Review: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

I went into this book unaware of what awaited me, and I was caught off-guard. It is an unusually structured book, and sails through history and historical personages at a brisk knot, and it took a while for me to find my sea legs.

The book begins with a three chapter preface, which makes up the first two fifths of the book. Labatut threads together 20th century inventions and discoveries: cyanide, black holes, algebraic proofs. Inventors and inventions both find themselves deployed in wars. Science and society are inextricably linked: developments in one shape the outcomes of the other. Both are driven by individuals, but advance on a scale so immense and interconnected that no one individual can turn the tides. Labatut’s stories are a mesmerizing blend of fact and fantasy, and it’s not always clear what is true, what is disputed, and what is fully invented.

The main section of the book continues in tone, focusing in particular on Schrodinger, Heisenberg, De Broglie, as they investigate the nature of matter and light. These hallowed figures find themselves caught up in madness, despair, sexual deviancy, mysticism, and spiteful feuds as they grapple with the biggest questions of physics and ramifications of their answers.

The final tenth of the book is a 5-part essay titled The Night Gardener. It echoes the themes and motifs of the preceding pages, but now without the giants of 20th century science: suicide, poison, fascists, the misuse of science in society, the struggle for individuals to shape society, society’s likely impending doom.

Negative reviews of this book point at its rehashing of tired science tropes: the lone genius driven mad by his discovery, oblivious to social norms and lacking in emotional awareness. Women enter the pages only to be objects of sexual desire. The author revels in the popular aesthetics of science — frantic midnight scribblings covering reams of paper, dramatic postulations at a lecture stand — more than shedding light on the experience of actually doing science. 

While these critiques are well-founded, it would be a shame to entirely dismiss the book on these grounds. Although the narrative revolves around science, the emotional aspects explored are not unique to science. What do you do when you cease to understand your world, when what you thought you knew is unveiled to be an illusion? Perhaps you’ve discovered your government aids a genocide, or someone dear to you breaks your trust. Do you withdraw into yourself? Abandon everything or end your life? Throw yourself back in with everything you have, and keep fighting? What is it like to feel torn between ambitions of greatness and feelings of uselessness? How do you come to terms with the fruits of your creative labour dispersing into the wild to be used and transformed beyond your intentions, out of your control? Labatut repeats these refrains in different keys and different voices. His unusual storytelling makes for a thought-provoking read with more to offer than a summary might suggest.

Review: The Knowledge Economy and Socialism by Agustín Lage Dávila

Our current age is remarkable for the rapidity with which knowledge is produced and integrated into products. New technology, like CRISPR or LLMs, explode onto the scene and change the game in such a way that news and technology from 6 months prior is already out of date. A company’s competitiveness hinges on how fast they can produce, respond to, and apply knowledge. Capitalist competition on this battlefield has led to the increasing privatization of knowledge, such as through institutions like patents. For most of human history, science played a liberating role in helping humans meet their needs and overcome the challenges of nature. Under capitalism, scientific output is increasingly commodified. What does an alternative model for the role of science in society look like?

Agustín Lage Dávila is a Cuban immunologist who played a leading role in developing Cuba’s remarkable biotechnology sector. In this series of essays written between 1994 and 2013, Lage Dávila reflects on the role science plays in society, and the way Cuban leaders used their understanding of economics and science to create a successful biotech hub in the unlikely soils of an underdeveloped and heavily embargoed country.

One of Lage Dávila’s insights is that the Cuban high-tech sector benefited from a highly educated populace, in contrast with mainstream approaches to development that prioritize development goals over educational excellence. For Cuba, success in exportable high-tech goods is a matter of survival: it is a small island and so its market is too small to support the production of specialized goods nor is its labour market able to transform into a major manufacturing hub (like China’s approach). It is also poor in natural resources, and so its ability to trade for the things it needs necessarily comes from the export of high value-add products, like its vaccines and cancer drugs. 

