Louann Brizedine - The Female Brain (2006)

 

One day, I was doing my usual pursuing of the Powell's technical books building. My girlfriend was selling clothes and I was disinterested in waiting in line with her. Floating around the physics books, I made my way over to the neurobiology section. Suddenly, my phone bleeped. Epinephrine flooded my body as I received the dreaded coup de grace text. I must pick a book now, or leave empty handed. There it was, with a little placard espousing its bestseller status.

Unfortunately, I found the text to be, frankly, unscientific in its wording and presentation. While the introduction was solid and laid a great opening framework for a scientific text, the actual meat and potatoes of the book felt like one long introduction, fraught with undue certainty when it came to its subject matter. I get it though, this is not a hardcore science book. Its a popular science book that is attempting to greatly simplify a vastly complex subject that is still an emerging field. The problem was in the way the simplification was achieved.

While the end of the book had a substantial number of references, individual scientific statements were made without individual citations or footnotes. This just makes me uneasy when reading a science book. How much of the statements are extrapolations of studies from the author? On what foundation is the author standing on? While I could check the back references for many statements, swaths of information did not have backing references.and statements were made that gave such certainty to their validity. While there is much we do understand about how neurotransmitters and different areas of the brain function, there is also a lot that we don't know and good science writers are adept at wording their books to reflect that.

The book forces a very dualistic viewpoint on male-female brain functions and focuses very little on the many ways that they are similar, to an absurd level. The functions of both testosterone and estrogen in the book are greatly simplified, when recent data has shown that both have more complex interactive functions in both male and female anatomy [1] [2]. Finally, at the end of the book, the author endorses acupuncture as a possible alternative to hormone therapy in postmenopausal women. As an aside, I'd also recommend foot rubs, but I wouldn't seriously suggest it in a scientific book about possible alternatives to hormone therapy.

With all its flaws, the best part of the book is the introduction. While its status as a scientific book should be questioned, the anecdotal stories of psychoanalytical tribulations by the author are, at least, entertaining and the book is written fluidly with an obviously unabashed dumbing down of its scientific content for a presumably unscientific audience. If you know anything about neurobiology, pass over this book.

Sources:
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-11/male-sex-drive-depends-on-both-estrogen-and-testosterone.html 
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/science/middle-aged-men-can-blame-estrogen-too.html?_r=0

Michael Specter - Denialism (2009)

Denialism, Wikipedia defines it as human behavior where individuals choose to deny reality as a way to deal with an uncomfortable truth. Science is the ever-growing body of knowledge which seeks to test and measure reality in the—thus far conceived—best possible way, the scientific method. It operates with emotionless impunity, stripping away bias and unrepeatable findings, until the best possible theory to explain observed natural phenomenon is reached by peer-review and consensus. Sometimes science gets corrupted by bias, capitalism, or any number of factors, and we can point to certain instances in history or current events where this is so (take tobacco safety for instance). Even with error, the method razors through, who do you think discovered the harm tobacco actually does, in the end? It certainly wasn't the science denialists or the alt-med quacks. It was the persistence, in the face of substantial corporate pressure, of scientists studying the effects of cigarettes on health and loudly protesting the consensus until it changed.

In Michael Specter's book, Denialism, he takes on several strains of anti-science thinking. Fear of science and critical thinking, the anti-vaccination movement, organic food myths and anti-GMO activism, nutritional supplements and homeopathy cures, and genetics in regards to racial ethnicity. Each topic is well argued with plenty of entertaining interviews, quips, and Specter's personal insights. I could write a lengthy article in agreement with each of these topics, but Specter covers each point quite well already in his book, which I of course highly recommend. This is a strong first book for a writer who's future work I highly anticipate.

