Book Review: The Heat Will Kill You First. Jeff Goodell (2023).

I read this climate change non-fiction book some months ago, and it’s taken me a while to get around to writing a review of it, but I believe it's still an important review to write and share. The author, Jeff Goodell, is an editor for Rolling Stone magazine who has written several environmental “travelogues” of sorts, which combine accounts of his eco-tourism trips (for journalistic research purposes) with focused discussions of specific elements or results of the climate change phenomenon, the effects of which he observes and recounts from his travels.

In one of his other books, for example, he did a global review of the impact of rising seas from melting ice on Earth’s geography, mankind and our technological civilizations. In this one, he looks at the impacts and feedback loops of rising atmospheric and oceanic temperatures.

 

He begins with an introduction and an overview about a fact which most of us already know and acknowledge is happening: the earth is warming rapidly due to our reliance on burning fossil fuels for much of the energy that powers our societies. He then gives some well-chosen examples of calamitous effects of heat which we are already seeing around us.

 

Next, he moves on to the topic of the effects of heat on the human body. He begins with the particularly grisly and heartbreaking story of a young California couple a few years ago who died with their infant child on a backpacking trip when they failed to plan for the dangers of heat exposure during a family day hike. From this, he moves on to clinical descriptions of how rising heat affects the human body, and how it will soon make increasing numbers of currently-inhabited places around the world no longer fit for habitation, particularly during the warmer months of the year.    

 

From there, the author provides well-researched and organized chapters on a number of other aspects of the effect of rising temperatures on the world. In one chapter, he explores the threat to crops and global food supplies. In another, he discusses the increasingly dangerous effects of heat on outdoors workers, including how extreme heat might prevent the delivery of crucial services in the future. He also explains why we need to develop new work health and safety standards to protect our essential workers who must work outside in hot weather from the extreme heat conditions of the near future.

 

Another chapter provides a close-up look at Antarctica, and the particular dangers to the planet from melting ice there, especially including the potential for sea level rise. He also reviews some of the scientific and engineering ideas that have been proposed to try to slow down and minimize the damage from warming on the polar ice fields and glaciers.

 

Goodell then proceeds on to hotter climes, and raises the problem of tropical insects like mosquitoes and ticks now on the move into many warming temperate zones. He analyzes the extent to which those insect migrations to new ranges will likely spread tropical diseases and epidemics into new regions and human populations, ones which haven’t previously been affected by these problems.

 

In another interesting chapter, he provides a description of how air conditioning works, and how current air conditioning technology actually makes the heat situation worse, both from burning fossil fuels to power them, and because of the heat released in the air conditioning process, but is still necessary to make many parts of the world habitable during the warm season of the year.

 

Toward the end of the book, he moves more toward creative problem-solving, by attempting to identify ways we can adapt to and survive the ongoing rising heat which seems inevitable. For instance, he talks about large-scale “heat events”, like the high pressure “heat dome” that has been over much of the country this summer, and asks whether we should start naming and tracking these high-heat extreme weather events the way we do tropical storms and hurricanes. He goes on to propose some possible approaches and ideas about what it would take to retrofit our modern urban areas for heat survivability in the near future.

 

Much of what is in this book has been in the news in various forms for years for those who are paying attention, as the age of human-caused climate change has settled upon us. However, the author has done a very nice job of focusing the conversation on the heat-related elements of the problem. He does it by taking us on a world tour to see some of the areas where rising temperatures are having early effects, analyzing how the various elements and impacts of rising temperatures fit together, and reporting on some of the means by which we humans may try to mitigate and adapt to the worst environmental effects of rising temperatures around the globe.

 

This is an excellent primer on the coming crisis of heat, and rising air temperatures around the world. 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.

Book Review: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (2022). Richard V Reeves.

I recently read this truly excellent book by Richard Reeves, on a topic which the author mentions he was discouraged from writing about by several friends and professional colleagues, due to its extremely controversial nature.  