Lage Dávila contrasts the path Cuba took with capitalist approaches to the knowledge economy, as well as to approaches taken by other socialist states, particularly the USSR and China. Some of his observations are a little dated: in particular, China’s world leadership in science and technology has only emerged in the last few years. Cuba has also struggled in recent years due to the US’s devastating illegal sanctions. Due to this book's origins as a series of individually published essays, it also becomes somewhat repetitive. Still, his account is clear-sighted and thoughtful, and as a scientist, I found it incredibly applicable to understanding my own role in society.

Review: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Philosophical beats repeat throughout history. Christian Thorne’s The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment traces anti-foundationalism from the Ancient Greeks through the modern era, and acts as a vaccine against such thought. Having read this work, I recognize it easily, and I can send out my metaphorical T cells to fight it.

J.S. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man plays a similar role against race science, tracing the bad philosophy and bad science to uphold the imperialist and racist status quo through a few hundred years. Indeed, his first edition (1981) anticipates the 1994 version of mismeasuring man, The Bell Curve. Gould highlights the factors that make this train of thought return to prominence: the need to justify cutbacks in social resources or explain increasing inequality by means of anything but social policy (“they deserve their fate, they’re just not smart enough to compete”). I think we will have many more years of such worsening social outcomes, so it’s a good vaccine to take.

Gould’s examination of some of the key figures and concepts of scientific racism (Broca, Goddard, Spearman's g, etc.) reveals a number of patterns. For example, data confirming a hypothesis is easily accepted and poorly scrutinized (Gould re-analyzes the raw data for several flawed but influential studies). In contrast, data showing the role of environment over genetics are tortured or waved away with absurd explanations like “intelligent Blacks move to where living conditions are better.” Politically or socially convenient findings are accepted and applied, despite pushback from contemporary critical scientists. Experimental protocols are poorly designed and often not followed.

Gould writes like a scientist (he was a professor at Harvard), for better or for worse. He is precise, cautious, meticulous, thorough. But he writes like a scientist with political convictions, who knows his work matters, who recognizes a personal stake in communicating the message. His presence throughout the book emphasizes this, such as his experience with a son with learning disabilities and how testing in education played a positive role in this case. Anticipating criticisms of bias, he cautions the reader not to conflate neutrality and objectivity: 

It is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice.

Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. Moreover, one needs to understand and acknowledge inevitable preferences in order to know their influence—so that fair treatment of data and argument can be attained! No conceit could be worse than a belief in one’s own intrinsic objectivity, no prescription more suited to the exposure of fools. 

It’s a work that bridges science, philosophy, history and politics in a way I found very satisfying, and still very important to the questions of today.

Review: The Dialectical Biologist By Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin

Although it is possible to receive a Doctor of Philosophy in a field like biology without taking a single post-secondary philosophy course, I don’t think it should be. Through practice, biology can teach you how to think, but I don’t think it teaches you how to think about how you think. Philosophy helps you step outside your thought patterns and examine assumptions or limitations you didn’t realize you were making. 

The essays in this book take as their target scientists who are correct in applying their craft — at least by conventional standards of logic and statistics — but nonetheless draw incorrect conclusions. These vary from incorrect models of evolution (e.g., one-way adaptation of creatures to their environment instead of a dynamic relationship between creature and environment), to deductions of processes that fail to consider the contingency of an observed relationship, to the chauvinism of expecting a western model of science to be universally optimal.

This anthology is now several decades old and biology has necessarily abandoned some of its insistence on what the authors term Cartesian science — a reductionist approach that fails to account for mutual interdependence, interconnectivity, and change. My own PhD research examined some of this: how do certain relationships change while other environmental variables are also in flux? In trying to navigate such a problem, I found myself becoming more fluent in dialectical materialism, although I didn’t know the term for it. 

Although biology has progressed, Cartesian reductionism remains prevalent. I find myself butting up against it often when I try to communicate the work I do. The essays felt cathartic to read: here, too, were other scientists fighting the same fights I fight (particularly chapter 4).

