Book Review: Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters. Brian Klaas (2024).

In one of my favorite lines from my song Strangers, I posed a rhetorical question: “Who can trace the mysterious chain of events that now bind us?”  Although in the song I was talking about a long love affair, it’s a question that applies more generally to everything about our lives, how we become who we are, and what combination of willful acts and serendipity shapes the reality and the history we experience. It’s a question I’ve mused about throughout my life, which probably explains my love of stories about time travel, looping repeated lifetimes, and the multiverse. Most of you probably have thought about it too.

 

Imagine my delight, then, to discover Brian Klaas’s best-selling new non-fiction book Fluke, which explores  these very topics of random chance, chaos, the role of unpredictable and unexpected events in our lives and the world around us, and how our own choices and actions interact with those of others and our environment to shape our lives, and the greater reality in which we live.

 

Klaas draws us in immediately with an introductory chapter, in which he tells a true story about a historical figure whose personal experiences decades before, and his subjective emotional response to those experiences, prevented one mass casualty event, and led to another one instead. He uses this dramatic example and several others to lay out his intentions for the book: to dispel the comforting but (in his view) false notions most of us have that the world operates in ways that are predictable and comprehensible in terms of causality, and that we can identify and shape the course of events through reason and the choices we make.

 

In essence, the book is a social scientist’s thoughtful exploration of the “butterfly effect” – the familiar theory in philosophy that even tiny forces, like the pattern of a single butterfly’s beating wings, can alter the whole course of history. Klaas makes the case for the notion that even small flukes, or unexpected events, really can have tremendous impacts on the course of events in our lives and world.

 

In making that case, he introduces a corollary: that we are deeply enmeshed in the lives of others, their choices and the random events that affect them too. In other words, we aren’t ever really in control of our fates, no matter how hard we try to guide the course of our lives through rationality or our actions. We still have to navigate events over which we have no control, and often don’t see coming.

 

One conclusion he draws is that we should feel empowered by our knowledge of the effects of random events to do things we believe in, even if it might seem that nothing will come of it. The author suggests this is true, exactly because we really don’t know what effect our actions will have on others. If we’re trying to influence others, for example, we might be ignored and not much will change at all as a result of what we said or did. But it also might change everything, or have an unexpected effect on others far greater than we expected.

 

The phenomenon of a social media post, or a music or video clip “going viral” would be obvious examples of that kind of unexpected impact on others. Or it might be nothing more than a quiet conversation that changes someone else’s life trajectory or opinions forever. There are an endless number of things we can do to affect others, and the world around us, so the author suggests there’s no reason not to try, even if we might doubt it will really change anything.     

 

I thought about this book the past two weeks, as the situation involving President Biden’s age and whether he should run for President again or not has played out in the national news. I haven’t usually been someone who wrote letters or emails to politicians, but in this case I did. And I did so, knowing my messages (along with those of many others) might help shape events and exert influence in a direction I preferred, but also realizing the ultimate outcome was unknown, and might arrive via any number of other unexpected and unrelated possible events.

 

In other words, it was strangely comforting to realize based on the ideas in Fluke that I could take actions in furtherance of my preferred outcome, and that they might even make a difference, but also accept with equanimity that my actions’ consequences and effects on developments like this are ultimately unknowable and unpredictable. I guess you might call that learning to “be philosophical”.

 

I’ve long enjoyed the writing of Malcolm Gladwell, because of the intriguing ways he challenges ordinary beliefs and assumptions, and takes us on a journey to look at things we think we already know or understand, but from different perspectives. In challenging what we think we know, and providing us with new information and analyses we might not have heard before, this kind of curious counter narrative can change us, and forever alter the way we view the world around us.  

 

Brian Klaas is taking us on that same type of  contrarian intellectual voyage in this book, with a similarly lively writing style and considerable success in making his case. I found it fascinating, and a pleasure to read and reflect upon. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Bitch: On the Female of the Species. Lucy Cooke (2023).

One of my favorite reads in late 2023 was Bitch, Lucy Cooke’s marvelous exploration of sex and gender in evolution and the natural world.  

 

The author is a young academic biologist, who entered the field already discouraged by the story that both science and society had to tell about her sex, the female one.  Her perception had always been that being born a female was to be a “loser” – smaller, less interesting and more passive than the much more exciting and empowered males of the world.

 

Fortunately, though, as she began to enter the world of science and research, she made a number of discoveries that dramatically changed her outlook on the scientific establishment, its history, and its stories about sex and gender. These discoveries included a myriad of counter-examples to the “facts” that were believed to be universal about sex differences in humans and many other species. The author takes us along for a funny and surprising tour of what she has learned.

 

Of course, we humans have always been fascinated with sex, the differences between the sexes, and we all have our own opinions about the relationships between the two sexes. More recently, modern society has also become particularly curious about a more fluid gender spectrum, and how certain traits may overlap in male and female populations. 

 

Religion traditionally has had much to say about these issues too, but Cooke begins by taking a look at how the biological sciences, particularly since the time of Charles Darwin in the mid-19^th century, have been dominated by a blindered view that generally reflected the Victorian social morals, self-interest and ignorance of the small group of mostly-English, mostly-white men who were developing the “scientific” understanding and assumptions in the new fields of biology and evolution almost from inception.

 

She explains all this with a light touch, using examples and giving explanations drawn from major studies and research approaches that have characterized the field. She shares specific historical examples of how and when major male figures in the biological sciences over the past two centuries appeared to incorporate their own insular personal beliefs about human sex roles and differences into broader “scientific” conclusions that all females in nature (of whatever species) tended to be smaller and weaker than males, more passive, invariably focused on child-rearing and nurturing, usually monogamous, and generally looking like their idealized version of an upper-class Victorian woman in their patriarchal society.

