The Dignity of a Woman

A Clarifying Insight from The Dignity of a Woman (女性の品格) by Mariko Bando, translated by James Vardeman

The book itself is moderately interesting, though the original is clearly targeted at women and the translation is clearly targeted at Japanese people who are studying English at a high level. In spite of the targeting and a bit of redundancy, the book struck me as mostly quite reasonable, though not startling. It mostly confirmed my understanding of a lot of things about Japan, but I couldn't really get the full meaning from it, especially in the sections that were discussing the nuances of appropriate Japanese expressions. Not just the use of Romaji, but also that the translator mostly left the examples of undesirable usages untranslated, though the examples of good use were generally translated.

However, the thing that struck me about the book enough to motivate this comment was something I realized near the end of the book. Not quite sure what triggered the crystallization of the obvious insight, but this is a topic that has been bothering me and nagging at me for quite a while. As I've aged, I've become increasingly appreciative of the advantages of marriage, and even thought that a so-called 'good wife' might well have influenced my own career in a positive direction.

What I finally realized in a clear way is that "Two against one isn't fair." Not exactly a big insight, but it suddenly explained a lot of the conservatism of companies, especially established companies. Within such a company there is a constant competition for promotion, and other things being equal, the family teams are going to win out. Not just any family team, but especially the teams in which one partner is completely dedicated to the success of the other partner. So for which teams is this recipe for success most likely to work? Obviously in most cases it is a certain category of conservative team in which the wife essentially sacrifices her own life towards the success of her husband.

The obvious long-term result is that each company tends to be 'captured' by that kind of man who is helped upwards by his wife. With this very conservative mindset in place at the top, the entire company naturally becomes more and more conservative over time. The only thing that really upsets the apple cart is when the company is so calcified and stiff that it collapses and dies.

That is bad enough in itself and explains why change is so difficult within most companies. However, it also augers badly for the future, since the Supreme Court recently increased the 'personhood' status of corporations. No matter what SCOTUS says, corporations are NOT people, but now the actual people who actually control those corporations, people who are mostly very conservative, will have much more freedom in using the corporations' money to support their own highly conservative views. It seems inevitable that the entire American society will soon be calcified to death--though I've already long suspected it was too late to worry much about it...

Seven Million Years

Obviously the rationale of this blog has effectively mutated to reflect the post-Dubya reality. Who cares what Dubya does or does not read these days? Not much, I'm sure. However, I suppose it's worth the observation that Dubya must reject such a book as this, which already starts by assuming the jury has come in on evolution, and evolution works, even for us. So now:

Reactions to and a Quickie Assessment of Seven Million Years: The Story of Human Evolution by Douglas Palmer

It was my reaction to page 119 that encouraged me to write about this book. That's where he rather crudely touched on the nature versus nurture debate. His presentation was muddled, but it seems he's mostly trying to come down on the side of nature without sufficient understanding of what it means to be a Turing Machine. Of course we are constrained by our physical reality, and that may even include certain predispositions in the genetically-driven neural wiring, but one of the essential things about Turing Machines is that they are in a sense 'universal'. We may not run certain programs as effectively as other programs, but I think we have almost complete freedom as to the 'mental programs' we choose to run. It's not that we are unconstrained, but even then we have the freedom to fight against every form of constraint.

In the concrete context of the book at that point, it got me to thinking about the crucial importance of clothing. He very much downplays the topic, with a single reference in the index and at least two overlooked and unindexed references in the text (since I had become sensitized to the word), but my realization at that point was that the simple act of adding or removing a garment would vastly increase the effective range of humans in comparison with any other animals--and do it at a speed that evolution can't possibly match. It takes some large number of generations to adjust the skin's coloration or the amount of hair, but a simple cape can achieve better effects at a speed that can match today's weather.

Ergo, I was already predisposed to regard the book as a rather superficial introduction to the topic. The bulk of the book was just a kind of trivial low-level biography of anthropologists--a list of who found what, when, and some mentions of who disagreed with which categorizations. Then the author seriously annoyed me during his superficial presentation of genetic analysis, which was treated as a rather minor topic late in the book--but polluted by the use of presidential politics in a distinctly inappropriate context.

Overall, a kind of trivial book. I don't like to say a nonfiction book was a waste of my time, but that's mostly how I wound up feeling about this book. I can't recommend it, even after struggling to think of an appropriate scenario...

A Collossal Failure of Common Sense

Review of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Incredible Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers by Larry McDonald with Patrick Robinson

This is really just a collection of notes on an interesting example of a kind of secondary historical source closely linked to a potential primary source. My primary conclusion is that I hope his ghost writer kept the notes, because those may well have some real historical value, but this book itself is way too slanted and defensive to take at 'face value'. My current hypothesis is that a lot of the juiciest bits are actually the result of the ghost writer combing through his recorded interviews looking for eye-catching and memorable snippets.

