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Right before Thanksgiving I was in San Francisco for a friend’s wedding. Back when California was a sunny & exotic land I really enjoyed checking out the North Beach district of the city. Often this involved something as banal as swinging by City Lights, purchasing a book, and then reading a lot of it at a local coffee shop (usually Caffe Greco) Since I read Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, I was on the market for something covering Mesopotamia. So it wasn’t a surprise when I picked up Civilizations of Ancient Iraq at City Lights to pass the time between lunch and dinner.
Civilizations of Ancient Iraq is a rather thin and light-weight book. Nothing equivalent to Wilkinson’s attempt to distill dense scholarship into a form accessible to non-specialists. Rather, it almost reads like a primer for those interested in that part of the world after the late geopolitical events which the United States has gotten itself into. Nevertheless, it’s a nice refresher, since I haven’t read anything on this topic since A History of the Ancient Near East. The most interesting fact which always jumps out at me about this period and place is that the greatest geographical influence of ancient Iraq likely occurred before writing, ergo, before history. The archaeological record is clear that there were at least two relatively uniform cultures which expanded rapidly from Iraq, and pushed as far as Anatolia directly, and indirectly into Lower Egypt in at least one instance. The latter of these seems to have been centered around the great city of Uruk, the literal megalopolis of its age. With the authors of the book being somewhat archaeological in their focus they don’t probe in detail how this sort of phenomenon could have come to be, but it strikes me that one possibility is certainly that there were empire-scale polities before that of the Akkadians. We’ll never know definitively, but this is one area that a better consensus as to human nature could probably improve our sense of the prehistoric past in its broad likely outlines.
In relation to my recent op-ed in The New York Times (which at one point was the most emailed piece on the website, I have the screenshot to prove it!), Steve put up a nice link to it. I was expecting a few comments of the “Would not bang” genre, and of course they came up. Usually these are from people “butthurt” that I banned or verbally abused them. All I have to say to anonymous commenters on the internet who perceive themselves to be brilliant: you are an anonymous commenter on the internet, and I am not. Reality hurts. Sorry. The most trenchant critics of Cultural Marxist egalitarianism never reflect to consider they themselves may not be notable or worthy in all domains. The reason I’m mean to the unintelligent or uninformed commenters is that life is short and I get tired of having to filter that sort of stuff out, not that I enjoy being mean. As people who’ve met me in person can attest I enjoy being nice. But the plain fact of the matter is that some people have low memory hardware which can’t launch certain useful applications (the stupid), or, they haven’t bothered to install anything worthwhile to tackle the tasks which they have in their sights (the ignorant).
Finally, I’m reading Steven Pinker’s new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. I’ve gotten a lot of advice on how I should write in the 12 years I’ve been blogging. Most of it has been influenced by The Elements of Style. I haven’t paid much of it any attention because I think I’m doing rather well in terms of gaining some level of notice for my writing despite not being a self-conscious writer all these years. And second, it always seemed weird to me that maxims spouted by Strunk & White really were somehow written in stone. So far Pinker has quickly refuted slavish adherence to The Elements of Style as being somehow meritorious, particular because Strunk & White themselves don’t adhere to their own style when making the case for it! But he’s also making it clear why a lot of the “Post-Modernist” style of prose strikes as bad on the face of it. Definitely enjoying it so far, though I don’t know if it will change how I write. But likely it will at least make me a bit more self-reflective, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I shifted things on the margin. We’ll see.
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You might be interested in N. M. Gwynne’s “Gwynne’s Grammar” (Knopf 2014), available from Amazon.
So with the latest Jurassic park movie trailer out, it got me thinking about mammoth cloning. Apparently they think that the mammoth carcass with pools of frozen blood might be a good sample of DNA. One article I read mentioned them possibly being able to compare hemoglobin from the carcass to mammoth hemoglobin that had been artificially synthesized with bacteria. I always thought the Jurassic park movies had a stupid moral ( don’t try to progress science because…chaos theory?). Since a mammoth would require a surrogate mother and cross species pregnancies haven’t seemed to work well in other cases (see Asian gaur), I think there may be some merit to ethical complaints about the safety of the elephant mother. Then again, we do weird stuff to animals all the time in the name of science, but elephants are endangered an whatnot. I’m curious, where do youstand normatively with regards to mammoth cloning?.
Off topic, a hypothetical question about human ethnic groups.
Imagine in the future: a United Nations sponsored spaceship has decided to send a massive spaceship to the nearest habitable planet.
