I’ve never read any of Yuval Harari’s wildly popular books (Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons fo the 21st Century), so I can’t judge those. Surely many readers have read one or more, however, so I’ll call your attention to this critique of his work in Current Affairs, and if you’ve read his work, do weigh in below.

The critical reviewer is Darshana Narayanan, who describes herself as a neuroscientist and journalist, adding “evolutionary biologist” in the piece below.  Her beef with Harari is that his books aren’t fact-checked, and so they’re full of howlers and misinformation. Since important people take Harari seriously, she sees this as a significant problem, especially when he tries to predict where humanity is going.

I’m pretty sure that his books, like nearly all popular-science books, are not fact checked. None of mine were, but when you sign the contract with the publisher you accept responsibility for any errors. Thus it’s up to the author’s sense of responsibility to ensure that a book is factually accurate.  Many publishers, however, do get “trade” (i.e. “popular”) science books reviewed by outside experts. I do this regularly.  That ensures that at least one set of expert eyes have vetted the manuscript, but we do this for free and there’s not much impetus to do fact-checking or line editing unless something sticks out as an egregious error. The job of such a reviewer is to give a broad take on the book, and point out places that need changing.

My take on Narayanan’s critique—and again, I haven’t read Harari’s books—is that it’s a mixed bag. Some of the false statements she highlights are trivial, while others are more serious. Yet she herself, despite being a biologist, makes some scientific mistakes, which I’ll highlight below.  This, then, is a review of a review. Click the screenshot below to read Narayanan’s piece:

Narayanan begins by noting both Harari’s popularity and his influence.

. . . consider: among Harari’s flock are some of the most powerful people in the world, and they come to him much like the ancient kings to their oracles. Mark Zuckerberg asked Harari if humanity is becoming more unified or fragmented by technology. The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund asked him if doctors will depend on Universal Basic Income in the future. The CEO of Axel Springer, one of the largest publishing houses in Europe, asked Harari what publishers should do to succeed in the digital world. An interviewer with The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) asked him what effect COVID would have on international scientific cooperation. In favor of Harari’s half-formed edicts, each subverted their own authority. And they did it not for an expert in any one of their fields, but for a historian who, in many ways, is a fraud—most of all, about science.

That’s a strong claim, and rather than saying he’s a “fraud” (based on what Narayanan says), I would say he’s “careless”. But he’s sold a lot of books, and if he gets $1 in royalties per copy, Harari’s a rich man:

It scares me that, to many, this question appears to be irrelevant. Harari’s blockbuster, Sapiens, is a sweeping saga of the human species—from our humble beginnings as apes to a future where we will sire the algorithms that will dethrone and dominate us. Sapiens was published in English in 2014, and by 2019, it had been translated into more than 50 languages, selling over 13 million copies. Recommending the book on CNN in 2016, president Barack Obama said that Sapiens, like the Pyramids of Giza, gave him “a sense of perspective” on our extraordinary civilization. Harari has published two subsequent bestsellers—Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). All told, his books have sold over 23 million copies worldwide. He might have a claim to be the most sought-after intellectual in the world, gracing stages far and wide, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per speaking appearance.

She coins a term to describe Harari: a “science populist”, which is pejorative:

Yuval Harari is what I call a “science populist.” (Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube guru Jordan Peterson is another example.) Science populists are gifted storytellers who weave sensationalist yarns around scientific “facts” in simple, emotionally persuasive language. Their narratives are largely scrubbed clean of nuance or doubt, giving them a false air of authority—and making their message even more convincing. Like their political counterparts, science populists are sources of misinformation. They promote false crises, while presenting themselves as having the answers. They understand the seduction of a story well told—relentlessly seeking to expand their audience—never mind that the underlying science is warped in the pursuit of fame and influence.

Note the psychologizing and the reasons for his sloppiness: his desire to present a simplified but appealing narrative. I generally stay away from psychologizing, but it’s hard to imagine that Harari doesn’t enjoy his sudden fame. Whether that’s the reason for his two subsequent books, his lectures, or his discussions with Notables I cannot say.

