Book Review

    Fredrick Turner’s book Beauty: The Value of Values offers a part philosophical, part anthropological, and part scientific understanding of beauty. To him the way humans perceive beauty is natural because beauty to us has a biological basis via culture. With the expansion of our brain came an expanded understanding of the world around us. This expansion is also responsible for our current interpretations of beauty.

Charles Darwin begins his famous On the Origin of Species with a confession. After relating some details of his early journey on the H.M.S. Beagle, he explains that questions he asked during his trip accumulated into “a sketch of the conclusions” that he now presents in this volume (95). He writes, “I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision” (95).

Adam Zakheim

May 15, 2009

Bio202 – Prof. Grobstein

Book Commentary

      The book ‘an Anthropologist on Mars’ byOliver Sacks discusses seven ‘paradoxical tales.’ These tales describe thelives of individuals who have had accidents that damaged their brain, have hadtumors removed, have been blind and regained their lives or are autistic. Sacksfocuses on the impact of these ‘conditions’ on the lives of these individualsand how their lives change or how their lives have turned out. In anAnthropologist on Mars I saw many of the similar themes to our class in termsof loopy science, an holistic approach to neurobiology, the lack or truth andreality as well as a distinction between the self and the body, the environmentand the unconscious.

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”-- C. P. Snow

      A ‘tipping point’ is a critical juncture when isolated events are unified info a significant trend.   In our Emergence course, we explored how what many people consider complex behavior arises from a number of simple entities interacting without an architect or creator.  We have examined many these phenomena in order to better understand how their smaller, simpler components allow for their complex behavior.  In his 2000 book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell closely examines why change happens as quickly and unpredictably as it often does.