Atom Land by Jon Butterworth

Rating: WARTY!

I usually like to favorably review science books that I read, because I usually enjoy them and I learn something. Once in a while my instincts fail me and I end up with a book that didn't do the trick. This, I am sorry to report, was one such book.

Now you can try to make a case, if you wish for books about physics and in particular about sub-atomic physics (see what I did there: sub-atomic - particular?!) to be poor choices for listening to in audiobook form, while commuting, but I disagree. I've enjoyed a variety of non-fiction books, including some pretty heavy (for a layman) science books, and not felt like I've missed anything critical. I can't say the same for this book, which I felt took the wrong approach - or maybe it wasn't so bad an approach, but it was definitely one with which the author became far too enamored, for I felt that his attachment to the metaphor he'd chosen, took the book slowly downhill and made the concepts a lot denser than they needed to be.

On top of that, there are things in books that don't translate well to audiobooks - especially things in science books. I don't want to be read a formula that I can't see, nor do I need a fraction to be quoted to a dozen or more decimal places with a host of tedious zeroes, much less several in siuccession. It's just annoying.

The approach this author used was the metaphor of the world of the atom, with boats sailing from ports to other ports in the various lands on this world, and journeys by air or overland to various places within each territory. I can see why such a metaphor might appear to make sense to a writer, but just because it made sense to this author doesn't necessarily mean it will appeal to everyone or make it any more intelligible. To me, it did not. It just confused things, especially since the author himself was evidently confused, and had to backtrack more than once. That to me is poor writing, or it's poor planning or it's a sign your over-arching concept is failing you.

Some of the land names were a stretch, too - I mean Bosonia? Really? And one extended piece about the airport not being close to the city for these three particular locations, and the tedious endless descriptions of people who may arrive at one airport but be traveling to a different city were obnoxious. They really were.

I think that's about the point where I decided I had had enough. I made it about three-quarters the way through this, which was more than it deserved because I got a lot less than three-quarters of the content of the book, but in the end I'd firmly decided that I really did not want to visit this land, much less travel extensively in it. The thing is that I already have a decent layman's grasp of the ideas here, so if they made little to no sense to me, or bored me even as they made sense, then I fear they're certainly not going to reach anyone who is a complete newbie to this world. On that basis I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes

Rating: WORTHY!

It came to my attention this morning that I never reviewed this book which I read some time ago and found fascinating, so here we go! Note that this book offers no support for young-Earth creationism or for the Biblical mythology. Eve is used loosely and I wish it had not been, but authors don't always think up the best titles for their books - or worse, they're pushed into choosing misleading titles by their publisher for the sake of boosting sales.

The book is all about mitochondrial genetics. Mitochondrial DNA comes to us only through our mothers. It is separate from the main complement of DNA that we have, and was probably, at one point way, way back, a bacterium that got inside a cell and thrived there. Since it is part of the cell, it comes from the mother's ovum. It is not found in sperm, so this is a matriarchal lineage that can be traced back genetically and can tell enthralling tales of ancestry unavailable to us via other means.

The book focuses on modern European lineages, all of which can be traced back to seven founding groups. note that this doesn't mean that there there were only seven women alive back then. There was never a point where there was one Eve, either. There were many, many more women alive, but only these seven had their mitochondrial DNA lucky enough to survive the ages through to modern times. This means that a heck of a lot of DNA has been lost! We should mourn that.

The groups are referred to as haplogroups, scientifically, which in a very rough sense is somewhat akin to a sub-species or a tribe, but these only very rough approximations. Humans are all the same species, but even within a single species there can be many subgroups. The author attaches female names to each of these sub-, or haplogroups, the initial letter of which is taken from the alphabetical letter by which the haplogroup is known to science. The author gives his fictional the names as follows:

• Helena
• Jasmine:
• Katrine
• Tara
• Ursula (Haplogroup U5, excluding subgroup K)
• Velda
• Xenia

TO BE COMPLETED!

Atlas of a Lost World by Craig Childs

Rating: WORTHY!