Because this book is a collection of essays not intended to be read together, the essays sometimes repeat metaphors or examples or concepts. An abridged reading of my favourite chapters that retains the sweeping scope and remains feeling fresh and pertinent would be the Introduction, followed by chapters 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13 and the Conclusion.

Review: Conspirituality by Julian Walker, Matthew Remski and Derek Beres

There's a banger of a long-form essay somewhere here. Unfortunately, in book form, the argument felt a bit padded.

This book examines a fascinating phenomenon that came to a head in 2020-2021 at the height of the COVID pandemic: the surprising affinity between far-right/fascist politics and the health and wellness industry. As the authors point out, this is not a novel phenomenon; the story of yoga's westernization is one of colonial anxiety about racial decline, while the history of eugenics has long married a health-conscious striving for purity with racism and reactionary politics.

So at the start of the modern yoga movement (...) we have a bizarre colonial collision. Europeans, afraid of racial decline as the borders of empire became porous through global trade and increased long-haul travel, concocted an exercise ideology to defend and restore the once-proud national body against corruption. Indian modernizers grabbed hold of this strongman aesthetic, mingled it with Scandinavian gymnastics, and then consecrated it with yoga exercises reconstructed from the medieval period. They faced east to salute the sun and sculpt a new national body, purged of foreign influences and colonial shame, a body that can carry a torch of ancient wisdom onto the modern global stage.

By 2020, the health and wellness industry had evolved into a network of small businesses, magazines, multi-level marketing corporations, and social media influencers. Facing rising rents and the cut-throat competition of capitalism, those who were able to earn a living in this sphere often found themselves needing to combine many aspects of these industries. Yoga studios discovered class fees were insufficient for making rent and so sold yoga instructor classes (a sort of MLM scheme) and essential oils (often via MLMs) and became instagram influencers. The philosophy of the wellness industry aligns perfectly with capitalism: you alone are responsible for your own health; your choices (and purchases) and hard work can lead you to success.

COVID was a perfect disaster to radicalize this group of people. On the one hand, (necessary and reasonable) restrictions against gathering in person prevented many of these businesses from operating. On the other hand, the individualistic approaches of the wellness industry were particularly ill-suited to combat health issues that required entire communities to act in unison to protect their most vulnerable. The wellness community was already primed to be skeptical of the medical community; vaccine skepticism was already high and herbal solutions and other such remedies were often preferred over clinically proved treatments. This group found a natural political ally with another group with similar distrust in collective solutions over individual rights, fury at government-mandated limits to in-person business operation, and skepticism over institutional health guidelines: the alt-right.

The authors explore how both extreme political parties and wellness industry proponents show overlap with cults. Members of these groups similarly dismiss evidence that does not fit within their worldview (using distrust of institutions, etc, to do so) and burn relationships with people that resist their beliefs. At least one of the authors was a survivor of a cult, and recognized many common patterns of the alt-right and wellness community rhetoric in their own experiences.

One of the strengths of this book was its empathy for all parties involved. The frantic communications from the government in the early days of the pandemic were confusing and contradictory, if understandable. The medical community has behaved in ways that corrode trust: events like the Tuskegee Syphilis trial are a stain upon our professsion, while at the individual level, busy doctors often dismiss patient concerns or fail to treat them like holistic human beings. Those who care for people that have become wept into proto-fascist politics have to find a line somewhere that allows them to maintain a relationship with those they love without being enablers themselves.

The authors don't quite have the answers for solving this problem, but because it is so multi-faceted it is a really hard nut to crack. Improve scientific literacy (and that includes not just pointing to peer reviewed articles as the arbiter of All Things True), integration of health within community networks in ways not mediated by money, regaining of trust between institutions and people. How do we get there in a way that doesn't further provoke the frustrations of people upset at government overreach?

