The Weakest Link
A review by Chris Beard
Recent events cause me to wonder whether we are in the midst of an arms race being waged by various scientists and their marketing gurus over how best to communicate results to the lay public. A case in point is the commotion over the Eocene primate skeleton known as Ida. At roughly 47 million years old, Ida is a remarkably complete specimen of a juvenile female primate from the Messel Pit, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Germany, near Frankfurt. Variously hailed as "the Holy Grail of paleontology," "the eighth wonder of the world" and a "Rosetta stone" for reconstructing our distant ancestry, the fossil made its public debut at a gala event at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on May 19, 2009. A press conference at the museum coincided precisely with the online publication of a technical paper describing the fossil in the journal PLoS One. By the time the press conference had ended, a glitzy Web site promoting the fossil had gone live, a television documentary was...
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Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution by Adrian Desmond
 Who can divine the intentions of the human heart, the motives that guide behavior? Some of the reasons for our actions lie on the surface of consciousness, whereas others are more deeply embedded in the recesses of the mind. Recovering motives and intentions is a principal job of the historian. For ...
The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life by Alison Gopnik
 Have you ever wondered what it's like to be a baby, or how a young child's perceptions and introspections might differ from those of an adult? Reading Alison Gopnik's new book, The Philosophical Baby, is probably the closest you will ever come to knowing.
Gopnik is a leading developmental...
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson
 Steven Johnson's latest book, The Invention of Air, focuses on the life and career of Joseph Priestley. Its provocative title encapsulates its themes: "The Invention of Air" is a kind of double entendre, referring both to Priestley's work in pneumatic chemistry and -- more grandiosely -- to the...
The Tropics of Empire Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Techn) by Nicolas Wey Gomez
 Nicolas Wey Gomez opens his learned and incisive study of cosmography and colonialism in the Age of Columbus with a simple observation: Christopher Columbus did not just sail west across the Atlantic in his search for a maritime passage to the Orient; he sailed south as well. The Genoese sailor's...
What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect by James R. Flynn
 James Flynn is best known for having discovered a stubborn fact. In a series of papers culminating in the classic 1987 article "Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations: What IQ Tests Really Measure," he established that in every country where consistent IQ tests have been given to large numbers of people...
Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul by Fredrik (edt) Hiebert
 In the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great invaded and occupied at tremendous cost the land of Bactria. This region (now northern Afghanistan, southern Tajikistan and southeastern Uzbekistan) soon became the most truculent in Alexander's empire, and after his death a civil war erupted among...
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
 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...
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
Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 Years
by Vaclav Smil
The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary Thought
by Robert J. Richards
Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture
by Peter L. Galison and Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber
Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture
by Alan Sokal
The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
by Donald Worster
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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