Narayanan decided to fact-check Sapiens, Harari’s first book, and, to put it mildly, gives it a low grade. Yes, she finds errors, but they range from trivial to serious.  Errors are errors, but were I Narayanan, I’d concentrate on the serious ones: ones that make a difference in what people think. I’ve classified the errors she highlights as being “serious,” “middling”, or “trivial”. I’ll take them in reverse order

Trivial errors. 

Here’s a statement about top predators that, Narayanan says accurately, is not exactly correct and is confusing to boot. Her writing is indented:

Consider “Part 1: The Cognitive Revolution,” where Harari writes about our species’ jump to the top of the food chain, vaulting over, for example, lions.

“Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.” 

Harari concludes that, “many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.”

As an evolutionary biologist, I have to say: this passage sets my teeth on edge. What exactly makes for a self-confident lion? A loud roar? A bevy of lionesses? A firm pawshake? Is Harari’s conclusion based on field observations or experiments in a laboratory? (The text contains no clue about his sources.) Does anxiety really make humans cruel? Is he implying that, had we taken our time getting to the top of the food chain, this planet would not have war or man-made climate change?

Yes, Harari speculates here beyond what we know, but this is a purple passage of little import, or so I think.

Here’s another error that a biologist shouldn’t have made, because it’s careless and false. But it’s also not a major error:

My scientific colleagues take issue with Harari as well. Biologist Hjalmar Turesson points out that Harari’s assertion that chimpanzees “hunt together and fight shoulder to shoulder against baboons, cheetahs and enemy chimpanzees” cannot be true because cheetahs and chimpanzees don’t live in the same parts of Africa. “Harari is possibly confusing cheetahs with leopards,” Turesson says.

This is wrong but doesn’t affect Harari’s point.

Middling errors:

Here’s one:

But [Harari’s] errors unfortunately extend to our species as well. In the Sapiens chapter titled “Peace in our Time,” Harari uses the example of the Waorani people of Ecuador to argue that historically, “the decline of violence is due largely to the rise of the state.” He tells us the Waorani are violent because they “live in the depths of the Amazon forest, without army, police or prisons.” It is true that the Waorani once had some of the highest homicide rates in the world, but they have lived in relative peace since the early 1970s. I spoke to Anders Smolka, a plant geneticist, who happens to have spent time with the Waorani in 2015. Smolka reported that Ecuadorian law is not enforced out in the forest, and the Waorani have no police or prisons of their own. “If spearings had still been of concern, I’m absolutely sure I would have heard about it,” he says. “I was there volunteering for an eco-tourism project, so the safety of our guests was a pretty big deal.” Here Harari uses an exceedingly weak example to justify the need for our famously racist and violent police state.

This is a middling error because the Waorani were certainly once more violent than they are now, though we are not told whether they’re still more violent than an “average” society. As Steve Pinker pointed out in Better Angels,  violence has declined worldwide in the past few hundred years, certainly in part because of organized law enforcement and punishment accompanying a better morality. Narayanan devalues her criticism by making the last statement about Harari’s justification “for our famously racist and violent police state.” Is that in fact what he’s doing? And one could certainly argue whether this characterization of modern law enforcement is accurate or, indeed, worse than the kind of crime and punishment in indigenous “tribal” societies.

Narayanan admits that this kind of error is “inconsequential” but argues that they add up to a crumbling edifice of a book:

These details could seem inconsequential, but each is a crumbling block in what Harari falsely presents as an inviolable foundation. If a cursory reading shows this litany of basic errors, I believe a more thorough examination will lead to wholesale repudiations.

Serious errors.

I consider these more serious not just because anybody with the least expertise could spot them, but also because they are misleading about the status and fate of humans in nature. She quotes Harari on languages and then takes the statement apart:

Next, take the issue of language. Harari claims that “[many] animals, including all ape and monkey species, have vocal languages.”

Anybody who knows how human speech differs from that of other species will recognize the qualitative difference between human symbolic language and the non-symbolic lanaguage of other species, as does Narayanan:

Yet, in spite of all their similarities to humans, monkeys cannot be said to have a “language.” Language is a rule-bound symbolic system in which symbols (words, sentences, images, etc.) refer to people, places, events, and relations in the world—but also evoke and reference other symbols within the same system (e.g., words defining other words). The alarm calls of monkeys, and the songs of birds and whales, can transmit information; but we—as German philosopher Ernst Cassirer has said—live in “a new dimension of reality” made possible by the acquisition of a symbolic system.