Sam Harris - The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and The Future of Reason (2004)

I'm nominating this book as my top read of the month. I'll even throw it into the running for best book I've read all year, but its sharing some hard fought brain territory with several exceptionally written books. Also, keep in mind that the year is not entirely over. Before I start on praise, I'd like to briefly touch on the two points of contention I have with this book, just to clear the air, so to speak. First off, Sam Harris somewhat haphazardly criticizes Noam Chomsky and I will lay out my case later on in the review as to why I feel this way. It would probably be prudent to also mention—before spurious accusations of idolatry are leveled—that although I've read several of Chomsky's books, I do not believe he is above criticism. Actually, my complaint isn't with the specific charges that Harris levels at Chomsky, its the terse and somewhat superfluous nature of them. The other complaint is his moralistic rationalizing of torture. I will return to elaborate on these dissensions later, and now on to the praise.

Near the very beginning of the book, Harris begins to rend the idea of biblical literalism to shreds. This is an idea in American Christendom which has spiraled out of the realm of personal faith, invading public and political life in America. You cannot simply practice your faithful meditations, kneeling bedside with hands folded, you must accept a literal translation of the bible and not only that, you must intervene to save others from eternal hellfire. Harris' criticism of Christian faith is flawless, presenting new arrangements of arguments and rarely recycling others material (although he does call on Bertrand Russell with some frequency). He also excellently attacks the broad spectrum of "faith" or unjustified belief without evidence, again with superb argumentation.

A large portion of the book is dedicated to what Harris dubs "The Problem of Islam". He analyzes polling data from territories with high Muslim populations pertaining to suicide bombing. Indeed, the polling data shows an alarmingly high general acceptance of the practice which is undoubtedly cause for concern. Also, Harris extracts all of the excerpts from the Quran in which heretics, infidels, or non-believers are specifically ordered to be killed or punished which appallingly takes up nearly five-and-a-half pages. The most often leveled charge against the New Atheists (Are they even considered "new" anymore? One of them is dead.) and Sam Harris is often specifically accused of this, is "Islamophobia". Not only is the word a bit of a psychological misnomer, is it really Islamophobia when most of what Sam Harris is doing is analyzing/presenting polling data and quoting the Koran? I would argue strongly in the contrary.

The first issue I take with the book is the fleeting attack on Noam Chomsky. Rather than providing an overview on political belief and how it functions to cloud rational judgements (like in Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain) Harris singles out Chomsky's brand of leftist ideology and fleetingly takes a jab at him. He starts by tying this into his criticism of Islam. Commonly, leftist ideology takes the stance that Chomsky embraces, that the reason Muslims hate the United States is because of the United State's past foreign policy transgressions not because of the inherit positions that must be taken on a literal reading of the Quran. Although I partially agree with Harris, to summarily pass over the political history of the region is tantamount to a failure of analyzing the full picture. Regional politics is much more complicated than most people can imagine and you can't singly point to either Islam or political history then announce "See, there's your problem right there." The two are irrevocably tied together, interwoven, and doubtlessly there is a "Problem With Islam" in the region. To conclude, while Harris' critique of Chomsky compromises with acknowledgements of the factual basis of Chomsky's arguments, Harris also doesn't attempt to defend the U.S.'s past actions, and even concedes many of Chomsky's points, yet Harris wraps up his critique by accusing Chomsky of moral blindness. And while I partially agree (Chomsky focuses almost entirely on the United States, it's client state's histories, and their transgressions), Chomsky has written thousands of extremely well-researched pages (which itself is somewhat of an understatement) probing into the politics of the region and deserves more than three pages of criticism in order to launch a properly argued critique of his stances. In the end, all of this is entirely superfluous to the overall purpose of the book.

The second dissension to examine is Harris' justification of torture. He does this by a spectacular bit of moralistic reasoning. How can we reconcile our willingness to wage war with the use of torture? Slowly, (although this is accomplished second-hand, by using other people's arguments) he begins slipping down the long, upturned waterboard* slope towards embracing the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. This is a section which I encourage you to read for yourself and reading it again makes me doubt whether Sam Harris actually embraces the stance or is playing the moralistic "devil's advocate". In the end, he makes the very valid point that there is already scientific evidence that our ethical intuitions are driven by considerations of proximity and emotional perceptibility. Whats more, that these intuitions are fallible. While this quarrel perhaps appears nebulous by objective standards, it does seem to me that if Harris could possibly harbor ideas that State-endorsed torture of unproven, judicially invisible Muslims can be justified in certain situations I find the inclination rather ironic considering he was earlier accusing Chomsky of moral blindness.

