Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 (Best American Series)

From Publishers Weekly
Science buffs will find a smorgasbord of lively pieces in this anthology selected by renowned Harvard psychologist Pinker (The Blank Slate; etc.). Many readers will jump straight to Ron Rosenbaum's "Sex Week at Yale," an entertaining exposé of how academics can give their audience a headache when they yammer on about sex. Even the most science-wary readers will enjoy Peggy Orenstein's "Where Have All the Lisas Gone?" about trends in naming babies. Bird lovers (and cat haters) will laugh out loud at the Letters to the Bird Brain collected in Michael O'Connor's "Bird Watcher's General Store." And ailurophiles will be stunned by Robert Sapolsky's report ("Bugs in the Brain") on how the pathogen that causes toxoplasmosis alters its carriers' (rodents) brains so they no longer fear their number one predator (cats). Medical buffs will look for Atul Gawande's extended profile of the amazing Francis Moore, a pioneer in treatment of burns, nuclear medicine, hormone replacement therapies and organ transplants. Both Pinker's choice of subjects (linguistics, psychology) as well as sources (The American Conservative, The Cape Codder) range happily beyond the usual suspects; everyone will find something they haven't already read. The collection is recommended for intellectually omnivorous readers in this and all other universes. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
On the publishing heels of its rival anthology, The Best American Science Writing, 2004 [BKL S 15 04], comes this selection of two dozen articles giving general readers both a range of subject matter, from zoology to astrophysics, and of authorial voices, from expository to satirical. Guest editor Pinker, the prominent neuroscience researcher and author (How the Mind Works, 1997), has made some idiosyncratic choices, such as an advice feature for birdwatchers taken from The Cape Codder, unrenowned as a science periodical. What is the relation to science, one must wonder, of two articles plucked from the New York Times, one concerning fads in naming babies; another, the politics of grammar? Whatever their connection to hard science, such offbeat pieces balance out the more serious-minded declamations of philosopher Daniel Dennett (disputing the late Stephen Jay Gould on genetic determinism) or cosmologist Max Tegmark (describing postulations of many, infinite, or higher-dimensional universes). All of Pinker's picks carry a cogent main idea eloquently expressed, testifying to the healthy condition of contemporary popular science writing. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
In his introduction to The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, Steven Pinker writes that the best science writing "gives readers the blissful click, the satisfying aha!, of seeing a puzzling phenomenon explained." Here to deliver the blissful click are many of the most "eclectic, provocative" (Entertainment Weekly) science and nature essays written in 2003. Geoffrey Nunberg turns to linguistics to expose the grammar police, Scott Antran questions received wisdom regarding the root causes of terrorism, and Peggy Orenstein shows that trends in baby names are not inspired by . . . just about any external cause. Straight from the Cape Codder comes Mike O'Connor's "Ask the Bird Folks," from a weekly column that strikes a tone far from, as Steven Pinker puts it, "the worshipful sonorities found in much nature writing." Also on the creature front, Meredith Small shares with readers the pleasures of primatology (while for the first time explaining satisfactorily why primates groom), and Eric Scigliano gives us the eerie, and eerily intelligent, world of octopuses. (Read Steven Pinker if you aren't convinced that the plural of octopus is octopuses.) Atul Gawande profiles the great innovative surgeon Francis Moore, a man who essentially remade modern surgery -- and then could not live with the consequences -- and Jennet Conant captures the engaging, irreverent, and ever-provocative James Watson. Chet Raymo's musing on the modern universe story gives elegant insight into the cosmic place of physics, chemistry, and biology -- but not before first harking back to the days when "boys took physics (and went on to become engineers and automobile mechanics), girls took biology (and became nurses and homemakers), and nobody took chemistry if they could help it (except a few nerds who wanted to make stink bombs)."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