 

He wrote it anyway, and I'm very glad he did.  It's all about why and how men and boys, and a wide range of their contemporary problems and needs, require our attention and resources, and why neither the Left nor the Right are getting it right with respect to the difficulties faced by men in our society today.

Reeves anticipates the predictable feminist-oriented reaction against this position, and the assumption that he and his arguments are misanthropic and anti-women in nature, which they are not. At the outset, he states a number of important caveats about what he's not arguing for, principally the expectation that he hopes to preference the needs of men over women, and then moves on through chapter after chapter, exploring many ideas and the scientific research in support of the notion that we need to pay more attention to the plight of men and boys.

 

This is a book that needs to be read in its entirety, and the various pieces of the puzzle which he explores need to be seen together as a whole to be fully understood.  But here are just a few of the important points he considers.    
 

Boys and men have fallen behind in school and academics.  Women at this point, as a result of Title IX and 50 years of widespread governmental and institutional support, now succeed at a far higher percentage of the population in acquiring education in most subject areas than do men.  Why is this?  
 

Boys and men are also struggling in employment – despite the "glass ceiling" for women, and the predominance of men at the top of the corporate elite.  In fact, a significant number of young, able-bodied working age men have dropped out of the work world entirely, and are no longer in the labor pool, which has created major negative impacts in other areas of social life, such as family stability and lower availability of suitable or desirable mates for many women.  
 

Black boys and men, as distinct from males who are white or even in other ethnic groups, have a specially compounded set of problems caused by the legacy of slavery, systematic demonization of black men as a result of systemic racism, and widespread lack of functional fathers and male role models in many black families due to widespread imprisonment, welfare laws and other structural impediments put in place over many generations, which need particular focused attention and help.
 

Reeves then makes a strong case for something that on some levels, most of us accept, which is that human boys and men do have biologically-based differences from girls and women. This idea, seemingly so obvious, has actually been highly contested in some circles for the past 50 or more years, in service of the need and desire to remove sex-linked characteristics as the basis for discrimination against women.  

 

Reeves' analysis on this central topic is refreshing and insightful. Many of the differences between men and women that have been universally recognized and accepted over eons have actually been verified in much social research recently. As he points out, the stereotypical male tendencies and behaviors that are different from those of women are not "bugs" of masculinity.  They’re features, resulting from evolution, which in the past rewarded men for focusing on aspects of the needs of their families and communities which were different from those of women, due primarily to the men's lack of ability to bear children.

 

Reeves mentions common beliefs about the differences in men and women, such as that men are more interested in things, while women are more interested in people, or that because men have more testosterone, that leads men to greater aggression, risk-taking, and more competitiveness, all features which play out over time as the evolutionary tools by which men struggle to be able to reproduce their genes, by gaining access to women's attentions and their bodies. 

But these differences aren’t (or shouldn't be) grounds for discrimination (as they have been in the past) – they’re simply tendencies that overlap between men and women, and appear in different proportions in each individual. This means that in a perfect world, for example, we still wouldn’t expect to see a perfect balance in the number of men and women in all employment fields or areas of interest.  

 

This point was a revelation to me -- that we shouldn't always strive or expect to see complete parity for example in male/female distributions within any particular profession, even if everyone has equal access to them. The distribution instead should mirror the averages of how interested each sex (as a group) is in that profession.

 

The point, as Reeves says, is to make it possible for all people to realize their best interests and capabilities.  Our lives and opportunities are not and should not be controlled by just our sex at birth, and the attributes that come with it. They are controlled instead by three different factors:  nature (what we're each born with), nurture (the training and support we receive), and our personal action and choices. 

 

We can encourage women in STEM, but that doesn't mean that 50% of the profession will ever be women -- as a part of the population, they probably are just not quite as interested in those fields as men.  But it might be 41%, and if so, they should have the opportunity to succeed, just as much as the men should. 
 