Read decently by the author (I'm a big advocate of authors reading their own material for audio-books if they can), this book gave me mixed feelings at times. Overall, on balance though, I considered it a worthy read. The aim of it is to discuss how this planet changed over the course of the ice ages in North America, with a reference here and there to other parts of the world, and how this affected humans and their habits and migratory patterns. The way the author does it is to take trips and relate his experiences to things that may - or may not - have happened to ice age peoples who lived on the North American continent back then.

There's a lot of information dispensed here, but it's often mixed in with the author's own personal experiences and sometimes I think this muddies the waters. At one point he writes a mild admonishment that we should not imagine that people back then necessarily viewed the world in the same way we do today, and under different conditions. They had their own lives and drives, he advises, but then he goes right back to relating his experiences to theirs! It sounded a bit ambiguous.

The text is evocative and sometimes overly imaginative, but it never gets wildly out of control and it does tell an interesting story that really makes a reader (or in this case a listener) think about these things in new ways, which is what I liked about this. There's some technical information, but not an unwelcome amount, and I enjoyed that - learning about an era which is often not covered in the textbooks that like to ramble on about dinosaurs or early African hominids. It gave me some good perspectives about life back then, and on how hardy and creative these people were, and what they had to contend with. I commend this as a worthy listen.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

Rating: WORTHY!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though it was rather on the long side and a bit rambling, but it's a topic I enjoy greatly, and an author I love. On top of this, it was read beautifully by Sean Runnette. I'm a big advocate of an author reading their own material, but I understand that there are good reasons why many authors do not. Though this reader isn't Dutch, listening to him reading it so well, it was one of those occasions where, with a slight stretch of the imagination, you can fool yourself into thinking that this is how the author would have read it.

The book rambles a bit and might be somewhat stodgy and overly academic for some, but it was precisely what I was expecting and I had no unpleasant surprises, only a lot of satisfying ones. There were scores of examples of animals' intelligence, with many interesting anecdotes and lots of descriptions of scientific studies which went into enough detail to explain why it was a scientific study and what result it showed, but without belaboring it. The studies have covered all kinds of animals from mollusks to monkeys, birds to apes, fish to elephants, and a variety of others.

The book explains how these studies differ and what they show, and how one study can or cannot be made to work with another species for an assortment of reasons. While it was thorough, I was never bored, and felt no need to skip a page or two. We learn how studies have changed along with our view of society and why older views as to the limitations of animal cognition are invalid, so it's as much a measure of change in human cognition as it is in measuring animal cognition, which is quite intriguing.

I whole-heartedly commend this as a worthy read.

The Perfect Theory by Pedro G Ferreira

Rating: WORTHY!

This book was much more my idea of a 'science for the masses' sort of a book. I have just reviewed A Natural History of Color negatively because it was hard to follow and too dense, and this book was the polar opposite. It had plenty of juicy detail, but it was written lightly, and in an easy style so when Sean Runnette read it to me so nicely, I was able to follow it even when driving and partly- or mostly-focused on traffic. To me that makes a big difference since I'm rarely sitting listening to books in an armchair.

The book follows the historical pursuit and discovery of relativistic physics, naturally discussing Einstein who opened this field, but there are many other contributors. Einstein, for example, is mostly closely associated with the famous formula E=mc⊃2, but the fact is that he was not the first to derive that equation!

Approximations to it had been expressed earlier by people like John Henry Poynting and Fritz Hasenöhrl, and Henri Poincaré came very close to the actual equation citing m = E/c⊃2, although he found paradoxes in his approach. Italian Olinto De Pretto also published the equivalent of Einstein's formula , effectively expressed as E=mv⊃2 where 'v' is the speed of light. Pretty much all of these people were dealing with a universe which contained aether - or so they believed. Einstein dispensed with aether because he correctly rejected its existence, but he was so widely read it is hard to believe that he was not aware of the equation before he ever wrote it down himself.

The book goes on to discuss gravity and acceleration, issues involving theoretic math versus practical physics particularly in relation to plans for developing a gravity wave detector. There are chapters on collapsing stars, singularities, black holes, and John Wheeler, the accidental radio detection of the cosmic background radiation, and dark matter. It ive sag rea thisotry fo the work, visits many of the contributors and tells a great story. I commend it fully as a worthy read or listen.