Review: Maladies of Empire by Jim Downs

Maladies of Empire tells the usually-untold story of how epidemiological and medical advances were made directly as a result of the institutional aspects of colonialism. The “told” story usually includes Onesimus, an enslaved man who told his master, an 18th century New England priest by the name of Cotton Mather, about the practice of inoculation against smallpox using exposure to a small quantity of the virus to prevent a more severe, systemic infection. Mather tested this process on some 250 enslaved people and eventually his own son, convincing the aggressively skeptical medical establishment of the validity of this Black “folk” wisdom. Good discussion of this episode in history is usually limited to the ethicality of experimentation on enslaved people (see Medical Apartheid). But there’s sort of a comforting aspect to this narrative too: Onesimus was a relatively well-treated slave, and that his master listened to him and learned from his cultural traditions plays into the story the Anglo empire likes to tell that cultural mixing was beneficial for itself and all the civilizations it conquered.

Where Maladies of Empire goes beyond this is to document how the very processes through which the British Empire colonized much of the world also enabled the medical field to understand the spread of diseases. The story starts with slave ships:market forces drove slavers to keep costs down as much as possible without hurting the sale price of their human wares. This captive population was carefully documented and experimented upon, and from here, the medical establishment learned about the minimum fruit or vegetable intake required to stave off scurvy.

The mechanisms of the spread of infectious disease, however, necessitated the aggregation of records from across the world. Who was living where? Where did these ship passengers come from? Where did they go? After how many days did symptoms start? The meticulous records through which the British Empire tracked their ships and military and subjects allowed medical doctors to track the spread of yellow fever and cholera. For the first time, scientists were analyzing data that others had collected, possibly from the other side of the globe. 

The birth of epidemiology is therefore also, in a sense, the birth of data science, and the dark sides of data science were present from the start. The individual names and stories of the people who contributed the data — often racialized or institutionalized or poor — are lost to the sands of time, while the knowledge gleaned from their data goes on to benefit the wealthy and white. Downs’ story-telling is up for a challenge: how do you bear witness to these lost narratives and humanize the individual subjects whose suffering taught us how to cure or prevent disease, without getting mired in details? I don’t think the result is fully successful — there were some episodes where I felt the main themes became a little lost in the weeds of names and locations. But the work is excellent for understanding how intimately linked the development of science was with imperialism.

We see similar beats today: the bureaucracy of institutionalized people supports medical advances. For example, the link between the Epstein-Barr virus and Multiple Sclerosis was shown quite definitively only because of the mandatory monitoring and testing of American military recruits (themselves an imperializing force).

Downs contrasts the racism of the British Empire in the 19th century with that of the United States. In general, the British were certainly white supremacist, but more accepting of belief systems that allowed for similarities between races. For example, see Florence Nightingale and some of her peers’ views of racial differences in disease susceptibility:

Although Florence Nightingale believed in racial difference, regarding the English as the finest race on the planet, she did not use race as an explanation for the spread of cholera or other infectious diseases. Even after germ theory became widely accepted, she insisted that unsanitary environments led to disease. She did not believe that the source of disease transmission could be found in innate characteristics of the patient (...). Similarly, while Gavin Milroy and other doctors working in the Caribbean certainly harboured racist beliefs, they too searched for the cause of disease in the natural and built environment. Milroy condemned Black people’s living conditions and blamed their high rate of illness on their failure to maintain clean homes, but he did not focus on racial difference as the cause of disease spread.

Because their economic system depended on enslavement (and later, subjugation and segregation) of the Black race, American doctors approached medicine quite differently, and sought to reify the impact of race in health. The answer to “why is disease more prevalent in slaves?” could not be that they were oppressed, and forced into terrible living conditions, since that was a threat to the social order:

Many doctors in other parts of the world were turning to the physical world and the built environment to understand how disease spread; they observed symptoms in a patient and then turned outward to housing, sewers, drainage, and crowded conditions to understand why patients were sick. USSC surgeons did the opposite. They turned inward to the patient, trying to find the answer to the illness within or on their body. While they considered the natural or built environment, they emphasized racial identity as the cause. 

This approach had a long-lasting impact on the medical establishment: while slavery ended with the Civil War, “the USSC resurrected slave-holding ideologies to amplify racial difference and to contribute to medical knowledge.” These were not the first scientists to seek to justify their pre-existing beliefs with “evidence” and refuse to consider alternative explanations, and they were certainly not the last.

