Book reviews
evolgen | May 30, 2008Phylogeny Friday -- 30 May 2008
Research on animals in under attack throughout the world. Animal rights activists not only stage rallies against animal testing, but they also engage in criminal behavior. They vandalize property, sabotage experiments, and terrorize researchers. How can scientists fight back?
Michael Conn and James Parker have written book documenting the animal rights issue from the scientists' perspective (The Animal Research War). Conn and Parker have also briefly described their position in the FASEB Journal. Here is how they summarize their book:
This book is a personal…
evolgen | April 23, 2008Brian Charlesworth wrote a review of Mike Lynch's The Origins of Genome Architecture, in which Charlesworth argues that sexual reproduction can explain many of the features Lynch claims evolved under nearly neutral processes (doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.01.008). Not to be left out of the party, Deborah Charlesworth has chimed in with her opinion, and it's much more critical of Lynch than her husband's (doi:10.1017/S0016672308009282). The main thesis that Lynch has been presenting in both this book and some of his recent papers is that many features of eukaryotic genomes (introns, complicated cis…
grrlscientist | April 15, 2008I have been thinking about a book review that I published yesterday about David Attenborough's Life in Cold Blood. In short, my review of that particular book was positive, but not effusive. Because I focused on errors/ambiguous wordings and on what I think that book lacked, it is possible that I came across as being too harsh. As a result, I'd like to know if I should use an unambiguous rating system, such as something like Amazon's five star system, to help you quickly assess what I think of the book?
I like to publish positive book reviews on my blog, and generally refuse to even finish…
evolgen | March 5, 2008Brian Charlesworth has reviewed Michael Lynch's The Origins of Genome Architecture for Current Biology. Charlesworth's review is generally positive, and he agrees that population size may be an important factor in genome evolution. However, he thinks that Lynch overplays the role relaxed selective constraint in small populations plays in the evolution of genomic complexity.
Charlesworth argues that sexual reproduction may be partly to blame for some of the features found in the bloated genomes of many eukaryotes. For example, the abundance of transposable elements may be the result of sexual…
evolgen | January 30, 2008Everyone's blogging about Stephen J. Gould's Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Razib, John Lynch, Laelaps). I'm not. The book's too long, and I'm too busy. But that doesn't mean I can't link to them, and to another review of Gould. The other is Richard Lewontin's review of two Gould books: The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould and Punctuated Equilibrium. The latter is a chapter in Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Yes, a chapter of a book was released as a book on its own.
Lewontin's review of the two books isn't really a review of the two books. It's more of a eulogy or an…
grrlscientist | January 3, 2008tags: books, book reviews
Thanks to you, I read a LOT of books (and watch a few DVDs as well), but end up reviewing approximately one in four (or is it one in five?) of all books I read (and rarely review any DVDs that I watch). This doesn't seem right, even though I have had the great pleasure to read so many wonderful books, both gifts from my readers and review copies provided by publishers. Unfortunately, if I reviewed every good book that I've read this past few years, I would not write anything on my blog except book reviews. So to address that sad situation, I have decided to add a…
grrlscientist | November 27, 2007I was browsing the NYTimes list of the 100 notable books of 2007 and was surprised to note that only one science book is included on that list! This is even more amazing when you realize that Natalie Angier, who wrote The Canon (a book that I reviewed but didn't like), was not even included in the list and she is a science writer for the Times!
Of course, it is difficult to know what is truly "notable" but I will assume that it can be used interchangeably with "best". That said, there are some other lists of the best 100 books of 2007, such as Amazon, and they include science books, so what…
retrospectacle | November 2, 2007Just a few days after Halloween, and who could have thought the inner ear could be so terrifying? Uzumaki by Junji Ito is a magna that I recently picked up, which describes a town whose inhabitants are becoming infected with an obsession with spirals. Although I've only read the first of three books in the series, the art is both beautiful and grotesque AND involves the subtle integration of the cochlea into the horrible tale. Specifically, one of the main characters is driven mad by her "contamination" with spirals and feels the desperate need to eliminate all spirals from her body. First…
evolgen | September 27, 2007Or is he micro-phobe?
Nature Genetics has published a mostly positive review of the new Evolution textbook by Nick Barton and others (the others include blogger Jonathan Eisen) The review is penned by Francisco Ayala. Among the things Ayala brings up is the coverage various taxa receive:
Surprisingly, however, five of the nine chapters of Part II are dedicated to the history of microbial evolution, and only one chapter deals with the diversification of plants and animals.
So, of the nine chapters in Part II, six deal with particular groups of organisms. Of those six, five focus on microbial…
retrospectacle | September 26, 2007The following is a guest post by Tim Marzullo, Graduate Student in Engineering/Neuroscience at the University of Michigan.
"Tri, Dva, Odin, Zashiganiye!" (Three, Two, One, Ignition!)