Therefore I'm going to focus mostly on the evidence of the slants in this review. The particular slant that really started to grate on my nerves was the dislike of poor people, which is interesting since the author includes a couple of brief biographical episodes involving his own experiences of poverty, and in those places the themes were that it wasn't his fault and that his poverty didn't mean he was stupid or a bad person or anything like that. However, when he's talking about OTHER poor people he says things like "NINJA" (for No Income, No Job, no Assets) (frequently used throughout the book), "betting the farm on poor people making their mortgage payments" (p. 172), "guys who haven't got any bread" (p. 172), "bush telegraph of the poor" (p. 174), "out-of-work no-hopers" (p. 200), and the stuff about "firebrand official Roberta Achtenburg" (p. 243), who briefly worked in the Clinton administration advocating against racial considerations in housing loans. I think this last one was actually part of an intended slant to blame it on Clinton, since he went out of his way to introduce her in the the prologue. I'm sure there were lots of other examples, but it took a while for the anti-poor-people thing to become annoying enough to start tagging it.

Another slant that bothered me was the strong assumption that greed is basically natural and good. I think it underlies the book to the degree that a better title would have been The Most Colossal Failure of Selfish Greed--So Far. The evidence is actually confused on this point, since sometimes he's criticizing it, while in other places he's praising it, especially when he's on the receiving end. A sampling of the mixed evidence includes "rabid desire for some decent yield" (p. 141) and "grotesque personal greed that has slithered through Wall Street" (p. 141), showing that he (or his ghost?) can talk about the unfair aspects, but most of the examples were on the other side of the ledger in terms of huge profits and bonuses. I guess the part of this that annoyed me most was the long passage on page 209 where he projects his own flaws on other people. The specific target in this passage was the slimy salesmen who were using high-pressure tactics to sell the bad mortgages in the first place. He never bothers to consider the mitigating factors there, most importantly that any poor suckers who were smart enough to think ahead would have been told that they could get out from under by selling the house at a higher price or just walk away in the worst case. Of course, most of the poor suckers were just too trusting and not even thinking that much--but he doesn't consider that aspect of it. However, the real hook is that the author's OWN work was focused around distressed assets and short selling. He even describes himself as a vulture and proud of his super-bear father. Hey, fool. You can't fairly criticize other people for profiting from the suffering of innocent people when you have been making millions of dollars doing it. Big time projection there, but at least he (or his ghost) sort of knows it's wrong.

In many places in the book he's trying to show how clever he is about catching onto scams and swindlers. Examples include "in its wisdom" (p. 171) where he is sarcastically attacking Congress for the Commodities Futures Modernization Act that legalized many of the most dangerous practices (but without ever mentioning any Lehman-supported lobbying for the law), "a red flag to a bull" on his own acumen in spotting troubled companies, and the passage on page 235 where he's trying to link himself into an early warning discussion with the then Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson. However, I think his claims of any cleverness collapse with statements like the page 43 claim that Bill Gates was deeply knowledgeable about computer programming (when actually Gates' main programing experience was just helping with an early BASIC interpreter for PCs), calling Time Magazine a "bastion of reality" (p. 157), and "beyond the pull of gravity" to demonstrate a total misunderstanding of how gravity works.

That gravity thing was actually in connection with one of his rather feeble attempts to provide conceptual scaling for large amounts of money, which also convinced me he isn't much of a mathematician. For that sort of thing you need to start by scaling the problem. I haven't run the numbers, but I suspect you could have made it work with a large office building gradually filling up with $100 bills, though you'd probably want to imagine the building as not tapering as you filled it up from the lower stories. Also contributing to this theme was his mention of large essentially imaginary debts of money that never existed, such as $26 trillion (p. 169) (for the CDS market in 2006) and $13.4 trillion (p. 201) (for mortgage-backed securities issued from 2001 to 2006). If scaling was his concern, I'd have expected some comparison to the relatively piddling national debt, but he didn't even consider the illusory nature of these valuations. You'd expect him to say it clearly, because he seems to understand there's a problem there, but he just doesn't get around to saying that the fundamental problem there is that you can always imagine an arbitrary price--but that doesn't mean anything if the actual value of the assets cannot possibly justify the speculative so-called prices. It really is amusing how they tried to insure themselves for the payment of impossible valuations, and then they acted so surprised when the entire bubble burst. Oh wait. He was so wise that he knew it all along, sort of...

Actually, as of this writing I've only read as far as page 246, but I'm quite confident the book isn't going to improve in the stretch run. This is mostly just a good example of why the participants in historical events can't really be trusted. One of the things the book establishes very clearly is that the author is a hustler, and this is the kind of book whose value falls off very rapidly over time, so the hustle in publishing it was justified (from his greedy perspective).

The Goldilock Enigma

Targeted Review of The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? by Paul Davies

My original intention was to review this book as a comment appended to my earlier review of The God Delusion, where Professor Dawkins mentioned in passing that Professor Davies was a winner of the Templeton Prize. However, my intention for brevity got carried away, and the comment ran too long, resulting in this new post. (Comments are limited to 4,000-odd characters.)

