Category: book reviews

“All the Light We Cannot See”, a fantastic book

August 25, 2022 • 1:00 pm

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, was published in 2014, and I hadn’t heard of it until an old friend recommended it two weeks ago—as did his wife. It turned out to be the best book of fiction I’ve read this year, and perhaps in the last several years. It is a tour de force: mesmerizing, unbelievably inventive, and the kind of book I can’t read before I go to sleep because I just want to keep reading. I finished the book last night and my thoughts are still full of it and of the scenes as I imagined them. (Like everyone, I form a picture in my mind’s eye as each place or character is introduced.)

The book interweaves the stories of two characters, jumping back and forth in time from the beginning of WWII until 1974, with no straight temporal sequence—except that the two stories unfold in parallel, and in very short chapters.

One of the two subjects is a blind French girl, Marie-Laure, daughter of the key-keeper in a big Parisian museum, and the other a German boy, Werner, an orphan ultimately coerced into becoming a German soldier. They’re surrounded by a rich panoply of other characters, including Werner’s sister Jutta and Marie-Laure’s great uncle Etienne. 

The two protagonists are connected at the beginning only because when Marie-Laure and Werrner were children, Etienne broadcast the writings of his own brother on a homemade radio transmitter in the French seaside town of Saint-Malo. Way over in Germany, Jutta and Werner (an amateur radio fanatic) could hear those broadcasts on a homemade receiver, ethralled by the beautiful science scenarios described by Etienne. (Science, by the way, plays a big role in this book, from Marie-Laure’s fascination with mollusks to Werner’s fascination with radios. Even Darwin makes a few appearances in Etienne’s broadcasts.)

I can see that this will become way too long if I even try to summarize the plot without spoilers, so let me be brief.  As the Germans enter Paris, Marie-Laure and her father flee the city, the latter entrusted with a priceless diamond from the museum, tasked with keeping it out of Nazi hands. They wind up in Saint-Malo, taking refuge with Etienne and Madame Menec, Etienne’s housekeeper.

As the war proceeds, Werner becomes an expert in locating covert radio transmissions, but he’s not your average Nazi—he is empathic and kind and arrives at his job through coercion. (The mixture of good and bad in people is one of the book’s themes.) When the Allies invade France, Werner and Marie-Laure’s stories begin to converge as the German is sent to Saint-Malo to pinpoint covert Resistance radio broadcasts made by Marie-Laure. The war ends, people die, and the story fast-forwards to 1974, when only one protagonist is left. The theme of loss plays out on multiple levels, including that of the diamond, and one closes this book with a bittersweet feeling and perhaps an extra bit of moisture in the eye.

The writing is beautiful—simple but evocative—and the story, while complex, never fails to be convincing.

If you like fiction at all, you must read this book. It won the Pulitzer price in 2018, and deservedly so. I believe one reader also recommended it here, while another didn’t like it. But I can’t imagine disliking this book—not if you read fiction.

It’s worthwhile reading the Wikipedia page on this book to see its genesis (a man cursing his cellphone) and why it took ten years to write. Doerr explicitly wanted to write a war story that, while set in war, was not about war. The research behind the story is immense. There’s also a mention that Netflix is making the novel into a four-part movie series.

Here’s Saint-Malo, a place I’ve never been. I couldn’t envision the city as I read the book, and am glad to see it now. The town has been rebuilt, as much of it was destroyed by bombing during the war.

Photo by Sabine de Villeroy

What I’m reading

August 15, 2022 • 12:30 pm

I’m doing a bunch of reading trying to balance science with non-science (the latter mostly fiction). Click on the book cover reproductions to go to the Amazon links.

