liked about Six Great Scientists was that one of it’s aims was to talk about the personalities and not just focus on the science and scientific discoveries. Although this luxury is often available with the single-scientist biography, I still learned of things which I don’t remember reading about in the single-scientist biographies I’ve read. For example the fact that Galileo was an accomplished cook, or that he had created an instrument that his workshop made which sold like hot-cakes (of course I can’t remember the name of it now – no it wasn’t the telescope!), or a story about how Einstein had to temporarily leave a movie theater in Princeton once but went to the box office to make sure that they would know he had bought a ticket already (he was afraid they wouldn’t recognize him).

On the other hand, there are a few things that annoyed me about this book. For one, it is written in a somewhat bookish style. The author uses $100 words in places where they just are not necessary and some of these words I’d never heard of. I understood them, but it was almost as if I was reading something that was 100+ years old when certain forms of certain words were still in use that you just never see today. And no, the book wasn’t written that long ago. I can’t seem to find when it was written, but it was obviously at some point after Einstein’s death in 1955 at least.

The other main thing I struggled with was the narration. After about two or three hours I finally got used to the narrator enough to where I was able to fully concentrate on the content, but in those first two or three hours I was constantly wondering whether I should simply scrap the idea of listening to it and move onto something else. The narrator for my edition was Patrick Cullen, which is not the same as the narrator for the audiocassette version or CD. Cullen was not so much monotone as he was for the most part just uninteresting, or uninterested in the material. There was no life in his reading except in the rare occasions where he was quoting a letter that was obviously animated. Part of this may have to do with how the book was written in that a lot of it is written in short sentences, listing one fact after another. But still, Cullen seemed at times like we was reading a grocery list or something equally unexciting.

As mentioned, the author, J.G. Crowther, tried to include a lot of personal details and this helped to make the book a lot more enjoyable. I think without this and with the bad narration and the bookish style, it would have been deadly, but the personal accounts saved it. Still, at time these personal touches went a little far. Really, there was no reason to know what a typical shopping list for Newton was or a detailed listing of the furnishings in the Curies apartment. Fortunately there was not too much of this, but when it was included, it was a bit annoying.

All in all, I would recommend this book if you are interested in the scientists it covers – Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Madame Curie, and Einstein. Just consider getting the audio cassette or CD before the Audible.com version, and if you must get the Audible.com version, just note that you may have to struggle through the first quarter of the book before the narrator is no longer a distraction…

This book on the beginnings of modern Geology centers around Niels Stenson (A.K.A. Nicolas Stenonis, or Steno for short), a Danish scientist who uncovered for the first time the phenomenon of stratification. The book covers his life and in doing so showcases a who’s who of other scientists and philosophers of Steno’s time, many of whom he had personal dealings with.

Seashells had been found on mountaintops for as long as people could remember and the explanations ranged from spontaneous generation to the aftermath of Noah’s flood. Steno used the phenomenon and his sharp scientific mind to uncover truths about natural processes when many of the other scientists around him were asserting preposterous claims not backed up by anything. In fact, so much of science was subjective and affected by religious scripture back in Steno’s time (late 17th Century) that it can hardly be compared to science of today.

An interesting insight laid out in the book is that science and scientists were actually promoted and supported by the church! This seems impossible with all the conflict between the two in subsequent centuries, but the Church was out to combat the threat of “Atheists.” An atheist at that time wasn’t just someone who didn’t believe in God, but rather someone that thought that the universe was random. That there were no real laws (moral OR natural) and so people could really do whatever they wanted to. The Church was out to help science prove that there were natural laws and that the universe had order and pattern. However, there was still an adherence to scripture, and especially with the protestant religion to a very literal interpretation of scripture. So scientists were constantly compelled to shape their theories in order to back up biblical passages about genesis, the flood, and anything else. So while this burgeoning idea of experimentation and observation was distilling to the surface, at the same time the conclusions made were often leaps.

This is what made Steno such a special and ironic character. His demeanor and his objectivity as a scientist were unquestionable, even if these did not equate with scripture. Yet he was in the midst throughout much of his life of his own spiritual dilemma. He eventually converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism and then became a priest, renouncing science and devoting the rest of his life to religion. Despite this he never renounced his earlier discoveries that seemed to contradict much of the current orthodoxy.

The audiobook I listened to through Audible.com was unabridged and the narration was a bit on the dry side at times, but the subject matter was so interesting that this was not going to get in the way. The abridged audiotapes or CD are narrated by someone else so may be better in this respect.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Bill Bryson, I recommending becoming so as soon as possible. He is primarily known as a travel writer, but his most recent book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, is kind of a Cosmos, a book about how we got here and where “here” is exactly and how exactly we came to know what we know about these things. It turns out that although we know a heck of a lot more than we did a few hundred years ago, over and over again, we are confronted with the fact that we really don’t know much at all!

Bryson’s travel books such as A Walk in the Woods and In a Sunburned Country, are great reads as well, and in them Bryson mixes history and naturalist fact along with his personal narrative. So it was probably not a huge leap for him to seperate himself from the personal narrative on this occasion and go completely with the facts. Despite this, it is impossible for Bryson to be dry. Although one could call some of his wit “dry,” it has an irresistable cadence and charm. I actually listened to an abridged version of this book on Audible.com, who has recently come out with an unabridged version. One should really try to listen to his books on tape or CD, which he narrates himself. Having spend half his life in England, he has an unmistakable Brittish “tone” in his voice, but at the same time no Brittish accent. It is odd and yet endearing and somehow adds to the humor.

Speaking of humor, although not as much of A Short History is a laugh-out-loud riot as some of his other books, there are definitely parts that grab one as humerous. These usually have to do with the personal or professional behaviors of scientists that are so bizarre as to be funny.

In all, this is great read (or listen), and should be quickly gobbled up by anyone remotely interested in history and science, but even those who just want an entertaining story. The science in it is not presented in a particularly complex manner - it is really for the layman and Bryson himself is not a scientist by training, so he knows how to write about it for an audience of non-scientists. That being said, even the more scientifically inclined should get a kick if from nothing else of the stories and interwoven histories of science and scientific discoveries. For those who are familiar with James Burke, it did seem at points quite a lot like Bryson was creating his own tome of “Connections” although not as intentionally as Burke does.

Mean Genes is a look at human behavior in all it’s constructive and destructive forms and how we can explain much of it in the context of genes and natural selection. Although they don’t discount psychological factors, they do note at the beginning that their focus is on the genetic and they do a good job explaining this side of things. They discuss why so many of us are compelled to eat unhealthfully, use drugs, and take other risks, what motivates male and female stereotypical relationship/sexual patterns, etc. The authors, Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan, are actually a couple and use some examples from their own lives, as well as a myriad of fascinating descriptions from the animal kingdom and modern humans (from those in developed countries to hunter gatherers). So this is no dry academic study, but more like a huge essay from Popular Science.

I actually listened to an unabridged audio version of the book on Audible.com. It was narrated by Pat Woodruff, who does a good job