A challenge with books of this sort is where they stop. The British Empire is no more, but the world is still scarred by imperialism. Science has developed into a far more robust practice, but is still often racist, and the fruits of its research are unequally distributed. The author set out to tackle this topic for a reason, and I would imagine it is because he saw similarities between this part of history and our world today. If so, I agree, and I have highlighted some of these themes above. But Downs never goes so far as to explicitly draw out the link, to comment on practices of the twentieth century and beyond. I suppose it is the careful conservative nature of most academics, who don’t dare step outside their field of expertise — but that just leaves me, with my considerably smaller extent of expertise, to apply what I’ve learned on my own.

Review: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans De Waal

Human chauvinism drives a never-ending search to identify What Makes Us Different From Animals. Frans De Waal takes us through the history of the field of animal cognition and shows how each hypothesis (empathy, speech, forward planning, use of tools, etc) has been experimentally falsified, requiring changes to our understanding of cognition. Louis Leakey perhaps put it best, describing the failure of the tool hypothesis to distinguish man and beast:

I feel that scientists holding to this definition are faced with three choices: They must accept chimpanzees are man, they must redefine man, or they must redefine tools.

In some ways, this history reminded me a little of the search to identify the fundamental differences between human races. White scientists and philosophers posited explanations like climate or skull shape to explain why their race was cognitively superior, turning from explanation to explanation as their former hypotheses proved inadequate. 

Of course, while there are no cognitive differences between races, there are cognitive differences between bats and humans and octopuses. As De Waal points out, we have to study the way animals use their cognitive abilities to solve the types of problems they encounter in their typical habitats, and stop thinking of cognition as something that can be mapped along a single axis, or that all types of learning follow similar mechanisms. Instead, a better question to ask is, what are the cognitive strengths of an animal, and how does it relate to their survival? 

I liked the example of the kittiwake birds. This species of gull nests in remote, difficult to reach locations. Because of these locations, their nests are rarely under attack nor otherwise visited by other birds. In experiments, kittiwake birds were found to not be able to distinguish between their own young, and chicks from other nests. This absence of individual recognition makes sense given the challenges kittiwakes face in their habitats: fledglings stay in their original nests, so why would a kittiwake need to tell the difference between strange chicks and their own? Similarly, humans largely operate in locations with light, are visual creatures, and thus have no need for echolocation.

I also liked the example of the rats that learned to avoid a substance from a single incident of induced vomiting, when the vomiting occurred long after the substance was eaten — seemingly in defiance of the theory that stimulus/reward cycles needed to be closely associated in time to result in learning. This, too, makes sense in the evolutionary context: while physical manipulation of ones environment (either a lever, or some more naturally occurring obstruction) to obtain food typically occurs with minimal delay, indigestion has a lag.

As a former experimental biologist, I also appreciated the emphasis on study design. The field's (mis-) selection of controls, metrics, and other experimental conditions have often produced inaccurate pictures of animal cognition. For example, chimp/toddler comparisons are often executed in settings where chimpanzees are isolated from members of their species, interacting with straight-faced scientists, while toddlers are held by their parents and in the presence of other humans, and receive encouraging words, etc, from those who study them. Under which conditions do you think you'd perform better?

I thought there could have been a little more structure to the book, or perhaps it could have been a little shorter. By the end, it felt rather repetitive: the same themes I've highlighted above, over and over but with different animals. Still it was an enjoyable read (there are worse ways to pad a book than with interesting stories about dolphins and elephants), and the material covered strongly supports a dialectical materialist approach to biology.

Review: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

It's difficult to step outside your own worldview and see what parts of your thoughts or behaviors or relationships are universal to the human experience, and in what ways they are shaped by the general philosophy and economic system around you. I think Braiding Sweetgrass does a good job at introducing you to indigenous philosophy, and highlighting how the relationships between humans and the Earth differ in this worldview from the liberal capitalist worldview dominant in settler countries. 