Science: Flights of Fancy by Richard Dawkins.  It’s a good book and I learned a lot, though it’s centered more on the adaptation of flight than on concepts. However, Richard does bring in a lot of the ideas (the genic viewpoint, adaptive compromise, the necessity of step-by-step adaptation, and so on) from his earlier works. I’m wondering if this isn’t Richard’s equivalent of Darwin’s book on earthworms, where he instantiated with worms his idea that even small changes can add up to big results over a long period of time. The book seems to be written for young adults, but I enjoyed it and learned a lot. Nota bene: there will be an “event”

More science: A lot of stuff on the Galápagos to prepare me for lecturing in February. (I prepare well in advance!) It’s good to revisit the old stuff, so I reread these books:

I haven’t read The Voyage of the Beagle for decades, and it was instructive to go through it again. The section on the Galápagos is very short, and I’d forgotten that it didn’t contribute much to The Origin. Reading this and other sources, it’s clear that Darwin did not have an “aha moment” in the islands, and in fact only used them trivially in constructing his big theory. One reason is that he messed up his collecting notes, especially for finches and tortoises, and thus was unable to suss out their meaning until others (notably the ornithologist John Gould) properly classified the species. I was also surprised at how judgmental Darwin was about animals, finding them “odious”, “horrible” and “ugly” (he has very few kind words to say about the marine iguanas!). But he was young: only 22 when he embarked on the 5-year voyage. The book is alternatingly boring and absorbing, the latter when he comes close to thoughts about evolution (he was a creationist on the trip). There is far too much geology, since Darwin was more engaged with geology than biology when he went aboard.

It’s interesting to contrast the sickly Darwin of his later years with the robust youth described in his journal, a time when he’d camp out in the snow in a blanket and ride all day through swamps in the rain, not to mention hiking up every mountain he saw.

Beagle, which made Darwin’s reputation as a naturalist, was published three years after his return to England, and within five years after that he was a full-fledged advocate of evolution and natural selection. But he was timorous, and only published his ideas when forced to by Wallace’s coincidental discovery of natural selection in 1858.  The Origin, which came out in 1859, was published fully 23 years after the Beagle returned to port.

Here’s a good book on the influence of the Galápagos on biological thought, beginning with the discovery of the uninhabited islands in the 16th century and continuing on to the present day. Darwin’s own trip to the archipelago occupies about 1.5 chapters.

And I went back to the Galápagos section of Janet Browne’s magisterial two-volume biography of Darwin: Voyaging and The Power of Place. The first book ends as he arrives home on the Beagle, never to leave England again. This is truly the definitive biography of Darwin, and I was amazed, on rereading the Beagle section, at how much scholarship Browne managed to sneak into a biography that is truly a page turner. You MUST read this book: both volumes.

Fiction: I once again started Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, but for some reason found it unreadable: the writing seemed too self-conscious to me. Only rarely do I start a book and not finish it, so I’ll never know how it comes out.

On the advice of two friends, I got the book below instead, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015—a year after Tartt’s book won the same prize. I’ve just started it, but it’s a parallel narrative of two young people: a blind French girl who flees Paris for Saint-Malo with her father, and a German youth who’s destined to fight for the Nazis. As I’m only a wee bit into it, I can’t pass final judgment, but it hooked me instantly, and I can see why it was so lauded. This one I know I’ll finish.

This is, of course, your impetus to tell us all what you are reading, and whether you recommend it.

Patrick Matthew: the real inventor of the idea of natural selection?

August 5, 2022 • 9:15 am

Of the several independent assertions that constitute Darwin’s “theory of evolution” in On The Origin of Species, Darwin regarded the idea of natural selection as his most important and original. After all, it alone explained how naturalistic processes could lead to the remarkable adaptations of animals and plants heretofore seen as some of the strongest evidence for God. And although the idea of evolution itself had been broached by others before Darwin, including his own grandfather Erasmus, natural selection seemed to be sui generis.

Well, not entirely.  It was anticipated by several people, including the Scottish polymath James Hutton in 1794. But the most remarkable precursor to the idea of natural selection was published by Scottish horticulturalist and agriculturalist Patrick Matthew (1790-1874) as an appendix to his book On Naval Timber and Arboriculture (1831). Although the book was about how to build ships using wood, and what kind of wood to use, Matthew added a 28-page Appendix. In that Appendix were 29 sentences that laid out what he called “selection by the law of nature”, which bore a striking similarity to the idea made famous by Darwin 28 years later.