Scientists may have competing theories on how language came to be, but everyone—from linguists like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, to experts on primate communication like Michael Tomasello and Asif Ghazanfar—is in agreement that, although precursors can be found in other animals, language is unique to humans.

‘Tis true.

Here’s an error Narayanan put in one of the three footnotes to her article:

A similar excerpt from Harari’s 2017 bookHomo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow: “Once it becomes possible to amend deadly genes, why go through the hassle of inserting some foreign DNA, when we can just rewrite the code and turn a dangerous mutant gene into a benign version? Then we might start using the same mechanism to fix not just lethal genes, but also those responsible for less deadly illnesses, for autism, for stupidity and for obesity.”

We can’t just “rewrite the code”, as opposed to the CRISPR method of changing the sequence of a gene, because the genetic code is the dictionary telling us what amino acid in a protein is coded for in the DNA’s RNA product by each three-base-pair codon. That code is fixed, and I don’t understand how Hararis says we can “rewrite that code.” There’s no way that this seems possible.

And one more: Harari playing expert about pandemics:

Now here’s what Harari had to say about pandemics in his 2017 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.

“So in the struggle against calamities such as AIDS and Ebola, scales are tipping in humanity’s favor. … It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology. The era when humankind stood helpless before natural epidemics is probably over. But we may come to miss it.”

I wish we had come to miss it. Instead, over 6 million of us have died of COVID as per official counts, with some estimates putting the true count at 12-22 million. And whether you think SARS-CoV-2—the virus responsible for the pandemic—came directly from the wild, or through the Wuhan Institute of Virology, we can all agree that the pandemic was not created in “service of some ruthless ideology.”

Harari could not have been more wrong; yet, like a good science populist, he continued to offer his supposed expertise by appearing on numerous shows during the pandemic. He appeared on NPR, talking about “how to tackle both the epidemic and the resulting economic crisis.” He went on Christiane Amanpour’s show to highlight the “key questions emerging from the coronavirus outbreak.” Then it was on to BBC Newsnight, where he offered “a historical perspective on the ​​ coronavirus.” He switched things up for Sam Harris’s podcast, where he told us about “the future implications” of COVID. Harari also found time to make an appearance on Iran International with Sadeq Saba, on the India Today E-Conclave Corona Series, and a slew of other news channels around the world.

Well, I wouldn’t really call that a serious ERROR, but I would call it an unfounded prognostication. After all, many people would have—and probably did have—the same opinion. What’s potentially harmful is his appearing as an expert on the covid pandemic, particularly if he didn’t admit that he was wrong and say why he was wrong. It becomes most serious if, when Harari went on those shows, he said stuff that was dangerous, but Narayanan doesn’t give us an example of any serious misinformation imparted by Harari.

In general, then, Narayanan singles out some errors in Sapiens, but not a lot of them, and most of them appear relatively inconsequential. Whether they are harmful or not depends on whether they could affect people’s well being, which is an issue separate from simply conveying misinformation. But Narayanan says a couple of dubious things in her critique, too:

Narayanan’s own errors. 

Narayanan has a beef with the “gene-centric” view of evolution most famous promulgated by Richard Dawkins, and this leads to some errors of her own. First, her animus:

Harari’s speculations are consistently based on a poor understanding of science. His predictions of our biological future, for instance, are based on a gene-centric view of evolution—a way of thinking that has (unfortunately) dominated public discourse due to public figures like him. Such reductionism advances a simplistic view of reality, and worse yet, veers dangerously into eugenics territory.

