What I’m reading

I’m trying to read three books at once, and keep getting interrupted by the weekly arrival of The New Yorker, which takes an evening to read.  In the interest of all of us sharing our readings, I start the comments (please chime in) with this list of books:

1.)   A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: the Human Story Retold Through Our Genes by writer and science popularizer Adam Rutherford, who was trained as a geneticist under my friend Steve Jones (the book is dedicated to Steve). It’s a summary of what happened to the genus Homo over the last million years, concentrating on what happened after the genus made its multiple egresses from Africa. It’s of course going to be outdated soon, but for a comprehensive look at what we know now, I can’t think of a better book. One quibble: the book is written in a folksy, breezy style, and that makes it a bit bloated. There are also gratuitous footnotes similar to those in Robert Sapolsky’s Behave. When mentioning the genetic survey of Iceland (a fascinating project), Björk comes up with an asterisk, and you can read at the bottom Rutherford’s take: “*Who is of course a genius.”  I don’t share that view! Nevertheless, if you want to make sense of the confusing picture of human evolution, what with multiple Out-of-Africa trips, the Denisovans, the Neanderthals, their interbreeding with modern H. sapiens, and the enigmatic “hobbit” H. floresiensis, this is the book for you. I’m 125 pages into the 350-page book.

2.) Science Unimited?: The Challeges of Scientism. This collection of essays, edited by philosophers Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci, is published by the University of Chicago Press. The term “scientism”, of course, has diverse meanings, but is usually employed pejoratively. It can mean scientists overstepping their boundaries (as when science attempts to discern “objective” moral truths); science construed too broadly (Pigliucci, as he often does, criticizes my claim that “science construed broadly” is simply the use of science’s empirical techniques to find truth, so that a plumber “does science” by finding the source of a leak); scientists demanding that the humanities use more scientific methods; scientists criticizing the humanities for being a worthless endeavor, and so on. Different authors have different definitions, which makes the book a bit scattered, but still useful.

There are 15 chapters of diverse views and quality. Some are written poorly; others very well. The ones I found good reading so far are those of Philip Kitcher (with whom I disagree but whose arguments are clear and well written; you can see his chapter here, republished from The New Republic, as well as my disagreements—and Philip’s defense—here and here), Boudry, Stephen Law, and Russell Blackford. (I haven’t read the last five chapters). I’m less interested in the “demarcation problem” (what characterizes science as opposed to other endeavors?) than in the issue of whether anything other than science-like empirical study can give us truth about the universe. I’m not convinced that anybody makes a good case for “other ways of knowing.”

3.) The Qur’an. As I noted before, I’ve read the Qur’an once but wanted to read an English translation that both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars find accurate, or at least true to the original. I decided on Arberry’s translation, and started reading that one. But, like the Bible and the Book of Mormon (I’ve read all of the former and some of the latter), it’s deadly dull and even scary.  When I started reading Rutherford’s book, I put the Qur’an aside because it wasn’t nearly as interesting. I’ll get back to it and work my way through in a couple of weeks. But reading both the Old and New Testaments nearly did me in—despite Richard Dawkins’s claim and the effort of King James’s translators, it’s still mostly tedious stuff, with only occasional bits of “poetry”—and the Qur’an is even duller. But I have to have some knowledge when I discuss Islam, and the best way to do that is read its scriptures. Of course Muslims will claim that a. no translation can do the original justice, and b. I don’t understand what Allah meant when he dictated it through Gabriel to Muhammad. So it goes.

Your turn. What are you reading, and do you like it?