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Author: Jared M. Diamond

In “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,” Diamond answers a fundamental question that shaped human history: What enabled some groups of people to colonize, obliterate, or otherwise exert substantial influence over other groups? One popular belief is that some groups of people are simply more intelligent, more aggressive, better humans than others. Diamond counters this racist argument by showing that in fact, a completely plausible explanation for cultural domination can be traced back to purely geographic origins, namely access to large, domestic-able mammals, high-nutrient, domestic-able crops, and ability to spread ideas, technologies, and information readily between local cultures. These ultimate factors can explain the proximate factors that enabled cultural dominance, which range from weapons, disease resistance, technologies, and several others which Diamond calls “Guns, Germs, and Steel.”

While also noticeable on smaller scales, a suitable candidate with which to clarify Diamond’s ultimate factors is the case of Eurasian cultures subjugating the native cultures of Africa, Australia, and the Americas for the most part (There are some exceptions). At at proximate level, this is because the European and Asian cultures were much more technologically advanced, endowing them with ability to cross seas and travel to the remaining continents, along with advanced weaponry and unfamiliar epidemic diseases that decimated native populations. A central question in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is: Why didn’t the people of Africa, Australia and the Americas develop advanced technologies and subjugate the Eurasians? The answer lies in Diamond’s ultimate factors.

Eurasia had three key geographic advantages over the other continents that can explain the relative advancement of Eurasia with respect to the others. First, Eurasia was teeming with large mammals that could readily be domesticated whereas Australia and Africa were completely devoid of such mammals and the Americas enjoyed only the llama, which was much less useful as a domestic animal than the horse, sheep, cow, and pig. In my opinion this is the most prominent reason, as domestic animals, allowed for more efficient agriculture resulting in higher population densities, division of labor, and consequently advanced technology. The second factor is that of the major agricultural crops that humans currently farm, the majority of them, and the most nutritive ones, are native to Eurasia, so agricultural societies were much more successful in Eurasia, in comparison to the other continents. Lastly, the fact that Eurasia’s major axis is east-west versus north-south allows facilitates spread of ideas and technologies, while the Americas, Africa, and Australia are highly isolated by deserts and mountain ranges, and climatically very diverse. The fairly consistent climate of Eurasia, for example allowed the easy spread of farming knowledge, which lead to many self-sufficient farming populations that shared innovations and ideas, resulting in a highly advanced societies.

The “domesticable mammals” factor is one I had not considered before, but now I think that it is one of the most important. One must ask, “Why didn’t the other continents have domesticable mammals?” Interestingly, among the geographic factors (i.e. the Eurasian plains were more habitable for them), is the fact that when people first migrated to The Americas and Australia, they encountered several large animals that were unaccustomed to being hunted, because they evolved in safe habitats. The hunter-gatherers quickly found these animals as easy prey and exterminated them, obviously lacking the foresight that these animals could be crucial for later advancement. A causal factor here is that humans arrive in Eurasia much earlier than they arrived in Australia and the Americas so the wild animals in Eurasia had the chance to co-evolve with humans and develop defenses, making them much harder to exterminate. When humans arrived at the other two continents, they were already skilled hunters, but the animals were defenseless, leading to their rapid extermination. Once these continents had no domesticable mammals, they were destined to fall behind the Eurasians.

It is also interesting to think about how scientists, archaeologists, and historians have been able to piece together enough information to make these kinds of arguments. On one hand, a lot of it is very speculative. However, a lot of it is based on completely reasonable, well justified interpretations of archaeological evidence. One particularly interesting technique for studying population origins and migrations, which Diamond mentions and uses, relies on evolutionary linguistics. Essentially, people can trace cultural origins by studying the evolutionary history of languages. This has been used to characterize the migration of the Bantu people from West Africa into central and south Africa, as well as their interactions and for the most part their conquest over the Pygmies and Khoisan people of those areas. I think it is amazing that language undergoes the same evolutionary process as organisms and that it can be used for these sorts of studies.

To wrap up, Diamond makes clear, eloquent arguments against the racist view that cultural dominances is a product of human superiority, showing that instead, almost all conquests in history can be traced to geographic factors. “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is very multidisciplinary, combining elements of archaeology, history, and various subdisciplines of biology, into a pretty interesting read. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in any of those subjects.

