Book Review: 1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by Charles C. Mann
This book does a good job of discrediting several myths about the nature New World civilizations before Europeans arrived. It implies that significant parts of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel are wrong (in ways that Diamond should have avoided by consulting experts) – Indians were quite capable of repelling Europeans when their advantage consisted of guns and steel. After smallpox spread across the Americas (faster than Europeans), guns and steel were largely superfluous advantages.
The book presents evidence (alas, not enough to be conclusive) that most of the land in the Americas had been altered by civilizations that were much more sophisticated and varied than is commonly realized, and the myth that Indians were primitive savages is largely due to people mistaking the disease-ravaged remnants that the typical European colonist encountered for the pre-European norm.
The book also provides a few bits of evidence against historical determinism by pointing out how differently some aspects of civilization developed in the two worlds. For instance, the New World seems to have been first to get the concept of zero, but only used wheels for toys, and valued metals for their malleability rather than strength.
One very intriguing report is that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederation society was freer and more egalitarian than European society, and that this caused a number of Europeans to prefer Haudenosaunee society, but no Indians in that region preferred European society. It’s unclear how strong the evidence is for these somewhat controversial claims. I guess I ought to track down the books he references for this subject.
The book also describes the Inka empire as socialist, without any markets, but I’m disappointed at how little the books says about that (e.g. how broad a definition of market is he using?).
The main shortcomings of this book are the numerous anecdotes that add little to our understanding of Indian civilizations.
Politics
“I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel I owe anybody an explanation,” – president George W. Bush (via Andrew Sullivan).
Next time you hear someone implying that commercial development is the primary enemy of the environment, remember stories such as this one about how much harm a single wasteful Army Corps of Engineers project is doing to wetlands.
Book Review: Operation Yao Ming: The Chinese Sports Empire, American Big Business, and the Making of an NBA Superstar by Brook Larmer
This book is a very readable biography of Yao Ming.
But I had been led to hope that it would inform me about China’s future. I’m disappointed at how little it tells me about that subject. It provides some moderately interesting tidbits of information about China’s recent history, but the book doesn’t attempt to provide the kind of understanding of China that would tell us whether those tidbits are a glimpse of a past that is being abandoned or whether they contain useful indications of China’s future.
Book Review: Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective by J. Philippe Rushton
Rushton has a plausible theory that some human populations are more k-selected than others. He presents lots of marginal-quality evidence, but that’s no substitute for what he should be able to show if his theory is true.
Much of the book is devoted to evidence about IQs and brain sizes, but he fails to provide much of an argument for his belief that k-selected humans ought to have higher intelligence. It’s easy to imagine that it might work that way. But I can come up with an alternative based on the sexual selection theory in Geoffrey Miller’s book The Mating Mind that seems about as plausible: r-selected humans have more of their reproductive fitness determined by success at competition for mates (as opposed to k-selected humans for whom child support has a higher contribution to reproductive fitness). Since The Mating Mind presents a strong argument that human intelligence evolved largely due to such competition for mates, it is easy to imagine that r-selected humans had stronger selection for the kind of social intelligence needed to compete for mates. Note that this theory suggests the intelligence of k-selected humans might be easier to measure via standardized tests than that of r-selected humans.
Rushton’s analysis of the genetic aspects of IQ makes the usual mistake of failing to do much to control for the effects of motivation on IQ scores (see pages 249-251 of Judith Rich Harris’s book The Nurture Assumption for evidence that this matters for Rushton’s goals).
He also devotes a good deal of space to evidence such as crime rates where it’s very hard to distinguish genetic from cultural differences, and there’s no reason to think he has succeeded in controlling for culture here.
