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Evolution

The Ringworld Engineers Book Review

The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven Del Rey (1980) 354 pages ISBN 0-345-26009-0 Alternative title: Louis Wu gets Busy While not quite the crowning achievement of Ringworld, this is a solid scifi book that explores the concept of human evolution, using the Ring to expand the space of possibilities. In

The Long View 2005-10-04: Marvin the Paranoid Android

In a major break from John, I really liked the movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and hated the book. My wife suggested the problem was that I tried to read it as an adult, and since the book is literally sophomoric, you really need

The Long View 2005-08-05: Police Powers; The Skeptical Assassin; The Ironies of ID; The Travelog Not To Be Described

The Aga Khan reportedly protested that the Assassin's Creed series falsified the history of his sect, the Nizaris. I am entirely sympathetic. But falsification may be more than the series is truly capable of, since it features an unusually insipid storyline. I am also sympathetic to John'

The Long View: The Lucifer Principle

This is a rare book I read before John recommended it. I think this is a worthy summary. The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History by Howard Bloom The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995 466 pp., $24.00 ISBN 0-87113-532-9 If, like the present reviewer, you are

The Long View 2005-02-01: The Origins of Bad Behavior

We should indeed be wary of Just-So Stories when it comes to the evolution of traits, but not exactly in the way John expresses here: The study itself, in fact, purports to find a correlation between the murder rates in primitive societies and the incidence of lefthandedness among their populations.

The Long View: After Darwin

One of John's best quotes is this: In 1914, when the century began to manifest its characteristic features, the guiding spirits of the time were Freud and Marx and Darwin and Einstein. In 1989, when in a political sense the 20th century was already over, the guiding spirits

A decline in science?

Greg Cochran continues to be one of my current favorite reads. I learned something entirely new to me, the breeder's equation, from his recent post of the same name. R = h2 S. R is the response to selection, S is the selection differential, and h2 is the narrow-sense