Books reviews, current events, and other musings

 
As a change of pace, I just finished Lois McMaster Bujold's The Warrior's Apprentice. It's my first Bujold and the only science fiction that I've read in the last six months. The writing and characterization were rather ho-hum. Still, it's a pleasant twist for the protagonist to be short and crippled. The book's main entertainment value is seeing how the main character, through his cleverness, gets out of one impossible scrape after another. I will consider other volumes in the series as airplane books.
posted by Julian at 12:39 PM

 
Yesterday, I finally saw the new Star Wars movie. My reaction was the same as everyone else's. The special effects were fun, but the dialog and romance were painful.

One ongoing theme of the movie was the troubled relationship that the men had with their fathers or father figures. That aspect reminded me of Susan Faludi's book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, which I read a few months ago. Faludi talked to a variety of men, and many of them felt that their fathers were absent or remote, of that their fathers didn't adequately prepare them for the real world. Others credited father figures, from the workplace or other domains, for their successes in life. Other movies also have this theme, but Star Wars presented it repeatedly.
posted by Julian at 9:53 PM

 
Edward Wilson attempts a daunting task in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Wilson, a biologist, proposes building up an understanding of human nature and society, starting from biology. He is motivated by the successes of the natural sciences, which use physics to understand chemistry and chemistry to understand biology. Wilson advocates continuing that process, combining neurology, genetics, evolutionary biology and other scientific disciplines to understand the human mind. From there, he hopes to comprehend the social sciences, the arts, and even ethics.

In our age of academic hyper-specialization, it’s very impressive for anyone to lay out this grandiose of a scheme. His plans are based upon consilience, the synthesis of all disciplines into one integrated framework, describing each level in terms of other more fundamental levels. Wilson argues that, with such a framework, the social sciences and humanities can achieve the solid foundation that science currently possesses.

The ideas are intriguing, but I wasn’t convinced that science will answer basic questions about humanity. As Wilson acknowledges, understanding human behavior from biological first principles is an incredibly difficult problem. While much of the scientific research on the subject is fascinating, we’ll need other approaches in addition. We’re far from modeling the mind of a mouse, and human beings are vastly more complicated.
posted by Julian at 9:57 PM