One important point that derives from all this in Reeves' view is that treating traditionally male characteristics as a “toxic” pathology is damaging to men, and it's wrong. Masculinity is only toxic when it doesn’t serve the greater good of the species, or isn’t under mature adult control.  No one ever says anything about “toxic femininity”. When harnessed correctly, masculinity is natural, a result of evolution, and of benefit to society.  One example of this would be the greater propensity of men to take personal risks in defense of others.  

 

In Reeves' view, the #METOO movement's use of the term "toxic masculinity" as a routine pejorative for men and the way they behave is demoralizing, too broad-brush, and doesn't take into account the negative psychological effect it has on the morale and self-image of many boys and men, especially young ones trying to understand how they are supposed to behave in the world, and what their self-worth is.
 

The author then points out the opposite side of recognizing the positive and natural value of masculinity, which is that men also have “female” characteristics in varying proportions, while many women also have varying proportions of "male" characteristics. Care-taking and nurturing tendencies, and greater social interest and engagement, exist in men too – just to a somewhat lesser degree on average.  Women similarly have aggressive, competitive and less social tendencies too, just to a somewhat lesser degree on average than the men.
 

The chapter on the politics of all this is particularly thoughtful and convincing.  Reeves asserts that the political left and the progressive/feminist ideologues need to recognize and accept that there are truly biological differences between men and women, and that admitting that is not a basis for justifying individual and systemic discrimination against women. Conversely, the political right, which has been capitalizing in recent years on reactionary anti-feminist feelings among many men, needs to realize that there’s no reclaiming the oppressive, hierarchical masculinity of yesteryear.  

 

The central challenge for all of us is to realize that it’s necessary to have both men and women adapt to the new reality of a society based on equality between men and women. It’s not a zero-sum game: we can support women and their rights, but also support the men too. But if the left (progressives) won’t deal with the very real problems and difficulties boys and men are currently facing in our society, then the opportunists and bad actors, recognizing the grievances and sense of loss that many men feel as their traditional roles have disappeared, will surely come up with their own bad solutions.  The rise of Donald Trump and the misogynistic alt-right demonstrate this risk all too clearly. 
 

In the last part of the book, Reeves begins to try to pull together recommendations for what should be done to help boys and men succeed. He starts with the equitable and obvious claim that for the past 50 years in the United States, a great deal has been done to advance women’s health, rights and status in society, and that's good.  But nothing of the sort is being done for men, and it should be.
 

He suggests that we need to promote more men in the HEAL professions (health, education, and other social service fields),  just as women in STEM has been pushed.  We should get rid of the stigma of “women’s professions”, and open up more employment and career opportunities for men in these types of work, where they are needed and could have good careers. This might also improve pay scales for women in those professions.
 

One of his other innovative ideas for improving boys' outcomes in education and later life, which has drawn a lot of both positive comment and criticism, is what he calls "Redshirting" the boys – holding boys back a year (after the girls) in starting school.  He argues this would provide a significant positive effect on giving boys better results, because in general their intellectual development is delayed compared to girls (another biological difference between the sexes which recently has been well-established through research). 

 

Parents could still have the choice to opt out of a general system change like this, based on the needs of their particular children. And Reeves expresses willingness to hear other proposals to help with the uneven rate of brain development between boys and girls, relative to education.  But he's trying to start a discussion of how to help boys do better in an educational process which is currently stacked against them, compared to the girls -- a worthwhile and timely objective.

 

This book is a fascinating exploration of the situation of modern boys and men in America, and what they need to be successful and productive humans in a world shared more fairly with girls and women. It's full of important and genuinely humane proposals and insights to make things better for all of us, as we try to create a society where everyone can have a better chance to realize their own hopes and dreams, whether male or female. 

 

The book (and this review) may well be controversial, and challenge many peoples' thoughts and feelings about the relationship between the sexes, and their respective roles, but it is well worth taking the time to read it, and think more deeply about these issues in the light of contemporary science and social science research. Very highly recommended.