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Random Reading Notes
Maynard-Smith's review Molecules are not enough (subscription required; I own the book collection of essays) is quite good. I think I enjoyed these three parts the most.
- Mayr on Maynard-Smith asking if Goldschmidt is a Marxist:
Only illiterate Anglo-Saxons have to get their dialectics from Marx and Engels: he and Goldschmidt had been raised on a diet of Hegel.
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Isadore Nabi on the Tendencies of Motion, which Maynard-Smith called "the only genuinely funny scientific article known to me" link.
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The very last quote,
... molecular euphora that has led many universities to shift biology to the study of the smallest units, dismissing population, organismic, evolutionary, and ecological studies as a form of 'stamp collecting' and allowing museum collections to be neglected...
- Great account of Darwin's writing style in Rewriting Nature, e.g.
Few documents are more fun to read than his notebooks of the eighteen-thirties, where his ideas about evolution are already alive, and you see his mind at work, unafraid. Plato, he writes, says in Phaedo “that our ‘necessary ideas’ arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience.—read monkeys for preexistence.” Read monkeys for preexistence. Metaphysics is instantly collapsed into biology.
- Richard Lewontin's New York Review of Books piece covers creationism, intelligent, and sociobiology in his lucid style.
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Carbon Capture by Jonathan Franzen is a remarkably excellent read.
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Red knots, a stunning migratory shorebird, is facing declining population sizes due to overharvesting of horseshow crabs (which provide calorie-rich eggs the migrating flocks of knots feed on).
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Franzen has also written terrific articles on the unrestricted hunting of migratory songbirds in the Mediterranean in a New Yorker piece and a National Geoegraphic piece. This lead to his involvement in a documentary of environmental activists entitled Emptying the Skies.
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John McPhee on Las Vegas's pleistocene "fossil water".
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Franzen's My Bird Problem is honestly one of the best articles I've ever read.