A Natural History of Color by Hans Bachor, Rob DeSalle

Rating: WARTY!

The idiot librarians at Goodreads have this author listed as Bacher and Bachor. Way to go! It's yet another reason to ditch Amazon and all its works. Evidently there's no respect for writers in those quarters, only for profits. This audiobook was read nicely by George Newbern, but ultimately it was disappointing for me. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting from it, but what I got was less than that, whatever it was! The biggest problem for me was that the book was far more dense and technical than I expected. I did not expect an academic paper and to be fair, that's not what this was, but in many ways it was annoyingly close at times.

If I'd been sitting comfortably with no distractions I could have followed it a lot better, but I would still have had a problem with the density of the technical stuff. A book like that, if I'm going to read it, I need to have in front of me as a print, or ebook. Audiobooks do not work well for me that way. The fact that this book went off on tangents meandering as far back as the Big Bang and later off into evolutionary genetics did not help. While I would not have minded brief excursions in either direction, these things just went into far too much technical detail, and were much too long.

There was a huge amount on genetics and mutations, and on and on, and it started to feel more like a dry biology text book than one about color and color perception so I also tired of the topics. I made it through most of the book, but eventually decided my time would be better spent on a different topic, and I did not regret swapping this out for a book on relativity, which was far better written and much more educational and entertaining. I can't commend this one.

The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen

Rating: WORTHY!

Peter Brannen is a science journalist and in this audio book he talks (or more accurately, Adam Verner talks, since he's the actual narrator) about the five major extinctions that Earth has endured. These are far from the only extinctions Earth has seen in its four billion year plus history, but they are the most significant ones. Arguably, one major event that is relatively recently being recognized - something which destroyed at least a third of marine life diversity, and a significantly larger proportion of terrestrial diversity - is the end-Guadalupian extinction which took place ten million years before the Permian. Brannen does not mention this one. I don't know why. Perhaps since it's so close to the Permian he considers it all part of the same thing. Ten million years isn't a lot in geologic time after all!

As Brannen makes clear in his disturbing evocations, these events were truly horrific times, when the planet was brought to its knees in a series of nightmare scenarios. Earth froze or was virtually boiled, and or was shaded with debris and poisoned with noxious gases from volcanic or impact events, and nearly all life became extinct, only to resume when the crisis was over, to redevelop, re-evolve, and to spread widely and fantastically; then to be culled severely again by the next global tragedy. It's a miracle anything survived at all, let alone enough to allow humans to grow out of what came before.

The thing is though that only one of these extinctions can really be laid at the door of an asteroid impact. That's the most famous one - the dino extinction, and even that cause is disputed. The others? Climate change. The same sort of thing that is going on now, right under our noses, the only difference being that in the past it happened quite slowly whereas we are heating-up the planet far faster than anything nature has ever contemplated.

No other review I've seen has listed these events, but the five extinctions covered in this book are these:

• Ordovician-Silurian - 440 million years ago
• Late Devonian - 365 million years ago
• Permian-Triassic - 250 million years ago
• Triassic-Jurassic - 210 million years ago
• Cretaceous-Tertiary - 65 Million Years Ago

There's a reason these geologic periods in Earth's hugely-long history have boundaries and names and it's because of (from our modern eyes) abrupt changes in species diversity and composition. Flora and fauna changed and the period got a different name to mark these boundaries. Amazingly, nightmarish and totally weird organisms grew, flourished, and spread, and then disappeared, only to be replaced by an entirely new set of fantastical creatures. The resilience of nature and the inventiveness it exhibits is astounding.

I really enjoyed this book and fully commend it. My only complaint may have been related just to my copy, but I got this from Chirp and I played it through their app on my iPhone in the car on my daily commute. As usual with these books, it worked perfectly, in this case though for only about eighty percent of the book. Right around that mark, it began giving me grief. Other books have played to the very end without issues, but a couple of books I've had problems with, and this was the second that I can recall. It would play for a minute or so and then stop for no apparent reason. I'd restart it, and it would do the same over and over. A different book I began listening to had no such issues - but it has not reached eighty percent yet! We'll see how that goes. (It went fine!)

