Time management

Hat tip to Pharyngula for “The Story of My Life” from Crooked Timber.

Currently reading: The Secret of Life by Joseph Levine and David Suzuki

The Secret of Life: Redesigning the Living World, by Joseph Levine and David Suzuki, grew out of some Nova television shows about science. Joseph Levine began to realize how little the general public knows about science. He decided to write about some of the important and compelling discoveries that affect us all.

The book is out of date (1993) but nicely covers the basics of scientific developments in molecular biology and molecular evolution while I wasn’t paying attention (the 1970s and 1980s). There’s even a nice explanation of genetic engineering: what it is and what it is giving us (such as human insulin from bacteria instead of sheep insulin from slaughtered sheep).

It is generally clear writing with good analogies; but it scatters around too many metaphors. For example, it says that mutant fruit flies survive in the lab because they are “pampered and protected like kings and queens.” Surely no one is doing their nails and giving them hot baths and personal service. It would be clearer to say that they survive because they are “protected and fed” without alluding to royalty. On television, listeners would tune out the analogy because they’d be seeing someone in a lab handling bottles of fruit flies. But on paper, it’s distracting.

Evolution on the Colbert Report

Dr. Kenneth Miller is interviewed on the Colbert Report TV show and defends his position vis-a-vis creationism or “intelligent design” admirably.