You can read Matthew’s appendix at Darwin Online, and some of the statements about his views of natural selection can be seen and discussed in context here, here, and here. ‘

Here are two excerpts from Matthew’s Appendix:

THERE is a law universal in nature, tending to render every reproductive being the best possibly suited to its condition that its kind, or that organized matter, is susceptible of, which appears intended to model the physical and mental or instinctive powers, to their highest perfection, and to continue them so. This law sustains the lion in his strength, the hare in her swiftness, and the fox in his wiles. As Nature, in all her modifications of life, has a power of increase far beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls by Time’s decay, those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing—either a prey to their natural devourers, or sinking under disease, generally induced by want of nourishment, their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind, who are pressing on the means of subsistence.

. . . There is more beauty and unity of design in this continual balancing of life to circumstance, and greater conformity to those dispositions of nature which are manifest to us, than in total destruction and new creation. It is improbable that much of this diversification is owing to commixture of species nearly allied, all change by this appears very limited, and confined within the bounds of what is called Species; the progeny of the same parents, under great difference of circumstance, might, in several generations, even become distinct species, incapable of co-reproduction.

The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organized life may, in part, be traced to the extreme fecundity of Nature, who, as before stated, has, in all the varieties of her offspring, a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited and pre-occupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better suited to circumstance individuals, who are able to struggle forward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior adaptation and greater power of occupancy than any other kind; the weaker, less circumstance-suited, being permaturely destroyed. This principle is in constant action, it regulates the colour, the figure, the capacities, and instincts; those individuals of each species, whose colour and covering are best suited to concealment or protection from enemies, or defence from vicissitude and inclemencies of climate, whose figure is best accommodated to health, strength, defence, and support; whose capacities and instincts can best regulate the physical energies to self-advantage according to circumstances—in such immense waste of primary and youthful life, those only come forward to maturity from the strict ordeal by which Nature tests their adaptation to her standard of perfection and fitness to continue their kind by reproduction.

Well yes, that has variation, differential survival, culling of most individuals in a species, speciation, and adaptation—all features of Darwin’s own theory. It’s a remarkable anticipation of Darwin’s ideas.

Does this mean that Matthew deserves credit for the idea of natural selection? Only as an anticipation of Darwin’s far more thorough explication (Darwin, by the way, never read Matthews’ Appendix). Matthew deserves no more credit for natural selection as a popular idea than does Erasmus Darwin for evolution. Matthew’s ideas weren’t adopted, were almost never cited, had no influence in biology, and Matthew never realized until after The Origin was published (and sold out the printing in a single day) that he once had within his grasp The Big Idea that explained the design-like features of nature.

Nevertheless, several people have tried to diminish Darwin’s idea by pointing out that Matthew had it first—and that Darwin plagiarized it. The latest attempt is by Mike Sutton in this book published two months ago (click on image to go to Amazon link):

I haven’t read it, but according to Geoff Cole, a cognitive scientist at the Centre for Brain Science at the University of Essex, who reviewed the book in the latest issue of Evolution (click below for free access), Sutton’s book is a real hit job on Darwin.

The title of Sutton’s book clearly asserts that Darwin took credit for Matthew’s theory, and it’s true that once Patrick Matthew had read The Origin, he argued for his own precedence, even though Darwin had never seen the “incriminating” sentences above.  Sutton also claims that Matthew’s idea had real priority because Naval Timber was cited by others before 1859, but as Cole notes in a very critical but polite review, those citations were almost all to the book itself, not to the ideas in the Appendix.

Cole also notes Sutton’s ridiculous accusations of Darwin’s “plagiarism”:

What is most uncomfortable about Sutton’s thesis is his treatment and personal attack on Darwin. He suggests that Darwin ”was a plagiarist who lied repeatedly” and undertook “deliberate, knowing fraud”. Indeed, “the biggest science fraud in history”; fraud that Darwin supposedly hoped “nobody would notice”. Sutton also expresses suspicion about the chronic illness Darwin was known to suffer; a subject that many historians have written about (e.g., Hayman, 2009). From every single account of Darwin and how he went about his life, these “lies” are the complete opposite of what we know about the man. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen a scholar write that a particular event “is testament to his honesty”. As Browne (1985) stated, “By the time Descent of Man was published in 1871 reviewers were falling over themselves to congratulate Darwin’s “unassailable integrity and candour, and his “wonderful thoroughness and truthfulness” (Browne, 1985, p.257 & 258).