I don’t think Harari comes close to eugenic territory in his speculations below—after all, he’s talking about what is possible, not what we should be doing—and Narayanan herself gets things a bit wrong (she’s also wrong about the weakness of the gene-centric view of evolution: see below):

In the final chapter of Sapiens, Harari writes:

“Why not go back to God’s drawing board and design better Sapiens? The abilities, needs and desires of Homo sapiens have a genetic basis. And the sapiens genome is no more complex than that of voles and mice. (The mouse genome contains about 2.5 billion nucleobases, the sapiens genome about 2.9 billion bases, meaning that the latter is only 14 percent larger.) … If genetic engineering can create genius mice, why not genius humans? If it can create monogamous voles, why not humans hard-wired to remain faithful to their partners?”

It would be convenient indeed if genetic engineering were a magic wand—quick flicks of which could turn philanderers into faithful partners, and everyone into Einstein. This is sadly not the case. Let’s say we want to become a nonviolent species. Scientists have found that low activity of the monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A) gene is linked to aggressive behavior and violent offenses—but in case we are tempted to “go back to God’s drawing board and design better Sapiens” (as Harari says we can), not everyone with low MAO-A activity is violent, nor is everyone with high MAO-A activity nonviolent. People who grow up in extremely abusive environments often become aggressive or violent, no matter what their genes. Having high MAO-A activity can protect you from this fate, but it is not a given. On the contrary, when children are raised in loving and supportive environments, even those with low MAO-A activity very often thrive.

I’m not an expert on the effect of low MAO-A, but mutations in the gene that cause this are associated with a number of behavioral and neurological disorders, including aggressive behavior.  But who is claiming that there can be variations in the degree of association of low levels of this enzyme and behavior.  On average, lowering the level through engineered mutations would create a number of these disorders, but perhaps not in everyone, or, when present, not to the same degree. Nor is anyone claiming that there are not environmental causes of aggression unassociated with MAO-A levels.  Here Narayanan is attacking a straw theory: the view that everyone with a mutation (designed or not) has the same phenotype (here, level of aggression). Of course there are other causes of behavioral changes beyond MAO-A levels.

Here’s another of Narayanan’s misleading statements about genetics:

Our genes are not our puppet masters, pulling the right strings at the right time to control the events that create us. When Harari writes about altering our physiology, or “engineering” humans to be faithful or clever, he is skipping over the many non-genetic mechanisms that form us.

For example, even something as seemingly hardwired as our physiology—cells dividing, moving, deciding their fates, and organizing into tissues and organs—is not engineered by genes alone. In the 1980s, scientist J.L. Marx conducted a series of experiments in Xenopus (an aquatic frog native to sub-Saharan Africa) and found that “mundane” biophysical events (like chemical reactions in the cells, mechanical pressures inside and on the cells, and gravity) can switch genes on and off, determining cell fate. Animal bodies, he concluded, result from an intricate dance between genes, and changing physical and environmental events.

This is a common error, but one that should be caught by any biologist.  And it is this: even environmental effects that turn genes on and off can be coded by the genes. After all, all of development involves both the external environment and the internal environment—the latter a network of evolved changes coded by genes—turning genes on and off. Ergo, stuff like the assortment of chromosomes, the fate of cells, biochemical reactions, an so on, are orchestrated by natural selection so that the “internal environment” produces a vehicle—an organism—that itself is adaptive. Yes, the external environment can turn genes on and off—the changing color of Arctic mammals or the length of your cat’s fur as winter comes are examples—but it’s a mistake to argue that there’s a strict difference between “hardwired physiology” and “changes in the internal environment”. We have evolved so that genes produce products that, acting in the body, turn other genes on and off, and in an adaptive way. Unless you’re a Lamarckian, plasticity largely comes down to gene effects, even if activated by changes in the external environment. The whole system is evolved, and that means that genes affect each other through “mundane” biophysical events.

In short, Narayanan’s attack on “hardwiring”—which may be ideologically based on from her “puppet master” comments and denigration of the gene-centric view of evolution—is misguided. The gene-centric view of evolution is in fact the most sensible way to look at evolution, and doesn’t require denying any effects of the environment. After all, the going definition of evolution is “changes om the proportions of gene variants in a population over time.” But even Richard Dawkins is not going to say, and hasn’t, that we’re puppets on genetic strings, with everything determined entirely by our DNA.