 

Having set out her hypothesis, the author then takes us on a tour of many different species, and shows how time and again, the predominantly male investigators who studied them either overlooked or explained away obvious cases that contradicted the orthodox view of sex differences and sex selection, and also neglected to even devote any attention to studying female anatomies, behaviors and social roles in the species they studied, on the assumption that the females were unimportant compared to the males.

 

For example, Cooke is able to demonstrate that since the 19^th century, the mostly male biologists in the field have exhaustively studied and documented the male reproductive organs of many species, but until recently there was very little research done on the corresponding female organs. She provides humorous anecdotes of how male biologists totally misunderstood the significance of unusual penis configurations, sizes and sexual functionality in different creatures, because they had never bothered to look at the vaginas and clitorises of the females.

 

In the course of this book, you will learn many strange and wonderful things about how evolution has led to an almost endless variety of different sex roles, relationships between the sexes, and bizarre sex-linked characteristics in the natural world. In her words, few species (including humans and our mammalian cousins) are the same as others, or conform to the simplistic male-dominant assumptions with which we have all grown up. And in understanding this, we get a much more consistent and predictably complex view of how evolution works with respect to sex differences and characteristics.

 

Cooke also introduces us to a few of her intriguing and determined older female colleagues in the field of biology, and shares stories of some of their groundbreaking work, which first began to challenge the Darwinian/male consensus on sex differences and sex selection in the field.

 

Incidentally, another book also released in late 2023, Cat Bohannon’s Eve: How the Female Body Drove Over 200 Million Years of Evolution, appears from the description to cover similar topics and issues. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my 2024 reading list. 

 

For anyone who loves to think about sex and gender, sex differences (and similarities), and/or to argue about them, Bitch will provide you with a great deal to think about, and plenty of ammunition for future conversations and debates. It may be controversial to some people, but it’s also often humorous, while posing serious and well-reasoned challenges to our current scientific understanding and perspectives on these matters, as well as how they impact our human societies, norms and beliefs. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. Dr. Fei-Fei Li (2023).

This week, with all the sensational news of corporate upheaval and intrigue at OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence (AI) company in the world, we’re all suddenly taking note of this strange new chapter in the history of human technological innovation. Indeed, ever since the release of ChatGPT last year, with its astounding capabilities to generate text and write software, it’s become an unavoidable new topic of conversation and thought, as we try to figure out what it portends for the future of work, society and even the human race itself.

 

It was in this context that I noticed and picked up a copy of The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-Fei Li at my local library.  I’m so glad I did, because it’s a truly excellent book, combining a poignant personal account of the author’s life as a young Chinese immigrant girl, along with her parents, as they try to build a better life in America, with an insider’s look at how the quest for AI has developed over the past two decades inside our major universities and corporations.

 

If you dive into the details of AI and its history in the various news stories now appearing almost daily in the media, you will quickly find not only Dr. Li’s name and story, but also those of many of the other influential players with whom she has worked and who she names and describes in her book, who are now leading the industry and its ongoing research and development. 

 

Li’s most notable contribution to the field flowed from her decision as a young professor to try to build a huge database (called Image Net) holding digitized, labelled images of all the physical objects in our world. She succeeded, despite the seemingly overwhelming size of the project, and the discouragement of some older eminent scientists in the field, who saw it as both a hopeless and pointless undertaking. Her account of the process by which she led a small group of young scientists to overcome every obstacle in their way is a fascinating and inspiring story of scientists and engineers at work in our own era.

 

But her success in creating Image Net had unexpected consequences that accelerated the larger AI project. After sponsoring a contest to have other researchers use her database to train algorithms for computerized visual recognition of objects over several years, it suddenly turned out that neural networks – an AI architecture that had been tried in the past but had been in academic disfavor for several decades – proved to be massively more effective than more recent techniques, once it had been trained with a sufficiently large database.

 

From this major achievement, Dr. Li became one of the top experts in computer vision in the world. She was sought after as a scientist, researcher and teacher, and ended up moving from Princeton to Stanford, and then ultimately to a top position in AI at Google, where she found a very different culture than that of academia, with different priorities, and a far larger budget for her fast-growing research department.

    

At the same time she was leading this world-changing AI research, though, she was also living a human life we would all recognize. For example, her mother has suffered for many years with a chronic, life-threatening health condition, which led Dr. Li to think about new uses to which AI could and should be put in serving the needs of humanity.

 

As a result of her mother’s challenge to use her research to help others, she became involved in an effort to apply computer vision to problems of patient care in hospitals. But when she encountered unexpected resistance from those she thought she was helping (the nurses and medical staff), she was forced to begin considering more closely the negative side of the AI equation, and to think more deeply about the ethical and moral implications of her life’s work.

 

In the course of this life she recounts, she has also been a wife, a mother, a friend and mentor to many colleagues, and a loving daughter to both her parents, and she nicely weaves many of those important personal relationships and how they influenced her work into the larger story of her brilliant career.

 

So much of how we reached this technological moment, and what it portends for our futures, has taken place behind the closed doors of university laboratories and in corporate board rooms.  This outstanding and compassionate personal account by a leading scientist in AI explains how we got here, what it felt like to be one of the key contributors in such a dramatic process of human discovery and innovation, and also how both the perils and potential rewards of this technology have come into sharper focus at each step forward. Very highly recommended.