Apart from that I have no complaints and commend this book fully as educational and entertaining.

Why Balloons Rise and Apples Fall by Jeff Stewart

Rating: WORTHY!

Life is short and books are long - if not within the covers, then when referring to how many books there are otut here int he world demanding to be read!

That's why I'm glad this was a short, fun book about physics. I could have happily continued reading had it been longer. It's an easy read and makes concepts quite clear - for the most part. There were a couple of times I had to do a double take, and while I don't for a minute profess to be a physicist, the things seemed off to me. I shall mention those below, but overall, this book was well-written, fun, and entertaining, with a nice sense of humor running through it and plenty of readily understandable explanations about what are, let’s face it, often difficult concepts to get one's mind around.

The book has a series of short sections, starting with asking what physics actually is, and each covers a different physics topic. Nothing important is left out, not even relativity and quantum mechanics, so if you want a basic grounding in physics, this is a great place to begin. It covers: astrophysics, electricity, energy, forces, heat, magnetism, matter, motion, all delivered well and educationally without straying too far into technical jargon or obscure explanations.

I ran into a problem on page 55 in a boxed section discussing an experiment by Dutch philosopher and mathematician Willem Jacob 's Gravesande, who experimented with dropping brass balls onto a smooth clay surface and measuring the depth to which the balls penetrated the clay, deriving a formula from it. Émilie du Châtelet made subsequent use of this, but she gets no mention in this book. The author talks about the brass balls falling at different speeds, but as he points out in this same book, acceleration under gravity is constant regardless of the weight of an object! So speed would seem to be far less relevant than mass in this case? Maybe I'm missing something, but it seemed odd to me.

The other issue I had was on page 92, where the author was discussing inflating balloons. He said that once a balloon is inflated and sealed, the pressure inside equals the pressure outside, but I for the life of me could not see this. The air in the balloon is under pressure - it has to be to inflate the constricting rubber (or whatever) of the balloon skin. If it equaled what was outside, then surely the balloon wouldn't sink to the ground as they typically do, but float at whatever height you set it? Again, maybe I'm missing something here, and maybe it’s purely the weight of the rubber that's causing the balloon to sink rather than the extra weight of the compressed air inside, otherwise it would float, but it seems to me that the pressure inside has to be greater. If it were less, the balloon would rise, surely? The author seems to admit this himself a paragraph or so later when talking about hot air balloons.

But whether this is a mistake of some sort, or whether I'm up a gum tree takes nothing away from the overall quality of the book, which I commend as a worthy and educational read.

Vital Dust by Christian de Duve

Rating: WORTHY!

This is one of my favorite books and covers a topic that doesn't get as much attention as evolution. It covers the origin of life - I mean it had to come from somewhere before it could evolve, right? LOL! De Duve died almost a decade ago, but he has left us a treasure here which covers every aspect of life from non-life, with the available evidence (as of his writing this book in 1995).

The book is extensive - some three hundred pages plus an extensive bibliography, glossary and other supportive material, such as additional reading suggestions. It's divided into several broad parts, starting with one on chemistry, and following that with how the genome came to be, moving on to how cells formed, the first 'real cell' as we know them today, multicellular life, and the development of intelligence.

Each part is subdivided into sections going into more detail on various aspects on the main topic. For example, The Age of Chemistry is split into sections on the search for origins, the first catalysts of life, fuel for emerging life, and the advent of RNA.

I whole-heartedly commend this as a worthy read.

Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a really superb book about a prediction made by the theory of evolution which was followed up by the author and resulted in the momentous discovery of Tiktaalik. ("We were the Tiktaaliks. We were exterminated" - a little bit of Doctor Who humor there...). There was a gap in the flow of evolution from what one fossil (Panderichthys) represented as a fish, and what the next fossil in line (Acanthostega) represented in terms of fish coming out onto land over time. Panderichthys was some 380 million years old. Acanthostega was around 365 million years old.