Despite these two points, this book is a fantastic read and Harris makes several exceptionally impeccable arguments. Often, people want to read books with which they overall intuitively agree with. However, one of the reasons I've enjoyed this book so thoroughly is that I didn't entirely agree with it, I see the points of contention as almost boosts to my enjoyment of this book and there are a few smaller disagreements with which I've not tackled out of brevity. This work challenged me in a way which few atheist books do. In the end, books should confront your conventions and modes of thinking so that you can form new ideas which will shape your own world-view, its the challenging aspect which makes for excellent literature.

*I also encourage you to read Christopher Hitchens' account of being waterboarded which also appears in his collection of essays Arguably.

Marshall B. Rosenberg - Nonviolent Communication: A Langauge of Life (2003)

This book contains many useful general guidelines for understanding your own needs and properly communicating them to other people. It provides tools for increasing your empathy with other people by properly questioning them, to ascertain what their particular needs are. While I would recommend this book to people who have problems communicating, it is merely an unscientific overview of Rosenberg's own particular style of communication, which he has dubbed (I would say erroneously) Nonviolent Communication. There are no diatribes about why philosophical non-violence or pacifism should be adopted or what that exactly that means. My only working hypothesis so far is that he's named this communication style for its connotation. By naming it thus, he can have people with names like Arun Gandhi write introductions for him.

This book should be renamed Empathic Communication, so we're not drawn to any false associations. Further, this book is filled to the brim with anecdotes and very little references to psychological books. There's about two and half pages of bibliography and roughly half are not psychologically or scientifically based. There is a strong undercurrent of woo which never really overflows to the surface, with general references to "the soul" and "spiritual communion". Despite these flaws, I still found the read interesting enough to finish and even though I won't apply many of the principles in verbal communication I will still internally practice a few. I could see the use in recommending this book to people who have problems communicating their emotions.

Micheal Pollan - The Botany of Desire (2001)

Co-evolution is what has shaped modern agriculture, the mass cultivation of plants, animals, and fungus for human sustenance. Our domineering and self-important collective human psyche often puts us as the final arbiters, the Gods of the Garden, beholden only to our own whims. This book attempts to flip this paradigm on its head. We are not the Gods that possess complete domination over life, at least not yet. Nature ultimately is in control (though not an intentioned or conscious control), just as animals and plants in the wild are waging evolutionary warfare on each other - selecting for resistances to chemicals, building exoskeletons against predators, increasing running muscles in carnivorous predators, increasing eye-sight capabilities to see predators, continue ad infinitum - humans are in an unwitting war of desire on the plants we cultivate. We unconsciously and consciously select plants we find useful or desirable while the plants evolve the traits we want because the plants which cater to our needs are more successful, thus their genes are further propagated. The "Gods of the Garden" phrase gives way to the more accurate "Unwittingly Cooperative Caretakers of Plants" or perhaps something equally as awkward and verbose. Throughout the book, Pollan continually connects the assumed messianic paradigm with Greek polytheism, where Gods represented different facets of life. In a simple dichotomy, Pollan separates plants to appeal to Apollonian order or Dionysian frivolity.

Apples were introduced into North America by European colonists and part of what has made them so successful is their adaptability. Apples are examples of extreme "heterozygotes", rather than expressing the the DNA of their parents in a straightforward manner (with slight mutations), apples exhibit significantly different characteristics than their progenitors. Agriculturally, apples are grown exclusively through asexual grafting with sexual seed reproduction occurring only in wild apple trees. Currently, there are still a wide variety of cultivated apple breeds and this is due precisely to their extreme genetic variability. There are 7,500 different apple cultivars with around 25 varieties grown in commercial agriculture. Apple trees grown in a cloned orchard are more prone to disease than wild varieties due to their reduced genetic fitness.  Therefore, the work of staving off harmful fungus and other such maladies falls to us, the caretakers of our genetic creations. According to Pollan, our agricultural domestication of apples has gone too far. Reduced to a few handfuls of commercially cultivated cloned varieties, the natural genetic fitness of apples has been compromised. While our genetic clones are stuck in an evolutionary limbo--pests, fungus, bacteria, and insects are forever evolving and eventually, with the right combination of genes, they're going to win.