Rushton mentions a number of other traits that are more directly connected to degree of k-selection and less likely to be culturally biased. It’s disappointing that he provides little evidence of the quality of the data he uses. The twinning data seem most interesting to me, as the high twin rates of the supposedly r-selected population follow quite clearly from his theory, it’s hard to come up with alternative theories that would explain such twinning rates, and the numbers he gives look surprisingly different from random noise. But Rushton says so little about these data that I can’t have much confidence that they come from representative samples of people. (He failed to detect problems with the widely used UN data on African AIDS rates, which have recently been shown to have been strongly biased by poor sampling methods, so it’s easy to imagine that he uses equally flawed data for more obscure differences). (Aside – the book’s index is poor enough that page 214, which is where he lists most of his references for the twinning data, is not listed under the entry for twins/twinning).
Rushton occasionally produces some interesting but irrelevant tidbits, such as that Darwin “affirmed human unity” by ending the debate over whether all humanity had a common origin, or that there’s evidence that “introverts are more punctual, absent less often, and stay longer at a job”.
Edward M. Miller has a theory that is similar to but slightly more convincing than Rushton’s in a paper titled Paternal Provisioning versus Mate Seeking in Human Populations.
Book Reviews: Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (Paperback)
by Pat Califia
and Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex by Pat Califia
Sex Changes provides a good history of nonstandard genders. It describes a rather dramatic change in how typical transsexuals see themselves, from a time when sex change operations were considered attempted cures for a somewhat embarrassing disease and strongly desired to fit in to a standard gender stereotype to a time when many celebrate their diversity and see their gender (both before and after any hormones or surgery they may get) as something different from male or female.
I was a bit surprised by some things the book reports, such as that cross-dressing was illegal in parts of the U.S. as recently as the 1980s, or that some people approach sex reassignment with the same mindset as they do when getting tattoos.
The book has fairly good discussions of the problems with access to surgery and hormones that are created by disagreements over whether they are cures for a disease or something closer to cosmetic surgery. It is disturbing how much incentive there is to lie to doctors (and maybe insurers) in order to fit a somewhat arbitrary stereotype of someone with more mental problems than the average transsexual experiences.
I’m disappointed that the book does little to analyze the politics of how gender-segregated restrooms deal with people who don’t consider themselves male or female. It seems likely that this will generate political controversy soon, but few people seem prepared for it.
The book mostly deals with U.S. culture, but one chapter deals unusually-gendered roles in other cultures, mainly Berdaches in Native American cultures, and arguments about whether they should be thought of as transgender roles.
I have a few objections to what the book says:
The roots of prejudice against homosexuals and the hatred and fear of transsexuals are so closely woven together that it is not really all that difficult to educate people simultaneously about both communities.
This seems only half right. There are ways to argue for queer rights that apply to both groups, but I don’t see how they address many of the fears of bigots. Prejudice against gays has little to do with the fears that restrooms will be unsafe for some women if there is no clear boundary between male and female, or the fear that someone will put a lot of time and prestige at risk courting a potential mate only to discover that it won’t be possible to produce children via such a mating. Fear of transsexuals has little to do with the fear that gay men will spread sexually transmitted diseases.
There are many things that could have been done better to advance respect for transsexuals without hindering homosexuals. We could have used the word queer a good deal more often, and we could have tried harder to insure that queer was used in an inclusive way. (The obstacles to that weren’t just conservative tendencies among some homosexuals, but also intolerance among radicals who want to show off their ideological purity by distancing themselves from non-radicals who could be called queer).
Another way would be for gay rights advocates to focus more on disagreements about whether the primary purpose of sex and romance is reproduction. Many leading gay marriage opponents are trying to maintain or recreate a culture in which sex is more strongly connected to reproduction than I think the swing voter is comfortable with. Yet too many gay rights activists prefer to stereotype opponents as simply ignorant rather than having controversial but coherent goals.
These two approaches could have helped transsexuals somewhat without any cost to gays, but much of the reason gays have been accepted faster than transsexuals is that there have been more gays around to demand respect from their friends and neighbors, and no change in queer activist strategies would have much effect on that difference.
despite the fact that SRS has been performed for three decades, most insurance companies and HMOs classify it as an experimental procedure, and will not cover it. This should be compared to the response to organ transplants
Yet there’s much clearer evidence that organ transplants usually accomplish their goals well than there is that sexual reassignment surgery does. Insurers treatment of SRS doesn’t seem significantly more arbitrary than their decision to not cover experimental treatments in general. The main problem is the inadequate innovation in the surgical practices.
