Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen
Cost of Civilization
Spencer Wells
At first glance, it’s hard to see the down-side of being civilized. Compared with
Stone Age living, an office job doesn’t
look too shabby. Throw in the Internet,
leisure time and dessert, and all this
culture looks like a win-win.
But there’s a catch, says Wells, an
anthropological geneticist. Civilization grew out of a gradual switch 10,000
years ago from hunting and gathering
to farming, and, he says, “more food
produced more people.” The result is a
planet with 6. 8 billion human grazers.
The rise of farming meant that adults’
leading health threat, trauma, gave way
to infection over the past several millennia as animal domestication and
city living spread disease. Now humans
enter a new phase of threats, also tied to
agriculture. Wheat, rice and corn supply
more than half the calories consumed
by people worldwide, and high-carbo-hydrate, processed foods have spawned
epidemics of obesity, type 2 diabetes
and heart disease. Exacerbated by a sed-
Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness
Kees van Deemter
Politicians and salesmen aren’t the
only people who use — or even rely
on — vague language. Never mind that
much of the world can be measured in
neatly defined units
such as centime-
ters, milligrams and
degrees, writes van
Deemter, a computer
scientist. Most peo-
ple have little sense
of those units, so
vagueness permeates
speech and ideas, from describing a per-
son as “tall” to the weather as “chilly.”
Van Deemter argues that vagueness
is not only the norm, but can even be
useful. The imprecision of “chilly,” for
example, quickly conveys a comparison
and judgment that isn’t necessarily cap-
tured by a precise temperature reading.
entary lifestyle, the modern diet repre-
sents “a profound shift in the causes of
disease,” Wells writes. “More and more,
we are causing our own deaths.”
Wells isn’t advocating a return to
hunting and gathering. He points out
that farming settle-
ments fostered com-
mon language and
innovation, and these
positive trends con-
tinue. Farming took
thousands of years to
spread, he notes, but
the industrial revolu-
tion needed only a few generations. The
information age is even faster.
But Wells wonders whether technological advances can solve today’s health
and environmental problems — if gene
research will counteract disease and if
nuclear or renewable energy will make
up for oil shortages. And then there’s
climate change and species loss. “It is
time,” Wells writes, “to take stock and
realize that with great desires come
great consequences.” — Nathan Seppa
Random House, 2010, 230 p., $26.
in unexpected places, like mathematics
and the study of logic. Chapters explore
the sorites paradox (which concerns
the question of how many stones make
a heap) and physicists’ quest to define
the meter in increasingly precise terms.
But forget eliminating imprecision, van
Deemter contends. Like original sin, he
writes, vagueness is “a stain that can be
diminished but never removed.”
Besides being inevitable, vagueness
can be essential. Engineers developing
artificial intelligence, for example, know
the importance of building in fuzzy logic.
“If we were to build a robot that can
communicate, how precise would we like
it to be when it speaks to us?” asks van
Deemter. Such questions are intriguing,
though at times the book’s philosophical
wanderings become overly complex. The
author makes a strong central argument,
though: In a world of shades of gray,
vagueness can be a virtue. — Sid Perkins
Exploring the
Solar System
with Binoculars
Stephen James O’Meara
Backyard observers
can make the most of
basic tools. Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2010, 156 p., $29.99.
Super Structures:
The Science of
Bridges, Buildings,
Dams, and Other
Feats of Engineering
Mark Denny
Structures stand, soar
and collapse based on fundamental
physics principles. Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 2010, 266 p., $30.
Life in the Hothouse:
How a Living Planet
Survives Climate
Change
Melanie Lenart
A scientist explains
how the planet adjusts
to warming. Univ. of Arizona Press,
2010, 236 p., $22.95.
Remembering Smell: A
Memoir of Losing–and
Discovering – the
Primal Sense
Bonnie Blodgett
The author’s experi-
ence with anosmia
leads her to explore the biology and
cultural context of smell. Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2010, 256 p., $24.
Explaining Research:
How to Reach Key
Audiences to Advance
Your Work
Dennis Meredith
Scientists can use new
and traditional media
to communicate findings to the public.
Oxford Univ. Press, 2010, 357 p., $35.
How to Order To order these books or others,
visit www.sciencenews.org/bookshelf. A click on
a book’s title will transfer you to Amazon.com.
