With a Little Help from My Friends
A review by William McGrew
Broad-brush theories that explain the evolutionary origins of distinctively human attributes are perennial favorites in anthropology. Whatever the nominated unifying factor -- language, technology, culture -- the challenge is to persuade a usually skeptical audience that a single phenomenon might encompass the immensity of the human condition. This is hard enough to do, given the rich tapestry of current human diversity, but it is even more difficult to plumb a factor's origins in the prehistoric past. In Mothers and Others, the hypothesis is that the key development in the transformation of our ape ancestors into early hominins was the emergence of the extended family, and especially of alloparenting (see below), long before larger brains or language or complex technology appeared. Furthermore, as is made explicit in the book's subtitle, The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, the cognitive and emotional processes underlying the structure and functioning of the family...
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Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World by Sharon Waxman
 On April 19th, 2005, a Russian Antonov 124 transport touched down on a runway in Axum, Ethiopia. Its cargo was the middle section of a 1,700-year-old, 78-foot-tall, 160-ton granite obelisk, which had been removed from Ethiopia in the 1930s by Benito Mussolini, who erected it in front of his newly...
Structure and Randomness: Pages from Year One of a Mathematical Blog by Terence Tao
 Terence Tao is an almost ridiculously distinguished young mathematician, perhaps best known for his work in combinatorics and number theory, especially the theory of arithmetic progressions of prime numbers. In early 2007, he turned the "what's new" section of his home page into a blog, and his new ...
The Art and Politics of Science by Harold Varmus
 Harold Varmus's new book, The Art and Politics of Science, is a timely memoir of a remarkable career. It hits the stores just as that career is taking a new turn: Varmus will be one of the foremost scientific advisers to the Obama administration.
In this memoir, Varmus traces the trajectory of...
The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage by Jamie Benidickson
 Grannie used to say she was going out to the euphemism to euphemize. She meant the 1915-era summerhouse privy built on a granite ledge in Maine. To a child raised with water closets, as I had been, the span of the hole seemed dangerously wide and the pit below dark and bottomless. But the smell was ...
Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 Years by Vaclav Smil
 Prolific writer Vaclav Smil characterizes his latest book, Global Catastrophes and Trends, as "a multifaceted attempt to identify major factors that will shape the global future and to evaluate their probabilities and potential impacts." Smil is fluent in many languages of the East and the West...
The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary Thought by Robert J. Richards
 Decades of intense study of Darwin’s life, intellectual development, and social and political context have generated new kinds of questions about a number of matters: the interpersonal networks supporting him; the lives of the admirers and critics of his ideas; the dissemination and reading of...
Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture by Peter L. Galison and Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber
 This book makes an entertaining, engaging and informative effort to tackle a notoriously difficult topic: Albert Einstein's influence on society and culture. Einstein is strongly associated with modernism in the public mind. But the natural impulse to portray the man himself as a modernist has...
Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture by Alan Sokal
 In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal played an elaborate trick on some unsuspecting humanists and social scientists -- namely, the editors of the leftist journal Social Text -- by submitting an essay filled with at least six kinds of nonsense. The editors didn't catch (or were willing to countenance) the...
The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
 The spectacular achievement of the Internet is a success that has many parents. But when it comes to engineering design, a top honor must go to the decision to make the Net "stupid": Let the network perform its limited function of transmitting bits, and leave "smarter" functions, such as encryption,...
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster
 No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wilderness as that which regards the world as made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant and crystal controverts it in the...
A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry
by Nathan Hodge
The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation
by Steven Shapin
Objectivity
by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison
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