IntroductionHorace's summary of the purpose of literature, "to delightand instruct," is also not a bad summary of the purpose of scienceand nature writing. The difference is not so much that a science essaygives more weight to the second infinitive as that it unites thetwo. The best science writing delights by instructing. A good scienceessay, like any good essay, must be written with structure andstyle, but the best science essays accomplish something else. Theygive readers the blissful click, the satisfying aha!, of seeing a puzzlingphenomenon explained.A good example of what I have in mind comes from my days as agraduate student. Not from an experience in graduate school butfrom an experience living in the kind of apartment that graduatestudents can afford. One day its antiquated plumbing sprang aleak, and an articulate plumber (perhaps an underemployedPh.D., I feared) explained what caused it. Water obeys Newton'ssecond law.Water is dense.Water is incompressible. When you shutoff a tap, a large incompressible mass moving at high speed has todecelerate very quickly. This imparts a substantial force to thepipes, like a car slamming into a wall, which eventually damagesthe threads and causes a leak. To deal with this problem, plumbersused to install a closed vertical section of pipe, a "pipe riser," neareach faucet. When the faucet is shut, the water compresses the columnof air in the riser, which acts like a shock absorber. Unfortunately,Henry's Law applies: Gas under pressure is absorbed by aliquid. Over time, the air in the column dissolves into the water,which fills the pipe riser, rendering it useless. So every now andthen a plumber has to bleed the system and let air back into the risers,a bit of preventive maintenance the landlord had neglected. Itmay not be the harmony of the spheres or the grandeur in this viewof life, but the plumber's disquisition captured what I treasuremost in science writing: the ability to show how a seemingly capriciousoccurrence falls out of laws of greater generality.Good science writing has to be good writing, and another graduateschool experience led me to appreciate its first priority, clarity.The great Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport had died years beforeI entered the program, but he had written an "Epistle to ThesisWriters" that was still being handed down from generation togeneration of doctoral candidates. Allport tried to steer studentsaway from the clutter and fog of professional science prose and offeredas a model an essay by a ten-year-old girl, who, he wrote, meriteda higher degree "if not for the accuracy of her knowledge,then at least for the clarity of her diction":The bird that I am going to write about is the Owl. The Owl cannot seeat all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.I do not know much about the Owl, so I will go on to the beast I amgoing to choose. It is the Cow. The Cow is a mammal. It has six sides —right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs abrush. With this it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into themilk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that themouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth isto moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking.When people milk, the milk comes through and there is never any endto the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realized, but it makesmore and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it faraway. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not eatmuch, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungryit moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full upwith grass.In assembling this collection I looked for essays that combinedthe explanatory depth of the plumber with the limpid prose of theyoung zoologist. Explanatory depth, surprisingly, is not that easy tofind. The most common specimen is the science news story. A jour-nalist flips through the contents of Science, Nature, and the New EnglandJournal of Medicine, finds the article with the weirdest or mostalarming or most bite-sized finding, gets a quote from an author, asupporter, and a critic, and reports that the discovery has overturnedeverything that scientists had always believed. I understandthe pressures that shape this formula: the drama of iconoclasm, thedemand by editors for news rather than pedagogy, a desire to showthat science is a human activity among spirited antagonists ratherthan a revelation of the truth by white-coated priests.But just as presidential campaigns can be distorted by the press'sobsession with minute-by-minute changes in popularity polls, anunderstanding of science can be poorly served by news from thefront about continual revolution. Conclusions from individual experiments,especially the most surprising ones, are more ephemeralthan conclusions from the reviews and syntheses that can't besqueezed into a brief report in Science. The discovery-du-jour approachcan whipsaw readers between contradictory claims of unevenworth or leave them with lasting misimpressions, such as thateverything that is pleasurable is deadly for one reason or another.And contrary to the idea (commonly associated with Karl Popper)that science is a kind of skeet shooting whose goal is to put a bulletthrough one hypothesis after another, the best science weaves observationsinto an explanatory narrative. "All the Old SciencesHave Starring Roles" by Chet Raymo (whose weekly science columngraced the Boston Globe until his retirement this year) makesthe point succinctly. Max Tegmark's mind-expanding "ParallelUniverses" shows, by example and argument, how a powerful theorycan not only organize sundry data but also lead to an exhilaratingnew conception of reality itself. Horace Judson's "The Stuff ofGenes" reflects on the far-flung implications — for science and life— of the discovery of the structure of DNA, whose golden jubileewas marked in the year these essays appeared.Clarity and style, happily, are not in short supply in today's sciencewriting (though in professional journals their frequency iscommensurate with