Every serious historian who’s studied Darwin’s life knows that he was neither a plagiarist nor a liar, although he did, understandably, want to preserve credit for his own ideas. After Matthew wrote a claim of his priority in The Gardner’s Chronicle in 1859, Darwin not only published an acknowledgement of Matthew’s precedence in the same magazine, but also inserted this long acknowledgment of Matthew’s work into the 3rd edition of On the Origin of Species:

In 1831 Mr. Patrick Matthew published his work on ‘Naval Timber and Arboriculture,’ in which he gives precisely the same view on the origin of species as that (presently to be alluded to) propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself in the ‘Linnean Journal,’ and as that enlarged on in the present volume. Unfortunately the view was given by Mr. Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an Appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr. Matthew himself drew attention to it in the ‘Gardener’s Chronicle,’ on April 7th, 1860. The differences of Mr. Matthew’s view from mine are not of much importance: he seems to consider that the world was nearly depopulated at successive periods, and then re-stocked; and he gives, as an alternative, that new forms may be generated “without the presence of any mould or germ of former aggregates.” I am not sure that I understand some passages; but it seems that he attributes much influence to the direct action of the conditions of life. He clearly saw, however, the full force of the principle of natural selection. In answer to a letter of mine (published in Gard. Chron., April 13th), fully acknowledging that Mr. Matthew had anticipated me, he with generous candour wrote a letter (Gard. Chron. May 12th) containing the following passage:—”To me the conception of this law of Nature came intuitively as a self-evident fact, almost without an effort of concentrated thought. Mr. Darwin here seems to have more merit in the discovery than I have had; to me it did not appear a discovery. He seems to have worked it out by inductive reason, slowly and with due caution to have made his way synthetically from fact to fact onwards; while with me it was by a general glance at the scheme of Nature that I estimated this select production of species as an à priori recognisable fact—an axiom requiring only to be pointed out to be admitted by unprejudiced minds of sufficient grasp.”

Cole explains patiently why Darwin should get nearly all the credit for the idea of natural selection. A few excerpts from Cole’s excellent review:

Who then should be credited with discovering the process by which evolution occurs? Matthew, Hutton, Maupertuis, Wells? Or anyone else who also chipped in? The answer is simple. Charles Darwin.

. . . A necessary condition of insight is that the knowledge must be reflected upon and placed within the appropriate context. Unless a person fully recognises what they have said, done, or found, no formal insight has occurred. There is no priority.

. . . I suspect Matthew was annoyed with himself, as I was with myself, for not realising the importance of what he had written. That may have been why he dedicated so much of his later efforts on his priority claim. If he had realised he would surely have submitted an academic paper outlining his theory; a paper that was only about the theory. Given fear of religious establishment, this could have initially been anonymously penned. He may have even published a book on the origin of all life forms and how the development of every single species can be explained. He would have also repeatedly used his phrase “the process of natural selection”, a phrase Sutton places great emphasis on, as opposed to the one time he did so in Naval Timber. As it was, there was no paper or book. There was no in-depth development of ideas about evolution and how it relates to divergence, heredity, the geological record, geographic distribution, classification, morphology, and embryology. No lengthy discussion of how there are problems and “difficulties” with his own theory. There was not 30 years of methodical work in which he used his theory to explain aspects of cross-pollination and movement in plants, not to mention work on human psychology, sexual behaviour, and emotions. There were no lengthy and numerous discussions with colleagues about his theory and when he should go public.

In fact, Sutton acts like a creationist, arguing that generations of evolutionary biologists have realized that Matthew should really get credit for the idea; but we have, because of our mindless adulation of Darwin, kept that quiet:

Essentially, Sutton has to explain why generations of evolutionary biologists and the like have never come to the same conclusion as himself. The usual explanation is that we are all involved in a “cover up” (p. 5) or part of the “Darwin Industry”, as Sutton calls it, in which a “loosely affiliated in-group of scientists, historians of science, other writers, publishers, editors, and journals, share a common goal to protect the perception of Charles Darwin as a genius science hero” (p. 10). But how This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. about this for an alternative explanation? Those generations of biologists have independently decided that there is nothing to see here, that Darwin should be honoured with discovering evolution. Furthermore, if a few sentences in which natural selection is referenced warrants priority, as Sutton seems to believe, then why pick out Patrick Matthew? Why not his predecessors, Hutton, Wells, or Maupertuis? In fact, shouldn’t Matthew be accused of plagiarism, having failed to acknowledge the fact that his ”own original child” was described at least 30 years before by various others?

