OT: best book in years

[Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters]

Martin Maney <maney at pobox.com> wrote previously:
|Thinking of and fetching those titles made me think of Dennett's
|_Consciousness Explained_ and _Darwin's Dangerous Idea_

Yuck!  Dennett puts the "naive" back in "naive reductionism."  He was a
little bit clever back in the 1980s when he was writing cute, and
slightly clever, analytic philosophy essays.  But then he thinks he
discovered Darwin (who was himself NEVER so naive or poorly nuanced as
Dennet), and wrote the subsequent drivel.... plus take a look for his
advocacy of the word "bright" as a weird neologistic synonym for
"secular"... well, some of you may have seen my post joking about the
word "disingenuous."  You just cannot believe how awful Dennett's notion
is to you see it yourself.

That said... if Darwin and biology are interesting to you, I can highly
recommend reading some Steven Jay Gould.  Anything, really, but the more
technical stuff includes _Ontogeny and Phylogeny_ and his masterpiece
_The Structure of Evolutionary Theory_.  Slightly ligher than those, but
a bit more than his essay collections, try _Wonderful Life_, which is
quite a nice reflection on evolution and "deep time."

Now if you want really wild, try the fairly slim _Acquiring Genomes_ by
Lynn Margulis (who brought you the procaryotic symbiosis of mitocondrial
organelles) and Dorion Sagan (her son, my acquaintance).  You need a
slight grain of salt for this book, but between a few flights of fancy
is some remarkably compelling stuff that almost no one else is doing.

Yours, Lulu...

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