Author: Jonah Lehrer

In “How We Decide,” Lehrer recounts many of the scientific developments in neuroscience that contribute to our current understanding of how humans make choices and decisions. This discussion inevitably leads to philosophical topics like rationality, ethics, and morality so Lehrer also presents popular philosophical ideas that can be reconciled with modern scientific thought. And, of course, as a pop-sci book, “How We Decide” is riddled with cute, relatable anecdotes that help convey scientific and philosophical ideas. All of this come together in a fairly quick, interesting read with some nice takeaways about the way humans think and the trade offs between emotional and rational thinking.

Essentially, the thesis is that our brain is composed of a rational, calculating part and a more emotional part, and that these two are always competing to make decisions, but each is better at specific things. For example, the emotional brain is like a supercomputer; it is much better at making complex decisions, but it suffers from several historical drawbacks (risk and loss aversion among others) that make it worse than the rational brain at making simple decisions. On the other hand, the rational brain is great for making decisions where only a few factors come into play, but it has much less computational capacity so it struggles in the face of complexity. So, each is good for specific things, and we can improve our choices by thinking about how we make decisions and making efforts to use the “correct” part of the brain, depending on the situation.

The interplay between the two brains often leads to very interesting psychological phenomena, several that Lehrer mentions in his book. One example that I found particularly interesting is the ability to rationalize decisions/opinions/beliefs made by the emotional brain. This can come at the cost of ignoring glaring evidence in support of the contrary, and is something that we all need to be aware of. If one expresses certainty about something, one risks not being open to contradictory evidence, and this can be very dangerous. Lehrer talks about how it almost lead to the fall of Israel in the Yom Kippur War; the administration simply refused to believe that the Egyptians and Syrians would attack, despite the glaring evidence that they would.

It is also worth discussing how we can figure anything out about the neuroscience aspect. Lehrer mentions many experiments where people are placed in MRI machines and asked to make decisions. The activations measured in the MRI give insight to what brain regions are involved (often in combat with each other) in making decisions. However, these and other psychological experiments can only reveal so much, like what regions are involved in decision making, and cannot really reveal the function of each region. To gain insight here, neuroscientists and psychologists study patients with damaged brains, such as psychopaths. For example, people without properly functioning dopamine pathways have trouble learning from their mistakes. Others with damaged emotional brains have trouble making even the simplest decisions. And psychopaths specifically have trouble imagining how others would view their actions (called mirroring) so they lack any sense of ethics and can rationalize practically anything. Lehrer talks about all of these scientific developments and how they contributed to our still very incomplete understanding of the brain.

To summarize, “how we decide” is quintessential popular science. I personally learned quite a lot from the book, but I don’t know much about philosophy, psychology or neuroscience, and from my understanding, most of the knowledge is pretty basic. At the same time, the book is a quick read, so not much is lost if you don’t gain much from it.

Author: Orson Scott Card

One of the classic sci-fi novels, Ender’s Game is the first of novel in the Ender saga. The novel is probably more suitable for younger readers but it is a fun, quick read and there are certainly some interesting takeaways.

The novel follows Ender, a child prodigy as he is trained to command the human army against an alien species called the buggers. He is put through taxing trial after trial, either intentionally as part of his training or inadvertently by his peers (who are all older than him and prone to bullying). Throughout his supervisors watch him cope with stress and constant fatigue, but never intervene so that he learns he cannot count on anyone looking out for him. Ultimately, Ender flourishes, and potentially one can learn a lot from his experiences, i.e. how he deals with fatigue, antagonistic peers, and high-pressure situations.

I think there are a lot of useful leadership skills that can be learned from Ender. He quickly gets placed in charge of several cadets and has to deal with internal dissent, egotism and a general bad attitude toward him as a leader. He learns how to lead by example, and while many of his cadets despise him, it is clear that they all respect his abilities as a soldier. Later, when he is places in charge of a team of novices, he instills in them a strong drive to improve their fighting skills. In part this is because he is such a talented fighter (leading by example) but also because he uses psychological tactics to motivate his team. In this way, the novel was a interesting lesson in leadership, which I think carries over from fiction to reality.

Author: Rory Stewart

I actually finished reading this book about a month ago, but I’ve been too busy with work stuff to actually gather my thoughts and write a review. At any rate, here it is:

My mom recommended this book to me when I was at home a couple of months ago and I must say it completely lived up to her recommendation. The book is Stewart’s retelling of his walk through Afghanistan, from Herat in the west to Kabul in the east in the winter following 9/11, and it is really amazing to learn about Afghan culture and life during that chaotic time. Despite being such a instrumental part of modern history, I had never thought about or imagined what life in Afghanistan would be like (apart from reading a couple of books like “Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns”) and reading “The Places in Between” really gave me a good look at something really foreign to me. While most books about Afghan culture (like Hosseini’s books) deal more with life in the cities, Stewart’s spends most of his time in the hills and mountains of central Afghanistan, and as a result, his book gives the reader a deeper look into rural Afghan life then really anything I’ve seen before.