Sutton’s book is his latest, in his decade-long, attempt to undermine Darwin’s priority. As all others before, this one will fail.

Of that there’s no doubt. Matthew’s independent musings about natural selection are a remarkable coincidence, but he didn’t make much of them, didn’t examine them further, and certainly didn’t try to integrate them into a grand theory of organic evolution. But judge for yourself: I hope you’ve read The Origin, so just peruse Matthew’s brief discussion and then ask yourself whether Matthew should get the lion’s share of the credit for the idea of natural selection.

************

One brief correction of Cole’s fine review: on its first page it describes Darwin as being “the ship’s naturalist” on the voyage of the Beagle. That’s a common misconception, for an “official” naturalist—the ship’s surgeon Robert McCormick—had already been designated. Darwin sailed on the Beagle using his own money, and his position was as both a “self funded naturalist” and also the “captain’s companion”. He was taken aboard largely to provide gentlemanly company for Captain FitzRoy, with whom he dined and conversed. Darwin’s researches and collections during the voyage were done on his own volition and enthusiasm.

Books: “Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro

July 11, 2022 • 9:15 am

This is the fifth book I’ve read by Kazuo Ishiguro, who in my view has a strong claim to be the finest novelist writing in English. That’s unusual because his first language is Japanese, yet, like Joseph Conrad or Isak Dinesen, he’s overcome whatever strictures his first language imposed to become not only unrecognizable as a non-native speaker of English, but to excel even among writers. In Ishiguro’s case, this may come in pat from his moving to England when he was about five, and he’s visited Japan only sporadically since then.

Ishiguro was awarded a Nobel Prize for literature in 2017—before this book come out. (I recommend listening to Ishiguro’s wonderful 45-minute Nobel Prize lecture here.)

I was, as you know, trying to read all the Booker Prize novels I haven’t read, which are many, but I took a break, on a friend’s advice, to read Klara and the Sun (2021), Ishiguro’s latest novel.

At any rate, of the five Ishiguro books I’ve read, two are great masterpieces (The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go), and this book, which was nominated for a Booker Prize but didn’t win, is very great but not a masterpiece of world literature. It comes close, though, and I recommend it very, very highly. (By the way, if you haven’t read the two I recommended above, do so immediately, and then go watch the movies made of both. The movies are fantastic; I actually saw both before reading the books, and the disquieting film Never Let Me Go is what got me onto Ishiguro.

In the short video on the Amazon Page, Ishiguro touts his book almost reluctantly, but does say this:

It’s probably not inaccurate to say that Klara and the Sun is positioned in terms of its imaginary world and its approach somewhere midway between Never Let Me Go and Remains of the Day.

You can (and should) order the book; the screenshot below goes to the Amazon page:

I don’t want to recount the entire plot, which would reveal many spoilers (you can see it on the Wikipedia page), but I do want to say a few things. Why is it positioned between those two books?  The subject and narrator of the book is a “robot”, an “AF” (artificial friend) named Klara. She is purchased by the mother of Josie, a chronically ill teenage child, to be Josie’s friend and prepare her for college. (AFs were made in this tale to relieve loneliness.) The story, like that of Never Let Me Go, takes place in a not-too-distant dystopian future, and the first-person narration, as in The Remains of the Day, is also presented by a servant (in this case the AF, in the other book the head butler), both of whom come to realizations about life and humanity during the story.

Because the narrator of this book is an AI in a presumably humanoid body (Klara has hair, legs, and other organs, but they’re never explicitly described), the language used is simple, the way a newly made and naive robot entering the world would have written. Moreover, Klara doesn’t perceive her surroundings the way humans do: she is so constructed that most of the time she sees the world as a series of boxes in which separate images appear.  As the book progresses, you learn more and more about what’s going on, just as you do in Never Let Me Go. There is, for example, the practice of being “lifted”, which you must undergo to go to college, but only halfway through the book do you learn what that means. And Klara learns more and more about humans and her environment; before being purchased, she’d been awaiting a customer in an AF shop.