A review of "Live from Cape Canaveral" by Jay Barbree
"Live from Cape Canaveral" by Jay Barbree serves as a well-written introduction to the last 50 years of human spaceflight. Covering the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and space shuttle missions in 307 pages makes for very fast, pleasant light reading, and the book also serves as a memoir of sorts for Jay Barbree, who was a correspondent for NBC from the first…
scientificactivist | September 25, 2007Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming
by Chris Mooney
Harcourt: 2007, 400 pages.Buy now! (Amazon)
At 2:09 am on September 13, 2007, Hurricane Humberto made landfall just east of Galveston, Texas--still the site of the deadliest natural disaster in US history, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. With maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, though, Hurricane Humberto was just a Category 1 storm (the weakest category on the Saffir-Simpson Scale). While it was the first hurricane to make landfall in the US since the record-breaking and devastating 2005 hurricane…
grrlscientist | September 24, 2007tags: blog carnivals, books, book reviews
The Books Carnival is now available for you to enjoy. This blog carnival is filled with essays about books and reading as well as lots of book reviews. You can't say that you can't think of a decent book to read after you've read through this blog carnival! Interestingly, this is a bilingual carnival (Spanish), too.
evolgen | September 2, 2007Massimo Pigliucci has reviewed Mike Lynch's book on genome evolution for Science [Postgenomic Musings]. In his review, Pigliucci writes the following:
One of the central theses of the book is that natural selection is not necessarily the central evolutionary mechanism, as quite a bit of the details of genomic structures and evolution can be accounted for by invoking the neutral mechanisms of mutation, recombination, and drift. Lynch is certainly correct on this point, and he backs his argument with much empirical and theoretical detail. Yet, we must be hanging around with different crowds,…
denialism | July 24, 2007I've been reading Chris Mooney's Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming for the last week or so, and I've got to say, this is excellent science writing. A book on science for the non-expert reader should accomplish 5 things. It should let you know the history of the field and its prevailing theories, it should give you background and explanations that allow you to attain a basic grasp of the science or key concepts, it should be well-written, it should make you care about the subject, and it should be entertaining. Mooney gets a 5/5. It also was highly…
developingintelligence | May 17, 2007Prospective memory is "remembering to remember." Despite the pervasiveness of this requirement in real-life, we know surprisingly little about the topic. In their new book, McDaniel & Einstein provide a direly needed review of this fascinating new field, providing important information for researchers, clinicians, and laypeople alike on how basic cognitive science is coming to a "big picture" understanding of prospective memory.
In some ways, it's not so much a single topic as an amalgam of many different cognitive processes already studied in other domains. For example, prospective…
evolgen | April 30, 2007Dr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey and her husband Benny, as part of their H-O-W series of books, have produced an absolutely dispensable piece of misinformation, the third in a series of we can only hope not too many, ineloquently titled Animals of the Ocean: In Particular the Giant Squid. They claim that their World of Unbelievable Brilliance series, of which Animals of the Ocean is the third in a series of we can only hope . . . um, they claim that their series . . . well, I don't really know what they claim, because they never get around to it.
Dr. and Mr. Haggis-on-Whey are neither not biologists…
evolgen | April 19, 2007Oxford University Press will be releasing a new book in June entitled Darwinian Detectives: Revealing the Natural History of Genes and Genomes. From the OUP description of the book:
Molecular scientists exploring newly sequenced genomes have stumbled upon quite a few surprises, including that only one to ten percent of the genetic material of animals actually codes for genes. What does the remaining 90-99% of the genome do? Why do some organisms have a much lower genome size than their close relatives? What were the genetic changes that were associated with us becoming human?
Ignoring the…
developingintelligence | January 8, 2007In a few places throughout the second edition of his landmark book, Mark Johnson suggests that the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience has matured from infancy to toddlerhood. This book, then, is a sort of biography, from the field's theoretical ancestry in 17th century debates between "vitalists" and "preformationalists" to current (and in some ways similar) debates between nativists and empiricists. In between, Johnson expertly covers everything from prenatal cortical differentiation to developmental change in the distributions of various neuromodulators, to the development of…
evolgen | December 22, 2006
Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch are two of the leaders in the movement to keep the science in science classrooms in American public schools. Both Scott and Branch hold administrative position at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), and they've displayed great commitment to maintaining the scientific integrity of American primary and secondary education. Of recent note is their new book Not in Our Classrooms, which offers an introduction to modern creationism and science education in the United States.
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church…
evolgen | December 19, 2006
Via this press release I learned about this book: The Top Ten Myths About Evolution. The book deconstructs ten myths that creationists propagate while spreading misinformation. It also gives me an excuse to post cute pictures of furry primates.
The official website lists the ten myths:
1) Survival of the Fittest; 2) It's Just a Theory; 3) The Ladder of Progress; 4) The Missing Link; 5) Evolution is Random; 6) People Come from Monkeys; 7) Nature's Perfect Balance; 8) Creationism Disproves Evolution; 9) Intelligent Design is Science; 10) Evolution is Immoral
It sounds like a good treatment of…