Public Sex is a fairly good survey of unconventional sexual practices. Much of it simply reports that people (often the author) are proud to engage in this and that practice. The book occasionally makes arguments that attempt to convince people to approve of those practices, but mostly it will fail to change many minds. People who are unashamed of sex will mostly already agree with the ideas in the book, and prudes will be unwilling to consider them.
The rants against puritanical feminists might convince a few gays that some feminists are their enemies, but mostly they will just reinforce existing beliefs.
Many of the essays were written in the 1980s, and the sometimes tedious descriptions of legal and political details of that time are of little value except to historians.
Some of the older essays include an occasional annoyingly overbroad quasi-marxist class struggle rant, but the more recent essays indicate the author has become more sensible over time.
The rants against puritanical feminists might convince a few gays that some feminists are their enemies, but mostly they will just reinforce existing beliefs.
Many of the essays were written in the 1980s, and the sometimes tedious descriptions of legal and political details of that time are of little value except to historians.
Some of the older essays include an occasional annoyingly overbroad quasi-marxist class struggle rant, but the more recent essays indicate the author has become more sensible over time.
Ramesh Ponnuru, a somewhat respectable conservative, has published a book titled “The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life”.
I have nothing newsworthy to say about the claim that the Democrats are a party of death. What puzzles me is why Republicans think they should be considered opponents of a culture of death. I haven’t heard any leading Republicans criticize Leon Kass, who recently served as chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics under Bush, for statements such as:
the finitude of human life is a blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not.
See this article for a longer version of his argument that people ought to die.
I wonder if what Ponnuru really means is that the Democrats are a party of unnatural death, whereas the Republicans are a party of natural death.
Book Review: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
This book is an eloquent but not entirely convincing diatribe against tolerating religious faith.
He correctly points out that Christian and Muslim beliefs, when taken to their logical conclusion, are both dangerous and illogical in ways that would provoke appropriate contempt in almost any other context. He concludes that it is unwise to leave the irrationalities of moderate religious people unchallenged.
But he fails to convince me because his argument depends on the assumption that religious moderates have enough desire for logical consistency about their religious beliefs to make their illogic dangerous. I suspect that dividing the moderates from the religious extremists is a more productive strategy than Harris expects, because moderates are more willing to be inconsistent about their religious beliefs than Harris realizes.
Harris claims that suicide terrorists are strong evidence of the dangers of religious faith. But he seems unfamiliar with the strong arguments by Robert Pape that similar terrorism comes from secular groups (e.g. the Marxist Tamils), and that the common denominator for such terrorists is a dispute over territory.
His view of the average citizen of Iran as a brainwashed hostage is potentially quite dangerous.
The author occasionally sounds like he has beliefs that are based on faith rather than reason. For instance, he says “you will definitely die at some moment in the future” and then repeats that that “is not open to any doubt at all”, but provides no hint of a scientific argument that would justify this unusual degree of certainty.
The books contains a number of interesting tidbits, such as the theory that the Koran’s alleged promise of many virgins in the afterlife really meant a promise of white raisins. But he also spends too much verbiage on some rather unoriginal diatribes against a rather arbitrary collection of Republican policies.
China’s one-child policy has created an imbalance between men and women that is producing some unrest that has potentially serious consequences. This interesting article analyzes the feasibility of one of the better ways of mitigating this problem.
In Reason Magazine, James Bovard reports on some strange discrepancies in the media stories about Rigoberto Alpizar, who was killed by air marshals in December. It seems that the passengers in the plane said that Alpizar never claimed to have a bomb. Yet the majority of media reports seem to conclude that the air marshals acted correctly.
Why do the storytellers find this controversy much less entertaining than Cheney’s shooting accident?