There are many themes of this book, the main one being Klara’s attempt to understand what it is to be human, and especially to be Josie. Klara obviously was instilled with some “feelings”—or simulacra of feelings like empathy (don’t ask me how) in the factory, but the subtleties of human emotion have to be learned over time. Fortunately, Klara is a keen observer, and at the end of the book reviews her experiences and what she’s learned. It’s not clear that she has real inner experiences—though it seems she does—or whether her AI program is just being updated.

The main emotion she can’t master is love, and she’s always inquiring of Josie and her paramour, Rick, if they are in love. I’ll leave the resolution to you except to say that the book, although it could be considered science fiction, is an absolutely serious novel that inquires “What does it mean to be human?”  Klara is also religious in her own way, worshiping the Sun as a god because she herself apparently runs on solar power. She thus attributes the healing power of the Sun to everything, and has her own form of paying homage to it, and even some prayers to the Sun. This plays a crucial role in the book.

The rest I leave to you so you can have the great pleasure of reading this short book (about 310 small page). I give it two thumbs and two big toes up. Of all the dreck on the market today, this stands out. As I said, it’s not a classic novel, but it comes damn close.

Here’s an 8½-minute video of Ishiguro talking about this book, noting that it started as a children’s book (and was inspired by picture books for children), but quickly expanded into a novel dealing with artificial intelligence.

READ IT!

Jason Rosenhouse’s new anti-ID book

June 28, 2022 • 11:00 am

I may have mentioned Jason Rosenhouse‘s new book before, but I just finished it and wanted to give it two thumbs up. The image below links to the Amazon site:

This book is a withering critique of the so-called “probabilistic” arguments against evolution promoted by Intelligent Design advocates like Michael Behe and William Dembski. Jason is ideally equipped to write about them as he’s both a professor of mathematics at James Madison University and a diligent reader of creationist and ID literature. An earlier book of his, Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line, describes his many visits to creationist meetings and gatherings and his attempt to suss out the psychology of anti-evolutionists without being judgmental.

In this book, though, Jason pulls no punches, analyzing and destroying the arguments the evolution simply could not have occurred because the probability of getting organisms, proteins, or “complex specified information” is too low to be explained by materialistic processes. Ergo, the ID arguments supposedly point to the existence of the Intelligent Designer, who we all know is God. (IDers like to pretend that it could be a space alien or the like, but it doesn’t take much digging to descry the religious roots of ID, sometimes described as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo”.) The real target of ID is not just evolution, but naturalism or “materialism”, as they sometimes call it. Their ultimate goal is to sneak religion into public schools and into mainstream science. But they’ve already lost.

Still, the religious motivations aren’t important when the calculations are wrong—or rather, can’t be made. Jason’s main point in this book is that although complex-looking mathematics is often invoked to show the improbability of naturalistic evolution, IDers lack information about probability space to plug into their equations, so they can’t come to any mathematically-based conclusions. (And when we do have information, like that bearing on the claim that evolution violates The Second Law of Thermodynamics, or that the evolution of chloroquine resistance to malaria is impossible, that evidence doesn’t support the IDers’ and creationists’ claims.)

In the end, all IDers do, argues Jason, is throw sand in the layperson’s eyes with fancy equations, and then simply assert, without actually making valid calculations, that evolution by natural selection is too improbable to have occurred.

Other arguments that are less mathematical, for example that bacterial flagella could not have evolved in an adaptive, step-by-step process, are also discussed, and Jason shows how they’ve been refuted.

Another admirable aspect of the book is that Jason writes very clearly and elegantly, so it’s easy to read. Here are two specimens of his prose that also make his main point:

What about specificity? Dembski’s theoretical development of this concept essentially required graduate-level training in mathematics. He helped himself to copious amounts of notation, jargon, Greek letters, and equations. Anyone unaccustomed to wading through prose of this sort could easily come away thinking it represented work of depth and profundity just from the level of technical detail in its presentation.

