OmegaMom

To recap:  A few days ago, Pharyngula (PZ Myers) asked his readers “What science books ought a bookstore stock?”; he got 438 responses, and I (half-assedly, admittedly) tabulated the results.  Herewith are the top 10.  OmegaDad and OmegaGranny need to get together and decide which of these books each will get me for Christmas.  (That’s a hint, guys.)

Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark was the number one book mentioned by name in the comments, with 29 votes.  Since Pharyngulites tend to be hard-core skeptical types, it’s no surprise this came in first.  Sagan’s book takes on UFOs, Nessie, crop circles, angels, demons, Big Foot, the “face” on Mars, and more, emphasizing that one should always look at the evidence when examining the world around us.  Skepticism is the name of the game in this book, and science as a way of looking at the world is the hero.  Sagan was also mentioned for other books such as “Pale Blue Dot”, “Cosmos”, “Billions and Billions”, “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”, and singled out for “read anything by him” a number of times.

By delightful coincidence, sitting on my bedside table right now is Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, a romp through the world of science that looks at the history of science, how we know what we know now, what we know now, and the people who got us here.  Like all of Bryson’s books, it’s a fun read.  Right now, I’m in the midst of the atmosphere, and Bryson is talking about how, while it seems as if the Earth is extra-special just for us! (just close enough to the sun, just far enough away, just the right combination of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc.), that there is probably somewhere on another planet out in the universe, some life based on totally different basic chemical properties going absolutely ga-ga over how their world was made extra-special just for them! Bryson’s book was named by 25 commenters.

It has been 30 years since number three on our list, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, was written; my link points to the thirtieth anniversary edition, with a new forward by Dawkins. Twenty-three people mentioned “The Selfish Gene” by name, and Dawkins himself got the “read anything by him” nod from many commenters.  “Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel’s work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that “our” genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven’t thought of evolution in the same way since.”

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter, was mentioned 21 times.  In this book, Hofstadter links the mathematics of Godel, the artwork of Escher, and the music of Bach, and is “a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity”.  It looks at computers and artificial intellience, how the mind works, and examines the question of “self”.  I’ve meant to read this book over the years, but never gotten around to it; maybe this time I will.

I have been wanting to read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies since the first time I heard about it.  Diamond’s thesis is that the rise of European civilization was because of the bounty of biological and minerological resources and plant materials that the Europeans had at their fingertips.  He further examines the role of disease, which decimated the peoples of the New World when the Europeans came visiting (and conquering).  There were an astounding 1,075 reviews of this book on Amazon, with an average rating of 4 stars.  Jared’s book had 18 specific mentions in the commenting thread.

Another Dawkins’ book, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, garnered 17 comments.  In this book, Dawkins moves backwards through the ages, following the family tree of the human species back to the shared ancestor with modern apes, then to the ancestor of all mammals, then the vertebrates, and back even further to the dim beginnings of life on Earth.  “Dawkins sees his journey with its reverse chronology as ‘cast in the form of an epic pilgrimage from the present to the past [and] all roads lead to the origin of life.’”

We all know of Stephen Hawking, considered one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of our time. Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is considered a modern classic of science popularization; it takes on The BIG Questions.  Where did the universe come from?  What is it doing now?  Where will the future take it?  It talks about gravity, black holes, the Big Bang, what time is, the search for a unified theory to bring everything together into a nice, tidy package.  Amazon comments seem to break into two distinct camps:  Amazing, exhilarating, and brilliant is camp #1; “too hard”, “unintelligible”, “too brief”, “poorly written” is in camp #2.  It tied with the next entry with 15 mentions.

Neil Shubin’s delightfully named Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body tied with Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”, with 15 mentions.  I’d buy this book just for the title, frankly.  Shubin is a (famous) fish paleontologist (he’s the one who discovered Tiktaalik, a transitional species between aquatic- and land-based forms).  His university gave him the chore of teaching the basic anatomy and physiology class to pre-med students.  (OmegaBro taught this for many years and my memory keeps calling it “T&A”, though I suppose it’s supposed to be “P&A” instead.  Hmmm.)  Shubin found that his fishy background made it easier to teach the human side of P&A, and he uses the same approach to guide his readers through the human body and evolution.

Steven Pinker is a chaired professor of psychology at MIT.  In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, he takes the notion of infants as “blank slates” to task, using evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and cognitive science to argue that humans share an inborn structure made to order for survival, intellect, and language.  (This is, apparently, a quite controversial outlook, though I’m sure any mother (or father) of more than one child will be going, “Well, like, duh.”)  Pinker’s book was mentioned 13 separate times, and Pinker is another of the authors who were mentioned with a “read anything by him”.

Rounding out the list at Number Ten is Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory.  In this book, mentioned by 11 commenters at Pharyngula, Greene uses everyday examples to illustrate the complexities of string theory, and touches on astronomy, cosmology, and physics to show how it all interrelates.  Right now, string theory is supposedly the only thing that might serve as a unified theory combining macro physics, micro physics, and gravity into one.