And this is quite interesting, because from his portrayal, it seems like most of the people he encounters don’t care about the turmoil in the world (which at that time was focused on Afghanistan), but are more concerned with regional and ethnic conflicts and simply placing food on the table. It’s almost as if they don’t have the time to worry about the world, when they have to figure out how to survive the severe winters (which in the mountains are quite incredible) and when they have to deal with constant attacks from neighbors and other ethnic groups. This issues hit much closer to home for them and are simply more important than whatever conflict is going on between the US and Afghanistan at the time.

For most of the nights of his journey, Stewart finds a village and asks for hospitality in the form of food and shelter. His conversations with the various hosts he stays with reveal bits and pieces of Afghan history that are really fascinating. Villagers tell Stewart (and consequently the reader) about the civil war and the Taliban era, with it’s strict laws and harsh punishments, the Mujahideen and Soviet involvement, which was again a dangerous time, and even about the medieval era, which I had never even heard about. I had never really learned much about Afghan history and learning about it through Stewart’s conversations was really interesting.

At the same time the story has a lot of excitement, as Stewart runs into trouble over and over again on his journey. In this sense, it is really a story, intertwined with the historical and cultural aspects I wrote about above. I’m not really that interested in history/culture but, all in all, Stewart’s account kept me quite entertained. I really enjoyed reading “The Places in Between” and highly recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in travelling, the middle east, or history.

Author: Michael Pollan

I wrote last year about another Michael Pollan book called “Food Rules” and as it turns out that book is more or less a condensed version of “In Defense of Food.” “Food Rules” is essentially a list of rules and guidelines for healthy eating, prescribed by Pollan. In “In Defense of Food,” he spends more time detailing and motivating these rules by delving into the history and politics surrounding how we eat.

One of the main themes of Pollan’s book is that nutrition science, which pretty much has complete influence on how we eat, has yet to produce convincing results about what are the right things to eat. This is fundamentally because the biological and chemical complexity of the things we eat and our digestive systems prevent controlled experiments that can yield sound conclusions. For political and economic reasons, “results” of these nutrition studies have tremendous influence on the things we eat even though they are not conclusive, because the food industry can profit from telling us what and what not to eat. Pollan gives example after example of nutrition studies that prescribe certain eating habits, only to be contradicted later (For example, margarine is a classic example).

Clearly, as can be seen by rising levels of obesity, diabetes and other food-related health issues, nutrition science isn’t working. Yet, Pollan doesn’t believe that nutrition science is a complete failure, just that the systems it is trying to understand are beyond our current level of comprehension. Science may one day reduce healthy eating habits into a list of vitamins and minerals that we should consume, but it just hasn’t gotten to that point yet.

Until then, we should stick with what we know to work, namely the traditional diets of our ancestors. Our ancestors (as recently as our parents and grandparents) rarely purchased manufactured food-type items, they ate what Pollan calls real “food.” Through several examples, he shows that almost any traditional diet is an improvement over the modern American diet. One amazing experiment he mentions involves taking several Australian aborigines living more modern lifestyles and moving them to the outback for a brief period of time. Soon after reverting to their traditional diet, many of their pretty serious health issues subsided. Pollan also writes about other experiments of this kind, most with similar results.

So how do we revert to our traditional diets? Pollan’s suggestion (which he also stresses in “Food Rules”) is to “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” He goes into detail about how to do this with tips and rules of the “Food Rules” nature. Things like “Shop on the border of the grocery store” and “Don’t buy things with ingredients you can’t pronounce” are common rules of thumb that he prescribes for healthy eating. As I wrote in my previous Pollan post, I think most of his rules make sense, but I often don’t have the time/money to follow them. One thing that I realized recently is that American’s spend a much smaller fraction of their salary on foods than do many other nationalities; I don’t think following Pollan’s rules would put my food spending over that of everyone else worldwide.

I really enjoyed this book. I liked reading about the science (or lack of science) around both the nutrition studies, and the more macro lifestyle studies that Pollan writes about. These experiments did a great job of backing up Pollan’s arguments, which I also felt came through very clearly. I also felt that he did a better job of motivating and justifying his rules and guidelines than he did in “Food Rules” (which is understandable given that one is a condensed version of the other).