The tulip represents the ultimate quintessential flower. Simplicity, color, and beauty with an abstractness of emotions. Tulips are for kids, states Pollan, they are simple to draw and visually uncomplicated. They are the least Dionysian of flowers, their form being extremely ordered and perhaps their visual simplicity doesn't lead to overt passionate emotions. The "tulipomania" in Holland during the 1600s was a savage uprooting of the tulip's unemotional nature, people were willing to sell their homes for the mere promissory note of future tulips. As the market spiraled out of control, with tulips being sold for obscene prices, the most sought after prize was the "break"--tulips that had a streak of contrasting, passionate color across their uniformed simplicity. These broken tulips were rare and for unknown reasons at the time, created less progeny. In the 1920s, scientists discovered that broken tulips were caused by a virus which actually weakened the vitality of the plant. This throws natural selection against a brick wall, as humans were artificially selecting for a visual trait which actually made the plant sickly and diseased. From the point of view of the tulip, the human relationship was detrimental, but from the point of view of the aphids that spread the virus, this was pure evolutionary genius.

Marijuana represents the pure Dionysian plant. Visually ugly but contained within its flowers are powerful intoxicants. Human cultivators have morphed this highly adaptable weed into plants of pure delight, eliciting ever higher concentrations of THC content. With modern techniques, the marijuana plant can be forced to overproduce and does so quite willingly. Pollan describes his own misadventures with growing marijuana in his garden, from germinated seed to the eventual paranoid and frantic uprooting of his plants. Pollan then attempts to place an intoxicating plant in terms of evolution. How did THC first manifest? Pollan lays out his best theories (although since he is not an evolutionary botanist, his hypothesis seems perhaps half-baked) and tries to place the reasons for humans seeking out intoxication within an evolutionary context. Drugs can induce feelings of "transcendence" and Pollan begins to speculate (with some scientific backing) about the purpose of memory loss and normal functioning. Our brains are sensory input machines that are under constant assault from the outside and without a memory loss function, we would be quickly overwhelmed with our sensory memories. THC has been shown to effect short term memory quite substantially and endocannabinoids are produced naturally by the body which activate cannabinoid receptors in the brain. As far as what exactly that means, scientists are still unsure but cannabinoid receptors are similar in function to monoamine neurotransmitters (such as acetylcholine and dopamine) but vary in some respects.

The potato is, even more than the apple, proof of our strong influence over the evolution of plants. Wild potatoes are toxic, inedible, and without our evolutionary influence we would not be eating them. In the case of some potatoes, this control combined with modern technology enables us to force whatever evolutionary design we see fit in almost unimaginable ways. Pollan writes about his personal experiences with NewLeaf genetically modified potatoes by Monsanto. Engineered to be resistant to the Colorado beetle, Pollan's NewLeafs grew with fervor. He marveled at their perfection, their supreme triumph over nature. Removed from the market due to pressure from the anti-GMO lobby (mostly against McDonald's, one of the largest buyers of potatoes in the United States), Pollan expressed irrational fear against eating his modified potatoes. He left them sitting on his porch in a plastic bag, unable to be sliced for a conscious-free potato salad.

To provide my final thoughts, overall I felt like while being an entertaining read, this book is not a science book and it undoubtedly isn't intended to be. Though Pollan shows an understanding of evolution, he does a fair bit of simplification and speculation. I appreciate Pollan's ability to not blindly pander to the naturalistic fallacy. When he is critical of agricultural pesticides and GMOs he's not doing it in an unintelligent way--he provides evidence and counterpoints to his ideas. He seems like what a journalist should be, somehow in the middle of two opposing ideas: modern technological agriculture and pure organic agriculture, himself wrestling between the two (though he obviously leans towards pure organic). Our ideas of agriculture run between two diametrically opposed schools of thought. In my opinion, this is a false dichotomy. The way to solve our agricultural crisis lies somewhere in the middle of the two. I like to think that Pollan agrees with me.