The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher

 

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher  by Lewis Thomas

The medusa is a tiny jellyfish that lives on the ventral surface of a sea slug found in the Bay of Naples. Readers will find themselves caught up in the fate of the medusa and the snail as a metaphor for eternal issues of life and death as Lewis Thomas further extends the exploration of man and his world begun in The Lives of a Cell. Among the treasures in this magnificent book are essays on the human genius for making mistakes, on disease and natural death, on cloning, on warts, and on Montaigne, as well as an assessment of medical science and health care. In these essays and others, Thomas once again conveys his observations of the scientific world in prose marked by wonder and wit.

 Your Inner Fish by N. Shubin

https://www.amazon.com/Your-Inner-Fish-Journey-3-5-Billion-Year/dp/0307277453/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1WZNPGODE3L5M&dchild=1&keywords=your+inner+fish+by+neil+shubin&qid=1598560140&sprefix=inner+fish%2Caps%2C217&sr=8-1

Neil Shubin, the paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the “fish with hands,” tells the story of our bodies as you've never heard it before. The basis for the PBS series.

By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genomes look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible and told with irresistible enthusiasm.

Microcosmos : four billion years of evolution from our microbial ancestors; Margulis and Sagan

 

By L/ Margulis and D. Sagan

Published in 1986, a landmark explication of the ideas of symbiosis in evolution. Can be accessed free online at the Internet Archive.

Excellent narrative, lots of detail, and many insights. 

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky | May 1, 2018

“It’s no exaggeration to say that Behave is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read.” —David P. Barash, The Wall Street Journal

"It has my vote for science book of the year.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

"Hands-down one of the best books I’ve read in years. I loved it." —Dina Temple-Raston, The Washington Post

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal 

From the celebrated neurobiologist and primatologist, a landmark, genre-defining examination of human behavior, both good and bad, and an answer to the question: Why do we do the things we do?

Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.
 
And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior occurs--whether an example of humans at our best, worst, or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? By now he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened.

Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors millions of years old. 

The result is one of the most dazzling tours d'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.

The Gene: An Intimate History - by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Another great one I forgot to add to the blog last year.
from NYT review;

Heredity was the “missing science,” the ever prescient H.G. Wells remarked at the turn of the century: “This unworked mine of knowledge on the borderland of biology and anthropology, which for all practical purposes is as unworked now as it was in the days of Plato, is, in simple truth, 10 times more important to humanity than all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and industrial science that ever has been or ever will be discovered.”

This missing science we now know as genetics. Its elusive fundamental particle, the essential unit of biological information, we call the gene. First the idea of the gene had to be invented. Then the physical entity, present in each cell of our bodies, in every living thing, had to be discovered. The story of this invention and this discovery has been told, piecemeal, in different ways, but never before with the scope and grandeur that Siddhartha Mukherjee brings to his new history, “The Gene.” He fully justifies the claim that it is “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science.”

Power, Sex, and Suicide; Mitochondria and the meaning of Life by Nick Lane

Read this last year, just remembered to post it. terrific detail.

Mitochondria are tiny structures located inside our cells that carry out the essential task of producing energy for the cell. They are found in all complex living things, and in that sense, they are fundamental for driving complex life on the planet. But there is much more to them than that.

Mitochondria have their own DNA, with their own small collection of genes, separate from those in the cell nucleus. It is thought that they were once bacteria living independent lives. Their enslavement within the larger cell was a turning point in the evolution of life, enabling the development of complex organisms and, closely related, the origin of two sexes. Unlike the DNA in the nucleus, mitochondrial DNA is passed down exclusively (or almost exclusively) via the female line. That's why it
has been used by some researchers to trace human ancestry daughter-to-mother, to 'Mitochondrial Eve'. Mitochondria give us important information about our evolutionary history. And that's not all. Mitochondrial genes mutate much faster than those in the nucleus because of the free radicals produced
in their energy-generating role. This high mutation rate lies behind our aging and certain congenital diseases. The latest research suggests that mitochondria play a key role in degenerative diseases such as cancer, through their involvement in precipitating cell suicide.

