Today Easterblogg describes a number of books he’s been reading. Among them:
Humboldt’s Cosmos by Gerard Helferich. On a five-year expedition that ended in 1804, adventurer Alexander von Humboldt became the first European to explore the Amazon basin, in the process cataloging thousands of plant species, gaining Europe’s first knowledge of the ancient Incas and climbing Chimborazo, a 20,600-foot volcano, needless to say, without oxygen tanks. Unlike Lewis and Clark, who traveled with a large government-funded party of assistants and cooks, von Humboldt and one companion trekked alone, hunting their own food, making indigenous friends, and managing to avoid severe injuries or disease. Upon his return, von Humboldt became one of the most celebrated people in Europe. His story is a great read….
The X in Sex by David Bainbridge. The author, a British researcher, devotes an entire book to the X chromosome, which in pairs causes womanhood. The X chromosome is much bigger than the Y chromosome that determines maleness, appears to have evolved differently and, Bainbridge asserts, contains so much more coding than male-determining chromosomes that “males and females are more different than they really need to be to play their roles in reproduction.” What does it mean that the X is so much bigger and richer than the Y? Maybe this is the leading edge of a long-term evolutionary trend. Men, you might want to look away from the page for the moment: Science magazine recently cited the possibility that “the Y is slowly fading as a chromosome,” eventually to be out-evolved in a science-fiction future in which all humans are primarily female. Men, read this book with a six-pack and a swimsuit calendar close at hand.
The Beast in the Garden by David Baron. In 1991, a mountain lion attacked and ate a 14-year-old boy jogging in the foothills of Boulder, Colorado. Five more people have since been killed in the United States and Canada by mountain lions, and dozens mauled. Baron explores what it means that lions are repopulating developed areas–with pollution declining, wilderness acreage expanding, and lion hunting forbidden, there will be ever-more bobcats, cougars, and panthers in American and Canadian exurban areas. Meanwhile, preservationists continue insisting that wolves and grizzlies be reintroduced into North America; the deep-green love of the grizzly seems to stem from the fact that it kills human beings, whom deep-greens detest. Lawsuits demanding the grizzly be reintroduced into the wild are at the moment a big political issue in the Rocky Mountain states and provinces.