galliformes' dentition). The genre continuesto attract fine writers of all ages, belying the plaint that the youngergeneration no longer cares about language. Of all the things thatgo into good science writing, I am fondest of prose that airs out astuffy hall of scholarship and conveys its insights (or its absurdities)with irreverent wit, like Gregg Easterbrook's "We're All GonnaDie!," Jonathan Rauch's "Caring for Your Introvert," Ron Rosenbaum's"Sex Week at Yale," and Robert Sapolsky's "Bugs in theBrain." But pride of place goes to the Bird Folks (the nom deplume of Mike O'Connor) at the Bird Watcher's General Store inOrleans, Massachusetts, whose informative weekly column strikes atone that is opposite to the worshipful sonorities found in muchnature writing (parodied by Mark Twain as "Far in the empty sky asolitary esophagus slept upon motionless wing")."Ask the Bird Folks" could have seen the light of day only ina quirky rural tabloid, and I think the proliferation of other unconventionaloutlets will be a boon to unorthodox styles, formats,and, most important, opinions. Conventional wisdom can jell prematurelywhen a few commentators stake out the cramped real estatein national publications, and I actually believe the old clichéthat the Internet is changing intellectual life by providing limitlessoutlets for unconventional ideas. As it happens, most of the Webpieces on my short list were dropped at the last minute becauseof various exigencies (wrong year, wrong country, too muchoverlap). I suspect that more and more of our best science writingwill be found on sites like www.edge.org, scitechdaily.com (and itssister site artsandlettersdaily.com), www.spiked-online.com, butterfliesandwheels.com, techcentralstation.com, human-nature.com,and the many blogs by science-oriented journalists.Science is a human activity, of course, and its rewards are not justdiscovery and explanation. Most scientists enjoy the mundane activityof gathering their kind of data, and in "Captivated" MeredithSmall shares with her readers the pleasures of primatology (whilemaking me understand for the first time why primates groom).And the passionate eccentrics who call themselves scientists aregood grist for gossip and character studies, such as Jennet Conant'sprofile, which presents yet another consequence of the DNA revolution:the appearance on the scientific stage of the inimitableJames Watson.Perhaps more than is usual in these collections, my choices areslanted toward human behavior, and their methods shade into thesocial sciences. In part this reflects my own interests in psychology,linguistics, neuroscience, and evolution. It may also show that humaninterest makes for the most compelling writing. But most ofall, it reflects the fact that the study of the mind will be among theliveliest frontiers of science in the coming century.One of these frontiers is the application of genomic analyses tothe mind and its products, often in highly unpredictable ways.Judson alludes to the recent finding that the normal version of agene for a speech and language disorder bears the statisticalfingerprints of natural selection acting in our lineage after it splitoff from the lineage leading to chimpanzees. In one stroke this discoveryobliterates the suspicion that the evolution of language andmind is permanently beyond the reach of rigorous science. Theduo by Nicholas Wade, "In Click Languages, an Echo of theTongues of the Ancients" and "A Prolific Genghis Khan, It Seems,Helped People the World," explain two other remarkable applicationsof genomics to human evolution. One confirms the idea thataggressive polygyny could have affected human evolution by alteringour species' genetic makeup (with a surprise appearance byone of the great villains of history). The other may shed light onwhat was thought to be forever unknowable: the first language spokenby our species.In anticipating a steady turning of science to the mind and itsproducts I am thinking not just of fancy technologies but of an extensionto human affairs of the scientific mindset itself. This doesnot mean reducing the human condition to genes or neurons orprimate behavior, but rather seeking to ascertain whether a claimabout human affairs is consistent with the facts and with everythingelse we know about how the world works. Today this attitude is farfrom universal. What would happen if newspapers imposed the followingrule: any pundit who comments on a trend and blames it onsome factor must adduce evidence that (a) the trend is real, (b) thefactor preceded the trend, and (c) that kind of factor causes thatkind of trend? On many days the op-ed page would consist of a vastempty space op the ed.Many of my choices upend some bit of conventional wisdomabout human life. In "The Bloody Crossroads of Grammar and Politics,"Geoffrey Nunberg uses a smidgen of linguistics to expose abit of nonsense about "correct grammar" and the decline of standardsthat had been latched on to by writers from David Skinner inthe Weekly Standard to Louis Menand in The New Yorker. In "WhereHave All the Lisas Gone?" Peggy Orenstein shows that trends inbaby names are not inspired by the latest celebrities, the popularityof religion, or just about any other external cause. VirginiaPostrel's "The Design of Your Life" presents a sample of the manymyths about aesthetics that she dispatches in her 