However, when it came time to discuss the specificity of an actual biological system, the flagellum in this case, all of the technical minutiae went clean out the window. For all the use Dembski made of his elaborate theoretical musings, they might as well never have existed at all. He just declared it obvious that the flagellum was specified and quickly moved on to other dubious claims. At no point did he attempt to relate anything in reality to the numerous variables and parameters he included in his mathematical modeling.

As Jason shows, the lack of parameters needed to show that evolution is too improbable to have happened in a Darwinian way is a ubiquitous problem for iD. One more quote:

This pattern, of introducing difficult mathematical concepts without ever really using them for any serious purpose, is ubiquitous in anti-evolution discourse, and this fact goes a long way to explaining why mathematicians an scientists are so disdainful of it. Professionals in these areas strive for the utmost clarity when presenting their work. Used properly, the jargon and notation permit a level of precision that simply cannot be achieved with more natural language. This might seem hard to believe, since a modern scientific research paper will be unreadable for anyone without significant training in the relevant discipline. But the problem is not a lack of clarity in the writing. Rather, it is just that the concepts involved are difficult, and experience is needed to become comfortable with them.

. . . In section 2.6, I remarked that anti-evolutionist arguments play well in front of friendly audiences because in that environment the speakers never pay a price for being wrong. The response would be a lot chillier if they tried the same arguments in front of audiences with the relevant expertise. Try telling a roomful of mathematicians that you can refute evolutionary theory with a few back-of-the-envelope probability calculations, and see how far you get. Tell a roomful of physicists that the second law of thermodynamics conflicts with evolutionary theory, or a roomful of computer scientists that obscure theorems from combinatorial search have profound relevance to biology.

You will be lucky to make it ten minutes before the audience stops being polite.

If you want a clear and convincing response to IDers’ (and earlier creationists’) claims that evolution could not have happened without God or a Designer because it’s simply improbable via naturalism, read this book.

It will convince you, as Laplace supposedly tried to convince Napoleon about astronomy, that science—in this case, evolution—has no need of the God hypothesis.

“The God of Small Things”

June 25, 2022 • 1:00 pm

I’ve finished my second novel in my quest to read all the Booker Prize winners (I read eight before I started this odyssey). The latest one was one was The God of Small Things written by Arundhati Roy. Published in 1997, it won the Booker the same year.

This is just a mini-review as I’m still processing the book. To avoid spoilers, I’ll be brief.

The plot involves a pair of fraternal twins (boy and girl) growing up in Kerala, India in the 1960s in an extended family of Christians.  The story, which jumps back and forth in time over about 25 years, touches on many aspects of Indian life, including the Communism of Kerala (India’s only Communist state), the caste system—still very much alive then, and the ambiguity of love.  The central story is the close relationship between the boy, Estha, and his sister Rahel, which borders on romantic love. Their close relationship with each other ultimately culminates in a not-so-wonderful act of incest near the end. Both are also involved in a close but platonic relationship with a “dalit”, or untouchable, who befriends them and ultimately becomes the lover of their mother. That forbidden love triggers the shocking ending of the book. 

When I was about halfway through this book, I found the writing so atrocious—with the author seemingly trying to show off by capitalizing words to emphasize them, using the same phrase over and over again with slight variations, and spelling words them in weird ways (“Gnap” for nap)—that I almost put the book down. Even though the peculiarities of spelling and grammar may reflect the view of a child, it’s ultimately annoying.

It is only near the end, when the family finds out that the twins’ mother is involved with a dalit, do things pick up, the bad writing falls away, and the story becomes mesmerizing. It is this contrast between the slow and annoying bulk of the book with the absorbing finale that makes me unable to pass judgment on the book right now. I’m glad I read it, but I don’t know if it merits a Booker.

“The God of Small Things”, by the way, is a leitmotif, reflecting the fact that seemingly insignificant occurrences can have huge consequences.

My advice is “read it”, because many critics loved the thing, though some felt the way I do: conflicted at best. 