The rest of Narayanan’s article involves stuff that bores me to tears: artificial intelligence, the view of organisms as algorithms, and the growing group of “Dataists”: people who “perceive the entire universe as flows of data.”  This is simply my own predilection, as I know others are keenly interested in such things.

As for Narayanan’s criticisms of Harari’s tendency to predict things without the necessary basis for prediction, well, I can’t speak to that as I haven’t read his book.  But based on Narayanan’s critique, I do see that Harari appears to have been remiss in fact-checking. Whether that laxity is serious or not I cannot tell. But perhaps readers will below.

Here’s Narayanan reprising her critiques of Harari in a 38-minute interview with R. J. Eskow. There’s a lot of duplication with the stuff in her article:

Hamnet, the ninth book by Maggie O’Farrell, was recommended by more than one reader the last time we had our occasional book go-round, and I’m glad it was mentioned.  I’ve just finished it, and recommend it very highly. (Click the screenshot below to see the Amazon site.)  I’d give it an A, and though it’s not quite the tour de force of the last reader-recommended book I essayed ( Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, a Pulitzer winner that you MUST read), I’d certainly place Hamnet above nearly all the contemporary fiction I’ve read lately. I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of the book, though it did win the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2020.

In 16th century England the names “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were interchangeable, and the Hamnet of the title is in fact the real name of William Shakespeare’s son, who died of unknown causes at age 11 in 1596. The real Hamnet had a twin sister named Judith, who died years later, in 1662.  Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, also had an older girl, Susanna, who lived to be 66. The bard himself died at age 52—tragically early.

Here is the baptismal record of Hamnet and Judith in 1585, and below that the death record of Hamnet in 1596:

We know very little about Shakespeare or his family, but these are the facts upon which O’Farrell builds her novel, a novel fantastic in both senses.  While Wiliam hangs heavily over the novel, his name is never mentioned: he’s referred to as “Hamnet’s father”, or “Mary’s son”.  This is deliberate, for O’Farrell centers the novel on his family. Its center is the playwright’s wife Agnes (renamed from Anne) a sprite of a woman who has the gift of divination and healing with medicinal herbs, an a woman who prefers to crawl into the forest to birth her three children alone rather than stay at home with a midwife. The life of the extended family unreels while William is mostly off stage, having moved early to London to do what he really wants but can’t do in Stratford: write and put on plays.

O’Farrell did substantial research for the book, so that, for example, we see Shakespeare’s father as the glove-maker he was, with the nascent bard continually pressured to learn that trade. (The book leaps backwards and forwards in time.) The twins are inseparable—until the plague takes Hamnet, leaving his entire family inconsolable (William is in London, four days away, and doesn’t get home in time for his son’s death. (The short section on how the flea that bit Hamnet came from Italy is a novel in itself.) Hamnet’s death, with its own supernatural overtones, is heartbreaking; its effect on Agnes is the complete evisceration of her character, so that she can do nothing but lie abed and ponder her dead son.  Judith is hard hit as well, but we don’t learn the depths of the father’s despair until he writes a play with the title being a variant of Hamnet’s name.

It is when Agnes learns of this play and its title that the novel reaches its apogee, but I won’t reveal what happens lest I spoil the narrative. All I can say is that this is a book in which you can run a gamut of emotions on nearly every page. Someone asked me if the book was a “sad one”, and I didn’t know what to answer. It is sad in the way life is sad, leavened with moments of wonder and joy, and the sadness is redeemed in the end.  Yes, there’s a bit of the supernatural in Agnes’s divinations (she can tell a lot about someone merely by pinching the web of skin between their thumb and forefingers), but by and large it’s about life in 16th-century rural England, all overshadowed by an absent father scribbling away in London.

I loved the book and recommend it highly, just a notch in quality behind All the Light We Cannot See, but I still give it an A. I’m surprised that it hasn’t been made into a movie, for it would lend itself well to drama. I see now that in fact a feature-length movie is in the works, and I hope they get good actors and a great screenwriter.

I am now reading another book recommended by a reader, and the comments on posts like this one have been a valuable source of reading material—both fact and fiction. If you please, do tell us below what you’re reading now, or what you’ve read lately, and how highly you recommend it. Don’t forget any books you want to warn us off of!

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.

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.