You see that fifteen million year gap? That's the kind of thing that creationists like to point to when they make their baseless claim that evolution is "just a theory". Since they can present no scientific evidence supporting their position, creationists are necessarily reduced to pointing out what they blindly believe are gaps or errors in the scientific theory of evolution.

The author, Neil Shubin, and his colleagues decided that if there was a evolutonary link between Panderichthys) and Acanthostega - while not necessarily a direct one between the two, but if there existed any such thing - It would be found in rocks datable between those two fossils. Such rocks were to be found on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, so Shubin and co went there and dig - and lo and behold, they found the transitonal form exactly where prediction said it would be, and evolution was vindicated once again.

This book covers more than just Tiktaalik though. It goes on to discuss several curiosities we humans have which cannot be explained if we were specially created by a god, or if we were intelligently designed - because we are most assuredly not intelligently designed, as Shubin demosntrates. What Shubin shows here is that you can only explain various traits, organs, and behaviors we humans exhibit, by evolution. They're inexplicable, not to say inexcusable, if there was some sort of intelligent design! I commend this book completely.

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

One mroe book of Dawkins's to fnish up my set of reviews, and this one was awful! Just kidding. No. Richard dawkins write and awful book? never! This was another excellent one. The title refers to idiotc creationist (is that a tautology?) William paley and his claim that if he found a watch lyign onthe ground eh woudl assume an intelligent creator had made it. he woudl not assume that it arose through mutation and such over time, btu his anaology is flawed, as Dawkins shows.

Dawkins goes on then to completely undermine the creationist claim that complexity cannot arise by itself (it actually doesn't - it arises from the alws of physics and chemistry!) by tackling their prize argument - that of the eye. There is actually a short documentary - which may be on You Tube by now, for all I know - and which takes its title and content from this book. In it, a very young-looking Dawkins makes the same argument with video support. I don't think it's his best documentary, but it's worth a look if you're a Dawkins fan.

In the video he demonstrates the "biomorphs" which he discusses in this book. I was never very impressed with those visually, but in the underlying workings, they do handsomely demonstrate how a small tweak in one "dimension" (the biomorphs have eleven, if I recall, one for each of their 'genes') can have disproportionate effects on the overall appearance - something the creationists simply don't get - along with everything else they don't get about evolution.

So overall, I commend this book as well worth reading.

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

Last but by no means least, this is I think also in my top three. Or four! There are so many to choose from. This is another one taking aim at the evidence-free non-science (read: nonsense) of creationism by addressing the baseless creationist claim that evolution is too improbable to have happened - hence the title! With his usual wit, solid facts, clear arguments and fine writing, Dawkins takes the creationists to the cleaners and makes them pay for the job. I commend it fully.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

In the way that The Greatest Show on Earth was a paean to evolution, this book does the same thing for science in general. It's divided into intriguing chapters thus:

• The Anaesthetic of Familiarity
• Drawing Room of Dukes
• Barcodes in the Stars
• Barcodes on the Air
• Barcodes at the Bar
• Hoodwink'd with Faery Fancy
• Unweaving the Uncanny
• Huge Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance
• The Selfish Cooperator
• The Genetic Book of the Dead
• Reweaving the World
• The Balloon of the Mind

I commend this as a worthy read for the passion, the science, the arguments, and the great writing.

The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

This is an unabashed paean to evolution and a direct refutation of creationism, lining up as it does, evidence for the former, and kicking down the flimsy lies and evidence-free claims of the latter. It ought to be a school textbook with every student required to read it. I commend it heartily. This may well be my favorite Dawkins book; certainly it's in the top three and I commend it unreservedly.