I’m ready for my next Booker Book, but I’ve been sidetracked because a good friend just finished Ishiguro’s new novel and wrote me this about it:

I  read Ishiguro’s latest recently, Klara and the Sun. It is, again, a superb and profound (and profoundly touching) novel.
My friend has excellent taste in literature, so I’ve asked the U of C’s Interlibrary Loan to get me a copy of (I have no room on my shelves to buy books). Meanwhile, I’m pondering the reader’ last suggestions for Booker winners.  I’ll have to read Klara first because I simply love Ishiguro. Klara and the Sun was “longlisted” for the 2021 Booker Prize, but I’m starting to find out that not all Booker winners are masterpieces, at least in my view.

 

Click to go to the Amazon sites:

Short review: “Disgrace”

June 12, 2022 • 11:30 am

In my quest to read all the novels that have won the Booker Prize, I finished my first one on the list (I read four or five others in the past): Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee (1999). Highly lauded, it not only won the Booker Prize, but was a major impetus for Coetzee’s getting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

Not wanting to convey spoilers, I’ll just say that the story involves two parallel cases of “disgrace”: a professor who has an affair with one of his students and then, refusing to defend himself, is fired; and the Professor’s daughter, with whom he goes to live after his expulsion. She too meets up with an even worse fate, but again refuses to take steps to assure her a better life after her own misfortune. In both cases I take “disgrace” to mean a character’s refusal to try to mend a broken life.

I found the novel readable (not saying a lot) and the plot engrossing, but the prose plodding. When I really love a novel, the prose has to be a major factor, just as the musicality of poetry is an inseparable part of its overall effect. When the Nobel Prize committee gave Coetzee its citation, it said, among other things, this:

J.M. Coetzee’s novels are characterised by their well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance. But at the same time he is a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilisation. His intellectual honesty erodes all basis of consolation and distances itself from the tawdry drama of remorse and confession. Even when his own convictions emerge to view, as in his defence of the rights of animals, he elucidates the premises on which they are based rather than arguing for them.

Coetzee’s interest is directed mainly at situations where the distinction between right and wrong, while crystal clear, can be seen to serve no end. Like the man in the famous Magritte painting who is studying his neck in a mirror, at the decisive moment Coetzee’s characters stand behind themselves, motionless, incapable of taking part in their own actions. But passivity is not merely the dark haze that devours personality, it is also the last resort open to human beings as they defy an oppressive order by rendering themselves inaccessible to its intentions. It is in exploring weakness and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine spark in man.

. . .In Disgrace Coetzee involves us in the struggle of a discredited university teacher to defend his own and his daughter’s honour in the new circumstances that have arisen in South Africa after the collapse of white supremacy. The novel deals with a question that is central to his works: Is it possible to evade history?

Well, maybe, but I’m not sure what “evading history” means here? Overcoming misfortune, or simply denying it? Both the professor and his daughter are stuck with what happened to them, and refuse to move on, so if that’s “evading history,” well, it’s not something that everyone does. In fact, Coetzee’s failure to make me really understand why the professor refused to defend himself seems a failure of character delineation.

The theme, then, isn’t anything near universal, at least to me. One can understand the feeling of ennui and hopelessness in The Plague, which can be redeemed by caring for others, but that’s something that resonates to many readers. After all, we’re all mortal.

So my take is that Disgrace is a good book, but not a great one—not near the quality of other winners like those by Ishigura, Barker, or Scott. Yet sometimes I think I don’t know how to read novels, and perhaps I’m missing the subtle themes and qualities that struck other critics, the Booker Prize committee, and the Karolinska Institute.

But nevertheless, I persist. I am halfway through the next choice, The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, which won the Booker in 1997. It’s about a pair of twins and their extended family in Kerala, India, and is set in the 1960s. So far I found the plot engaging (it goes back and forth in time) but the prose overly baroque, with Roy apparently trying to show off her writing skills. At times the writing is so self-consciously “clever” that it makes me cringe. The style, while unusual, doesn’t seem to grow out of the author herself, as it does with writers like Cormac McCarthy, whom I love.

By the way, I noticed a similarity between Roy’s opening paragraph and part Thomas Wolfe’s “Poem to October” from his novel Of Time and the River:

Roy:

“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.”

Wolfe:

“October is the richest of the seasons: the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October.

Any more suggestions for Booker winners I should read next?