An example of this that I found particularly poignant is that of the creation myth. In the story of Turtle Island, the first human, Skywoman, falls to earth and she is supported and kept alive by the animals of earth. In turn, she brings seeds to fill the earth with grasses and flowers and medicines, which nourish the animals. This creation myth is one of community and reciprocity. In contrast, in the Christian myth, humans are created with dominion over animals and plants, then exiled from Eden when they consume the fruit of knowledge. This creation myth is one of humans elevated in status and power over plants and animals, rootlessly separated from their homes, burdened by sin. The stories we tell shape our views of our responsibilities to the earth and to each other. Our philosophy, in turn, shapes our practice. 

However, Kimmerer speaks with a foot in each philosophy, seemingly not realizing the ways in which her view of her responsibility to the world is still shaped by that of Eve. For example, in Collateral Damage, she describes her helping of salamanders migrate across the road as an act of repentance of sin (emphasis mine):

I can't stop bombs from falling and I can't stop cars from speeding down this road. It is beyond my power. But I can pick up salamanders. For one night, I want to clear my name. What is it that draws us to this lonely hollow? Maybe it is love, the same thing that draws the salamanders from under their logs. Or maybe we walked this road tonight in search of absolution.

The idea of addressing the wounds humans have made and continue to inflict on the world is repeatedly described in individualistic terms, and the solutions proposed are limited to measures that fit within liberalism and capitalism. "[I]t can be too easy to shift the burden of responsibility to the coal company or the land developers. What about me, the one who buys what they sell, who is complicit in the dishonorable harvest?" Kimmerer asks. She further suggests that the solution to the horrors caused by the market economy can be solved using the instruments of the market economy: "We can use our dollars as the indirect currency of reciprocity." In "Maple Nation: A Citizenship Guide", which discusses how legislative progress is hampered by people complaining about paying too many taxes, the sole solution proposed to address climate change is a carbon tax. She has a tendency to sneer at her students or neighbours who do not have a reciprocal or sacred relationship with the earth, without asking why (other than ignorance) they might not have adopted a better worldview. 

There is in the very last chapter, however, a hint of a bigger picture for how a healthier society could be organized, and I wish she had developed it in more detail:

What is the alternative? And how do we get there? I don't know for certain, but I believe the answer is contained within our teachings of "One Bowl and One Spoon", which holds that the gifts of the earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared from a single spoon. This is the vision of the economy of the commons, wherein resources fundamental to our well-being, like water and land and forests, are commonly held rather than commodified. (...) These contemporary economic alternatives strongly echo the indigenous worldview in which the earth exists not as private property but as a commons, to be tended with respect and reciprocity for the benefit of all.

And yet, while creating an alternative to destruction economic structures is imperative, it is not enough. It is not just changes in policies that we need but also changes to the heart.

Braiding Sweetgrass particularly examines the relationship between the accumulation of knowledge, i.e., science, in indigenous cultures versus that of settler cultures. The recurring theme is one of western science rejecting the methods and findings of indigenous science until the data has been collected and presented according to western norms and shoved in the face of western scientists until the truths can no longer be denied. I think it's an important point to communicate: our ability to understand our world and develop technology is hindered by limited views of science, and by our prejudice. However, I would have liked to see a little more synthesis. Indigenous philosophies are presented as static, unchanging over the last few centuries despite seismic shifts in society and technology in that time frame. We have seen how settler science should have listened to indigenous science and revised itself given this information. How do indigenous philosophies change and update themselves in response to new scientific discoveries, or social changes? 

There's a lot of looking backwards in this book. What does indigenous science and indigenous philosophy see in the road ahead?