River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

This book digs into the origin of life rather than the evolution of life, and while the two are separate sciences, they do have a lot in common in that at some point there had to develop a molecule that could survive and replicate itself, as well as change over time in order to survive and thrive in the changing conditions in which it found itself. That's all that evolution is when you get right down to the genomic level. The book also looks at where life might go which is really nothing more than speculation, if somewhat informed speculation. But it's a fun read and I commend it.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

So here's the one that started it all. Originally published in 1976, the book took a different approach from most books on evolution and started from the perspective of the gene and the genome in general, almost imparting a personality and ambition to genes to propagate themselves at all costs. Dawkins presents it as a sort of a competition, with the most ruthless genes succeeding and weaker ones be damned. In a way it makes sense, but like any perspective on science, it's not the whole story, hence the criticism and controversy this book has stirred up. The fact is though, that it does help sometimes to turn a topic on its head and think outside the box in order to gain a deeper understanding. That's what this book did and why it became so controversial and garnered criticism. I commend it as a worthy read.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

I've read a heck of a lot of what Dawkins has written and it's hard to believe that I've never published a review of any of his books yet, so that gets set straight right now, right here! The first book that brought him to prominence was The Selfish Gene getting on for a half century ago now, and that's one that also set the precedent for controversy that has followed a lot of what he's done and written since. He's been putting out books every few years and also doing TV documentaries. This particular book came out in 2006.

The aim of it is to undermine religious arguments claiming to establish the existence of a god. The book has been criticized for failing to tackle some arguments, but it was never Dawkins's intention to write a definitive refutation of all religious arguments, especially not the ones he considered have been refuted long before he published this. There are other books for that such as Atheism, the Case Agaisnt God and The Atheist Debator's Handbook which I shall review on another occasion.

This book covers questions of whether any god exists - what the ideas are - what people believe, and then considers the arguments for any god's existence - the so-called religious "proofs" from yesteryear, including Thomas Aquinas's "proofs" and so on. Chapter 4 is titled "Why There Almost Certainly is no God" with Dawkins characteristiclaly taking the scientific perspective which errs on the side of caution rather than stridently staking out a position which is what the creationists and other believers do. He points out that the proposition is so lacking in evidence or support that it's really not worth considering seriously.

In subsequent chapters he discusses morality, why religion isn't harmless (as if that wasn't self-evident), and childhood abuses. The book is a solid refutation of religious belief and dominance in society, and is a good starting point for any atheist to educate themselves and arm themselves with some good solid arguments to refute religious claptrap and bullshit. I commend it.

Evolution and the Myth of Creationism by Tim M Berra

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

The first is Tim Berra's work. At the time he wrote this, he was a professor of zoology at Ohio State university - that is, not some hydrologist or electrical engineer, or some other field entirely unrelated to biology, paleontology, physics, or cosmology like the real scientists are, and the creationists most certainly are not!

Berra's book is simed at open-minded readers (i.e. not creationists!) and laid out in lay-person's terms. It's divided into the following five sections:

1. What is Evolution?
2. Geologic Time and the Fossil Record
3. The Explanatory Power of Evolution
4. The Evolution of life and the Rise of Humans
5. Science, Religion, Politics, Law, and Education

The book is only some 140 pages long, not counting the extensive appendices and other supporting materials, but it competently covers, and in sufficient detail without being exhaustive or exhausting, enough of the basics about how science works to get you up and running. It explains why evolution is not a theory as expressed in everyday use, but a scientific theory, which is a different thing altogether, and it goes into what evidence supports it, giving many, many examples of evolution at work, and how we know what we know. In short, this is a solid beginning for anyone honestly trying to understand evolution, and I commend it as a worthy read.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

Rating: WORTHY!

Finally! I get to positively review a book! This one was great. This is the "Human Story Retold Through Our Genes," and the author knows his stuff. Adam Rutherford has a PhD in genetics from the University College, London, and is a television and BBC radio personality. This book talks about human history looked at through the lens of genetics and is accessible, slyly-humorous (as if you couldn't tell from the title), smart, no-nonsense, and unforgiving of charlatanry.

Starting with our development from earlier hominids, the first section goes into some detail about our relationship to other species and subspecies of humans from early history, covers diseases through the perspective of families in the past including some unfortunately inbred royal families, discusses genetic diseases, influences, and how badly these can sometimes be covered not only in the popular press, but also even by science magazines, and it even ventures into the question of 'are humans still evolving?'.