2003 book TheSubstance of Style, such as the notion that people seek beauty onlywhen their other needs are met, that styles are foisted upon a passivepublic by manipulative advertisers, and that economic value residesin practical goods and services. Jeffrey Friedman's "A War onObesity, Not the Obese" shows that we are not getting as fat as obesitystatistics would suggest and that the solution to this healthproblem does not consist of finding the right people to blame."Sex Week at Yale" shows that being an academic is no protectionagainst holding ludicrous beliefs about human motives, such as thedogmas about love and sex that are common in the humanities andhelping professions.Many misconceptions about behavior are harmless, but in thesedangerous times some could lead to catastrophe. Steve Sailer's"The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" correctly predicts that itwould be unwise to try to graft a political system onto a society withoutunderstanding how the psychology of kinship and ethnic identi-fication plays out in the local environment. Scott Atran's "Genesisof Suicide Terrorism" debunks the bromide, endorsed by impressivelists of Nobel Prize winners and other right-thinking people incountless signed statements, that the root causes of terrorism arepoverty and ignorance. The article is no more comforting to thosewho analyze suicide terrorism only in moralistic terms and insistthat terrorists are crazed fanatics or callous psychopaths. Moraloutrage is certainly an appropriate response to any slaying of innocents,and it is worth considering the possibility that the retaliationor preemption inspired by outrage is an effective countermeasure.But moral condemnation is just one technique of behavior modi-fication, and the fact that it feels right is no guarantee that it willwork. If our goal is to minimize innocent deaths, we may have to setaside our moral intuitions long enough to try to understand the behaviorin terms of cause and effect, and that means studying the beliefs,desires, and social dynamics of terrorist groups. I suspect thatpeople from all over the political spectrum may be disturbed byAtran's amoral analysis, but it is a mode of thought that we mayhave to get used to if we want to improve human affairs.The interface between science and morals also motivates my remainingchoices. Much science journalism today is hostile to scientistsin much the same way that much political journalism in thepost-Watergate era is hostile to politicians. Scientists are often depictedas arrogant Fausts or cruel Mengeles or greedy profiteers.One article I rejected, for instance, denounced a research programthat succeeded in modifying corn to synthesize pharmaceuticalscheaply despite its promise of vast enhancements to human healthand a demonstrably trivial risk to the environment. Halos areawarded only to whistleblowers in ecology or climate science whowarn us about the wages of our technological lifestyle. In Europe,left-leaning greens call for a Precautionary Principle in which applicationsof science should be banned or restricted if there is somechance they will have harmful effects, even in the absence of scienti-fic evidence that they do. If the policy, aptly satirized as "Never doanything for the first time," had been applied in the past, it wouldhave ruled out every new technology from fire to fertilizers to malariacontrol to oral contraception. In the United States, right-leaningbioethicists see research to improve health and well-being as apromethean grab at immortality and a soul-deadening quest to robus of the nobility of suffering.This hostility is a big change from the reception that scientistsenjoyed a generation ago. When I was a child, my favorite literarygenre was the hagiography of a famous scientist; I was taught thatSabin and Salk were the pride of the Jewish people and Bantingand Best the pride of Canada. No doubt we are all better off todaywith a more skeptical treatment of science, but we have swungtoo far in the direction of timidity about the applications of scienceand cynicism about the motives of scientists. Austin Bunn's "TheBittersweet Science" and Atul Gawande's "Desperate Measures"put a human face on uncured illness and remind us why aggressivemedical pioneers were once revered: they lessened pain, infirmity,and needless death, the most noble goal of human striving. Thereis a story waiting to be told on how the moral coloring of science(and other endeavors) in different periods can be distorted byquirks of the human moral sense (a fertile new research topic inpsychology). Our neural circuits for morality are overly receptive tothe trappings of purity, naturalness, and custom, and they are tooeasily impressed by gravitas, indignation, conspicuous asceticism,and other advertisements of saintliness that may have scant correlationwith actions that make people better off.Genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology will call intoquestion other moral intuitions. Reams of nonsense have beenwritten about cloning, genes linked with personality, andpharmaceuticals that may enhance mood, concentration, andmemory. Some of the non sequiturs are so bizarre that they makeme wonder whether the authors have fully assimilated what FrancisCrick calls "the astonishing hypothesis" — the idea that all thoughtand feeling consist of physiological