Review: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science by Helena Sheehan

It’s possible to study deeply in biology, to get a doctorate of philosophy in biology, without taking a single class in philosophy, let alone the philosophy of science. (The one philosophy class I took in my eleven years of post-secondary education, I took purely electively!) Concepts like evolution and genetics are (rightly) taught from a young age. Phenomena like the wave-particle duality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle you learn a little later. All these concepts are taught in a “and here’s what this means for biology/physics” sense, and not connected to a broader picture of how this impacted our understanding of knowledge and our relation to the world. For the most part, scientists approach their craft with an unexamined and eclectic form of positivism. It’s a worldview that doesn’t lend itself well to moving from genes to organisms to societies to history. Or, as Marx puts it:

The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality. (Capital, Vol 1)

Perhaps because of an awareness of these failings, many scientists shrug their shoulders and remain narrowly focused in their domain. We then continue to teach our craft as distinct threads of development. Sure, maybe advances in physics help advance our understanding, like using X-ray crystallography to deduce the structure of the basic macromolecules of life, but we don’t integrate these discoveries into a unified understanding. And so the next generation of unexamining eclectic positivists is born.

The stakes for failing to come up with a cohesive grand narrative of the world are high. We become materialists within the bounds of our own specialties, but stray into idealism, postmodernism, nihilism in our politics. Such a scientist might say “we tested fifty undergraduate students in a lab, and they all tried to maximize the amount of money they were rewarded in a game. From this, we can conclude that capitalism is the natural state of humanity, and any fight for a better system is futile.” A scientist with a unified theory of the world, one that recognizes we are shaped by our environments and that we shape our environments, and that the world is constantly changing, would conclude instead that this experiment demonstrates nothing more that in capitalism, our current economic mode, individuals are incentivized to maximize their capital.

Like fish might not remark on the water they swim through (I am not a fish psychologist), it’s difficult to step outside the philosophy you hold of the world (however eclectic it might be). One way to do so is to understand the history of philosophy of science, particularly the cataclysmic effect discoveries like evolution and quantum physics had on thinking in the nineteenth century. Rather than keeping these concepts in tidy separate boxes of thought labeled “biology” and “physics”, thinkers of the time reeled as they tried to fit these revelations of the earth as constantly changing and limited in its determinism with their prior conceptions of the world being composed of objects with unchanging essences requiring external impulses to bring them into movement.

To understand these debates, and the many philosophical pitfalls scientists and philosophers fell into (and continue to fall into!) when trying to deal with these contradictions, Helena Sheehan’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Science is a worthwhile read. She starts with how Marx and Engels translated Hegel’s dialectics into a unified understanding of the world, examining how dialectics describes not only history but also the natural sciences, as laid out in Engels' Dialectics of Nature. She traces the philosophy of science through the idealism versus materialism debates in the latter half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century as philosophers responded to the crises of science (Heisenberg uncertainty principle, relativity, evolution, sub-atomic particles), ending in the mid-twentieth century at the end of the Comintern and start of the Khrushchev era of the USSR. It's a sweeping survey of perhaps a hundred different thinkers, covering the origins, strengths and muddled parts of their theories. 

I saw my own experiences reflected in the biographies of scientists like Haldane and Bernal, who began studying Marxism as fully-trained, practicing scientists and found in dialectical materialism a better way of understanding their own field of expertise, as well as the world around them. 

On the other hand, I found the blind spots of Sheehan's narrative to be frustrating, to the point that I began to lose confidence in the areas she discussed in which I did not already feel reasonably well versed. The strength of her account was, I thought, the first three chapters, which focused on Marx, Engels, and the philosophy of science up until around 1917. Amply quoting her sources, she demonstrates the fool's errand of trying to "rescue" Marx from Engels or from Lenin. She also traces how philosophical differences (or ambiguity) towards science and materialism devolve to political differences (eg, Kautsky versus Lenin).

The fourth and fifth chapters, which made up well over half the book, were more flawed. The fourth chapter is a slow, 80-page build-up to how Lysenkoism took hold in the USSR in the late 1930s and 1940s. Sheehan approaches the political and geopolitical context of the 1920s-1940s USSR with surprisingly little historical context, positioning Stalin and Lysenko both as leaders who know how to dazzle people but are self-centered and power-hungry in any strategic thinking they manage to stumble into, rather than leaders dealing with high stakes decisions in low resource environments with fascists threatening to invade. Where her discussion of philosophical positions is generally very well-cited, historical occurrences are stated with few sources, complicating my efforts to learn more about the subjects at hand.