Part one, called 'How we came to be' is split into four sections: Horny and Mobile, the First European Union, These American lands, and When We Were Kings. Part two 'Who We Are Now' is similarly divided into The End of Race, the Most Wondrous Map Ever Produced by Humankind, Fate, A Short introduction to the Future of Humankind. I have to say I disagree with his comments on race.

The popular scientific positions seems to be that the genome is blind to race, but clearly this isn't true, nor should it be because there are health issues tied to genetics and these affect some ethnicities more than others. On top of that, race, as perceived or self described relaly has a lot to do with how we look, and it's the genome decides this: from the color of our eyes and skin, to the type of hair we have, to the shape of our bodies and faces. It therefore can't be blind to race since racial traits are integral to the genome. That does not of course mean the genome can be used for racist purposes. It cannot and it should not, and I do take the author's point when he makes the case, for example, that something like sickle-cell anemia isn't a purely African problem.

I think the real issue is that the author fails to distinguish between race, and ancestry or ethnicity. Race is misleading and can be used as a barrier when there is no justification for using it that way (or any other way). Ancestry is less problematic. You can't put a genome in front of a geneticist and have them say, "This guy was born in Africa" or "This guy is from Scandinavia," because the genome of everyone is so mixed and diverse these days. You can get a good idea of what a person's ancestry is. This is in fact how those genetic genealogy businesses work - but as the author points out, don't ignore that fact that their assertions can be highly misleading.

To pretend that what are considered racial traits somehow are not represented in our genome in any shape or form is also misleading and problematical if we wish to understand disease. African American women for example, tend toward greater bone density than women from other ethnic groups, but that doesn't mean all of them do and so therefore they never need a bone density scan. Genetic detective work in tracking down who is susceptible to certain traits and possible associated health problems is a form of contact tracing when you get right down to it, and we ought to know by now how important that is in preventing illness.

If you're Asian, for example, you have a 1 in 20 chance of having Alpha-Thalassemia. If you're Ashkenazi Jewish, European, French Canadian, or Cajun, you have a 1 in 25 chance of Cystic Fibrosis, but if you're Asian, your chances improve to 1 in 94 for this problem. Sickle Cell isn't exclusive to those of African ethnicity, but at a rate of 1 in 11, it is notably high. These things are not trivial; they're a matter of health and even life or death. It's not something that can be ignored. Neither is it something that should be used for discriminatory purposes. It's just a fact of life.

I do see Rutherford's point though, and In some ways I understand and applaud it, but methinks his attempt to simplify and even erase it were a little misguided. Besides, living in hopes that everyone will see that the genome is supposedly blind to race, and this will curtail racial issues in society is delusional. Sadly, it's going to take a hell of a lot more than genetics to fix that, and fix it we must. But knowing that ancestry is represented in the genome can be of real value, health-wise.

That quibble aside, I did thoroughly enjoy this book, I liked how accessible it was, loved the humor, and appreciated the non-nonsense approach. I fully commend this as a worthy and educational read.

Bright Dreams The Brilliant Ideas of Nikola Tesla by Tracy Dockray

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I'm definitely not one of these people who thinks Nikola Tesla was a god and worships him, nor do I buy into the inane conspiracy theories that have grown up around him, but I do admire his brilliance, and I have to say that this well-illustrated and sweetly-told story about his life is a great way to introduce children to an important inventor.

It begins with his interesting childhood (it starts at birth! Where else would a biography start?!), and covers his youth and his travels, and follows him to the USA where he really became a name to conjure with. It pulls no punches, either, not shying away from the sad parts of his life and the times where he was exploited by unscrupulous men. The thing was that he was so good at inventing things that he nearly always bounced back.

I enjoyed reading this and the only issue I had with it was the question of his digging ditches. Yes, it's true that for $2 a day he was forced to do this, which he accepted stoically until he could get back on his feet again, but whether those ditches were for Edison's cables or some other purpose is the issue I think it's folklore rather than authenticity which poetically has him do this for Edison's cables. Maybe it was, but I'm not convinced it was specifically for that. There were lots of other reasons for digging ditches back then.

But this is a minor thing that people can disagree about, and it takes nothing away from he overall power and charm of a story that I enjoyed and which I commend as a worthy read for young children.