activity in the brain — and insteadtacitly believe that human choice and individuality reside inan autonomous soul. Philip Boffey's "Fearing the Worst ShouldAnyone Produce a Cloned Baby," Daniel Dennett's "The MythicalThreat of Genetic Determinism," and Ronald Bailey's "The Battlefor Your Brain" are breaths of cool thinking in these overheatedarenas.I end with an indulgence. One article that particularly drew mein was, of all things, "Through the Eye of an Octopus." What coulda cognitive scientist find so interesting about the secret life ofcephalopods? It is not just that the piece reveals an astonishingspectacle in the natural world, and it's not just that the protagonistis named Steve. The reasons are twofold, and it is not too much of astretch to say that they illustrate another of my favorite themes inscience writing: the interconnectedness of all knowledge, no matterhow remote the disciplines.My first reason for liking the article is linguistic. In one of GaryLarson's Far Side cartoons, a bespectacled octopus at a podium addresseshis conspecifics: "Fellow octopi, or octopuses . . . octopi?Dang, it's hard to start a speech with this crowd." Judging from anInternet search, human scientists also go both ways on this issue.But Eric Scigliano consistently refers to his subjects as octopuses, andhe has the logic of language on his side. The -us in octopus is notthe Latin masculine noun ending of alumnus and fungus, which isreplaced by -i in the plural. No, it is part of the Greek word pousmeaning foot, and turning it into -pi makes no sense. Nor couldEnglish have imported the Greek plural as an irregular form, asit did with criterion-criteria and stigma-stigmata, giving us octopodes.An octopus is the creature that owns the enumerated feet, not theassembly of feet itself. The elegant algorithm that computes theproperties of complex words (described in my book Words andRules) ensures that these synecdochic compounds have regular plurals,even when they are built around irregular nouns. Hence werefer to several members of the extinct family of cats as saber-tooths(not saber-teeth). We similarly talk about lowlifes, still lifes, tenderfoots,flatfoots, and, in The Lord of the Rings, Proudfoots. And by this linguisticlogic, we should identify more than one octopus as octopuses.The other reason I liked the article has to do with human evolution.It's lonely to be one of the few species with advanced powersof problem solving, and it's scientifically frustrating too. How canwe test ideas about the evolution of intelligence if it happened onlyonce? One way is to find smarter-than-average species from widelyseparated branches of the tree of life and see what else distinguishesthem from their duller cousins. Studies of other smart creatureslike dolphins and wolves suggest that group living is one ofthe traits that sets the stage for the evolution of higher intelligence.But this does not explain why humans are so much smarter thanother social species. I have always suspected that the ancestral apethat spawned our lineage must have been dealt a number of traitsthat made higher intelligence worth its metabolic cost. And I speculatedin How the Mind Works that one of those traits is the possessionof hands. Evolution does not reward cerebration for its ownsake but only thoughts that can be put to use in adaptive ways, suchas manipulating the world to one's advantage. If this idea is right,intelligence increased in our ancestors partly because they wereequipped with levers of influence on the world, namely the grippersfound at the ends of their two arms. How pleasing to learnthat intelligence also evolved in a species that has eight of them.Steven PinkerCopyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin. Introduction copyright © 2004 by Steven Pinker. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.


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Science buffs will find a smorgasbord of lively pieces in this anthology selected by renowned Harvard psychologist Pinker (The Blank Slate; etc.). Many readers will jump straight to Ron Rosenbaum's "Sex Week at Yale," an entertaining expos of how academics can give their audience a headache when they yammer on about sex. Even the most science-wary readers will enjoy Peggy Orenstein's "Where Have All the Lisas Gone?" about trends in naming babies. Bird lovers (and cat haters) will laugh out loud at the Letters to the Bird Brain collected in Michael O'Connor's "Bird Watcher's General Store." And ailurophiles will be stunned by Robert Sapolsky's report ("Bugs in the Brain") on how the pathogen that causes toxoplasmosis alters its carriers' (rodents) brains so they no longer fear their number one predator (cats). Medical buffs will look for Atul Gawande's extended profile of the amazing Francis Moore, a pioneer in treatment of burns, nuclear medicine, hormone replacement therapies and organ transplants. Both Pinker's choice of subjects (linguistics, psychology) as well as sources (The American Conservative, The Cape Codder) range happily beyond the usual suspects; everyone will find something they haven't already read. The collection is recommended for intellectually omnivorous readers in this and all other universes. (Oct. 14) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.


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