The fifth chapter, which surveyed the development of philosophical thought from 1920-1950ish, was disproportionate in both length (some 180 pages) and emphasis, which was overly focused on the works of British thinkers of the time (100+ pages, of which 40 pages were Christopher Caudwell alone). The works of French and German scholars was quickly summarized in a half dozen pages each, and a smattering of paragraphs were devoted to the US and Yugoslavia. There was a complete absence of discussion of thought in China, Africa, the Caribbean, and other parts of the global south. Every scientist was assessed according to their critique of Lysenkoism; those who wrote against him were correct and brave, while those who did not critique his ideas (Bernal) or who were open to some form of environmentally determined inheritance (Haldane) were naive or uninformed or, despite their perspicacity in other spheres of thinking, not able to "realize the gravity" of philosophical debates.

Despite these flaws, as a scientist, I found this to be a valuable read for better understanding Marxism, Philosophy, and Science. The footnotes often have fun anecdotes, and Sheehan's writing style is clear and often a little humorous.

Review: Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

Part memoir, part pop science, in Born To Run, extreme sports journalist McDougall promises us a story about "A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen." I don't think he quite delivers.

In the first few chapters, McDougall sets up the mystery of the "hidden tribe", the Tarahumara, a reclusive indigenous people in northern Mexico with a strong tradition of running days-long races over challenging terrain. In "Tarahumara Land" we are told there is no corruption, crime, child abuse, obesity, diabetes or heart disease. The "Tarahumara geniuses" also created a "one-of-a-kind financial system based on booze and random acts of kindness."

The answer to the mystery is simple: they don't adhere to a western diet nor live in a capitalist society. No, indeed, that answer is too simple for a lifestyle bestseller. The actual answer to the mystery is a diet of chia seeds and corn, running in shoes without much support or cushioning, and treating running as a fun, communal activity.

In unravelling these secrets, we take a deep dive into a weird and quirky subculture (a beat I love). A fascinating cast of characters is woven into the story: Ann Trason, a biochemist who smashes women's running records left and right and hates being called a wimp; Barefoot Ted, an irritatingly garrulous runner with an interest in Victorian sports equipment; Jenn Shelton, a fearless poet who can run further and faster than nearly anyone despite being wildly hungover. 

Despite the book's tagline, the narrative momentum is really driven by Caballo Blanco. The opening sentence of the memoir starts with a ghost hunt for the Caballo Blanco. The tension at the climax of the narrative is whether the unorthodox race organized by Caballo Blanco will indeed ever take place. The reveal at the end of the book is the real identity of Caballo Blanco. 

While McDougall paints these vivid (somewhat fictionalized) portraits of various Americans, the Tarahumara are kept at a distance. They're treated as a mostly homogeneous group: we learn a few names, but never their personalities beyond their appreciation for running. Who are the Tarahumara? What are their lives like? These mysteries are not revealed, and so the treatment of them feels a little "otherizing." To sell a story as one about a tribe of indigenous people, but have it really be about a few white Americans felt a bit off.

I was also not convinced on the science of barefoot running. McDougall rightly points out the lack of randomized clinical trials demonstrating the benefits of the Nike Pegasus shoe and its competitors, but evidence for the benefits of barefoot running isn't much better (e.g., see Hollander et al, 2017).

All that aside, I enjoyed some of the meditations around why we run. Running is instinct, community, love, fun, freeing. It was a fun audiobook companion for a long run.

Review: Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

 Rating: 5/5 stars

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference is well organized, thorough, approachable, and has a delightfully sarcastic voice. Parts of the literature I was already quite familiar with, after a few psychology courses and a decade of reading feminist books/articles, but other parts, particularly the child psychology aspects, were new to me. This book should be mandatory reading for anyone that teaches men and women, manages men and women, or has/plans to have girl or boy children. So virtually everyone.

I finished the book both really wanting to invite Fine over for coffee, and wanting to tell everyone I know things I had learned in the book.