Being the UN, they want to send a representative sample of humanity. They want to send 1000 people, who would precisely represent the current human ethnic diversity on Earth. What would be the most scientific and accurate method of choosing who would be on the spaceship? If, for instance, analysis of DNA played a part, how would the chosen be chosen?
it’s an open thread, office topic is encouraged. depends on what you mean by ‘diversity.’ if it’s genetic, then african pops, and especially HG groups, have lots of that (looking at WGS). get a few non-africans from different antipodes (e.g., brits, oceanians, amerindians, japanese), and perhaps you’re good. if you want cultural diversity, then different obviously.
Cameron Carpenter
You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Cameron Carpenter. In the video you’ll see a lot about Cameron Carpenter: Cameron Carpenter’s giant Mercedes, Cameron Carpenter’s Star Trek sunglasses, Cameron Carpenter’s shaved torso…even Cameron Carpenter’s organ. You’ll notice that Cameron Carpenter likes Cameron Carpenter a lot. Also: Cameron Carpenter.
Razib, I noticed on your goodreads that The Bell Curve is one of the few books you’ve given five stars. I’ve never seen you mention it on the blog, but given that it’s now 20 years old, could you tell us some of your thoughts about the book and how its arguments have held up over time?
#6, i think the trend toward gains in income to those with skills (or at least less erosion) since 1970 confirms the contention that we’re seeing a world of greater self-sorting and cognitive stratification. human inequality has a lot of different variables (e.g., family resources, looks, disposition, and perhaps very importantly, luck). but i think intelligence is clearly a major one, if not the only or preponderant one.
What’s the best overall introduction to evolutionary theory? Would you recommend just starting with Origin of Species?
sure, origin is good. but do read something more contemporary. i guess mark ridley’s *evolution*. also, if you want texts, futuyma’s one is decent. that’s the only evolution text as such i’ve read (though i like maynard smith’s *evolutionary genetics* a great deal).
Razib,
I just wish you would scale back on the use of the word “stochastic” at those times when the word “random” would suffice.
I’ve been reading Pinker’s style book concurrently with some other stuff. I figured if anyone could make through-reading a writing stylebook interesting it’d be Steven Pinker and I haven’t been disappointed. My one complaint is that he uses passages from his wife’s writings extensively as examples. No harm in it really – he wrote the book and I didn’t – but no other author would have scanned the canon of literature for a lead example and settled on…Rebecca Goldstein. It just doesn’t help dispel the reputation of academia as a closed network of insiders.
Mostly I think good writing is a combination of talent and practice. There’s a few heuristics that are helpful at improving if you’re already writing a lot, but Pinker does a good job of showing where they come from and why they don’t always work.
#10 I’ll try
My cell biology professor liked stochastic as well. I think it has a bit more illustrative gravitas in a scientific context. In normal life, random seems to have a connotation of something done without thought, kinda like its shoddy. Stochastic succinctly implies the mathematical aspect without the negative baggage in the layman’s mind. Biological phenomena are the results of “random” occurrences (I.e. an individual enzyme finding its substrate in solution) but as the complexity of an organ or organism can attest, they ain’t shoddy. Random also seems to confuse people with regards to natural selection. Look at the critics of natural selection from back in Darwin’s day. It’s the random aspect that “strained their credulity (John Herschel called it the “law of higgledy piggledy). That’s why I like it when science writers avoid certain words with layman’s baggage. It puts readera in a better frame of reference.
City Lights is one of the few places that carry the journal Telos, and for that very idiosyncratic reason it’s a pretty sweet spot. Their anarchism section is cool too, and their categorization schema generally. If they were staffed by even a couple of Neoreactionary types (ain’t gonna happen, except on the DL) I could imagine their taxonomy expanding beyond “Green Anarchism” to “Revolutionary Conservatism.”
Wouldn’t that be something…
Could you recommend any book on the ancient Near East/Middle East? I am looking for something similar to Cunliffes “Europe Between The Oceans”, but for the Near East, and also including Egypt if possible. It should be authoritative but also interesting to read, not to much Academic textbook-like. And wide in coverage. Is a “A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 – 323 BC” by Marc Van De Mieroop good, or is too hard to digest? Combined with “The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt” maybe? Any other suggestions?
#15, both those are good. do it.
I agree that using stochastic too much isn’t that good, but the problem is that “random” has become too prevalent in common usage i.e. “that’s so random”.
Interesting, Razib. Would you recommend any reading at least vestigially related to TBC & it’s applicability, or vindication, even ,to the modern day?