Mitochondria, then, are pivotal in power, sex, and suicide. In this fascinating and thought-provoking book, Nick Lane brings together the latest research findings in this exciting field to show how our growing understanding of mitochondria is shedding light on how complex life evolved, why sex arose (why don't we just bud?), and why we age and die. This understanding is of fundamental importance, both in understanding how we and all other complex life came to be, but also in order to be able to
control our own illnesses, and delay our degeneration and death.

Blowout by Rachel Maddow

Fine narrative and dot-connecting by my favorite TV journalist. Story of the effects of the Oil and gas industry on world politics. Outstanding.

BLOWOUT 
from NYT review by Fareed Zakaria
Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth
By Rachel Maddow

For those who have watched Rachel Maddow’s television show, the opening scene of her book will feel familiar in its eye for a compelling anecdote. She tells the 2003 story of a small new business in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood that is about to be inaugurated by a head of state, in fact, “one of the most powerful men on the planet.” We’re intrigued. It turns out the business is a gas station. What’s going on? Four paragraphs later, we learn that the mystery man is Vladimir Putin, who is publicizing one of a string of American gas stations acquired by the Russian oil giant Lukoil. Having piqued your interest, Maddow now broadens her narrative and explains why this anecdote is an apt illustration of the book’s larger point — the centrality and influence of the oil and gas industry.

“Blowout” is a rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today. While she is clearly animated by a concern about climate change, Maddow mostly describes the political consequences of an industry that has empowered some of the strangest people in the United States and the most unsavory ones abroad. It is “essentially a big casino,” she writes, “that can produce both power and triumphant great gobs of cash, often with little regard for merit.”

Mama's Last Hug: Animal and Human Emotions

by De Waal, Frans

A good read about a specialty I knew little about. 

Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris

Not really recommended 

A reasonably accurate statement of the problem of consciousness but goes off into Depak Chopra space at the end. A non-scientist trying to pin mysticism on quantum mechanics. 

"These Truths"; Lepore and "How democratic is Constitution"; Dahl

Recent reads I liked

"These Truths" by Jill Lepore. History of America from Columbus to Trump. Clear-eyed, fact-filled, and very well written. The realities of the founding and development of our existing political system spelled out with warts and all. This 800 pager both refined and expanded my worldview. Very pertinent to our current chaos.
https://www.amazon.com/These-Truths-History-United-States-ebook/dp/B07BLKWBYT/ref=sr_1_2?crid=FHUU5E1D9YAI&keywords=these+truths+a+history+of+the+united+states&qid=1565208498&s=gateway&sprefix=These+truths%2Caps%2C155&sr=8-2

"How democratic is Our Constitution?" review from Amazon
In this provocative book, one of our most eminent political scientists poses the question, “Why should Americans uphold their constitution?” The vast majority of Americans venerate the Constitution and the democratic principles it embodies, but many also worry that the United States has fallen behind other nations on crucial issues, including economic equality, racial integration, and women’s rights. Robert Dahl explores this vital tension between the Americans’ belief in the legitimacy of their constitution and their belief in the principles of democracy.
Dahl starts with the assumption that the legitimacy of the American Constitution derives solely from its utility as an instrument of democratic governance. Dahl demonstrates that, due to the context in which it was conceived, our constitution came to incorporate significant antidemocratic elements. Because the Framers of the Constitution had no relevant example of a democratic political system on which to model the American government, many defining aspects of our political system were implemented as a result of short-sightedness or last-minute compromise. Dahl highlights those elements of the American system that are most unusual and potentially antidemocratic: the federal system, the bicameral legislature, judicial review, presidentialism, and the electoral college system.
The political system that emerged from the world’s first great democratic experiment is unique—no other well-established democracy has copied it. How does the American constitutional system function in comparison to other democratic systems? How could our political system be altered to achieve more democratic ends? To what extent did the Framers of the Constitution build features into our political system that militate against significant democratic reform?
Refusing to accept the status of the American Constitution as a sacred text, Dahl challenges us all to think critically about the origins of our political system and to consider the opportunities for creating a more democratic society.


www.amazon.com/How-Democratic-American-Constitution-Second/dp/0300095244/ref=sr_1_1?crid=8L7N8PQUOC9X&keywords=how+democratic+is+our+us+constitution+"+by+robert+dahl&qid=1565208589&s=gateway&sprefix=How+Democratic%2Caps%2C144&sr=8-1