Book Review

Are there ways to be healthy while being ill? Susan Sontag suggests in her book Illness as Metaphor, that the healthiest way of being ill is to resist such thinking. Sontag’s book is an inspection of the fantasies invented around conditions such as tuberculosis and cancer in our cultural history. Susan Sontag disputes that illness is not a metaphor and that the most ingenuous way of regarding illness is to defy thinking that one is ill. She gives examples of metaphors and images of illness that are taken from psychiatric and medical thinking as well as from

We don’t have to be expert in foreign affairs to have an opinion as to how much security the industrialized nations of the world brought with the $300 million they spent over ten years to eradicate smallpox, as compared to what was achieved with the $28 billion spent in 1983 alone for arms exports to Third World countries. Perhaps a few million dollars given to improve the health of the children of Central America would bring more security t o the area than the billions we have spent to arm the parents—and often the children.

Where do we get our religious concepts from? Why do some concepts, such as the existence of one God who knows all, the existence of souls, of an afterlife, of karma, and so forth pervade throughout the spiritual lives of very different people? Why do these concepts persist for thousands of years? How do these concepts gain a following? In Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought anthropologist Pascal Boyer attempts to answer these questions in terms of what we know about cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology (1). Where once it was believed that these were silly questions to ask, Boyer believes that we now have the tools to treat

Overall this book, The Red Queen, Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, was a fun read; even more so as the Bio 103 course progressed. Matt Ridley does an amazing job of providing readers with an abundant amount of various, compelling stories of observations to discuss ideas on sexual reproduction advantages and its correspondence to evolution. Reading this has reinforced my attitude towards certain aspects in science for I definitely have come to feel more comfortable accepting the notion that evolution is much about the reproduction of the fittest than simply just the survival of the fittest.