In his book Professor Dawkins criticizes scientists who accept such prize money from the Templeton organization. He basically feels that such scientists are giving an aura of scientific credibility to religion, and that this is basically harmful. Based on this newer book I doubt that Professor Davies would receive the award at this late date, though they probably won't try to revoke it. He basically includes a fuzzy and weak god hypothesis as one of the possible 'ultimate explanations' for the universe, but merely as one of the options on a long list of possible ultimate explanations--and he explicitly states that he does not favor it.

However, my main reason for reacting to the book is that I feel I have to reject several points of the book rather strongly. Overall, the book is a good overview of modern astrophysics and the current theories of the early universe, but I think it mostly fails in its largest purposes for two major reasons.

The first reason is that there is some serious confusion about cause and effect. Or perhaps it should be dismissed as a form of circular reasoning? The central enigma of the book is that the universe is just right for life, and that seems amazing to Professor Davies. Actually, it works the other way around--life is adaptive and will attempt to adapt as well as possible to the universe as the universe is. He actually doesn't do a very good job of explaining all of the remarkable fits, but he does acknowledge the problem in a couple of places where he remembers to say "life as we know it" or something along those lines. That's exactly the point and the problem. If the universe were different, then life would also be different--but that life would still evolve to become extremely well adapted to that changed universe. It is not that the universe is trying to be perfect for life, but rather that evolutionary pressure drives life to be as perfect as possible for its environment in THIS universe.

The second major reason I think he fails in his search for the ultimate origins is even harder to describe succinctly... Should I call it projection? It is a fundamental human characteristic to seek explanations even where NO explanation exists, but he simply wants to assume that there is some deep explanation for the universe. Actually, the assumption of causation is just a useful heuristic that helps humans deal with the excessive complexity of the real world. We try to seek meanings in things because that helps us deal effectively with the world. This is a pragmatic justification, because much of the time the assumption of causation is useful. (In accord with the Dawkins book, it is precisely when such a search for causation fails that we wind up with such things as irrational and unprovable religious explanations.)

My constructed example begins with his own example of the birds. If we see a live bird fly by, we can reasonably assume that the bird is behaving in the way that birds do and for the reasons that the bird has. We might not fully understand the 'causation' of the bird's precise path, but we understand it well enough for our purposes, such as hunting the bird. However, when a dead bird 'flies' past us, we quickly realize there is something wrong, and there must be some other cause at work here. In the real world, the dead bird fails the test as the cause of its own flight, but we quickly understand we need to consider the situation more carefully. Much more important to our lives if, rather than a bird, the flying object is something dangerous like a stone. Did the stone fall off of a cliff? If so, we should move away from the cliff, because gravity might cause another stone to fall. Did the stone come from where another person is standing? Maybe the stone was actually thrown as an attack, and the real cause is that the thrower is planning to kill me and take over my cave and spouse? Though I deliberately picked a negative example, you can just as well argue that this is the ultimate source of Kant's Categorical Imperative and the deeper source of ethical behavior. It is actually quite reasonable to assume that other humans are similar to us and that they share our own motivations and will act in similar ways for similar reasons. However, though it makes sense to assume other humans might share our motives and that this causes them to behave in ways that we think we can explain, it is a very strong form of projection to assume that the universe as a whole has to have such a motivation.

Part of his attempt to justify his position on this issue involved observer effects, but this was one of the places where the book didn't do a very good job. In particular, his attempt to argue that the observer could force the photon to choose its displayed nature struck me as very unpersuasive. Perhaps my technical background is just too weak, but he didn't convince me that any choice was needed, and I'm still willing to believe that the photon can be both a particle and a wave at the same time.

Another area (but less important) where his presentation struck me as weak was his treatment of velocity in expanding space. I felt like he needed to at least acknowledge the effects of the expansion of space on the distance traveled... The space that the light wave passed through at some past time was much smaller, and that space has since expanded, but he seemed to be treating it as a linear constant relative to the present time.

However, as already noted, I felt the book was mostly a good overview of modern cosmological theories. It was mostly in the 'ultimate' speculations of the last few chapters that things seemed to break down for me.

365 Ways to Become a Millionaire

Another intrusion of a book that Dubya might actually read. This one's so simple he could probably even understand most of it. It reminded me quite a bit of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad book to the point that I considered reviewing it as a comment on that review...

A brief and critical review of 365 Ways to Become a Millionaire (Without Being Born One) (Revised Edition) by Brian Koslow

Consider it a kind of predictive review? Based on reading the book, I have a number of predictions about the author, though I'm unlikely to take the time to test them.

First, an observation about the title: The title is a lie. Doesn't bode very well for the rest of the book, eh? Actually, the book is a list of trivial tips and bits of advice. Many of the entries say that they will lead to more money, but there is nothing in the book that could, even with major stretching, be interpreted as an actual "way" to make a million dollars, and there are certainly not "365 Ways" here. Wear expensive shoes because some people will notice? Give us a break.

There are three main themes of the advice in the book. One theme can be summarized as "be a good person" for various reasons that will contribute to your ability to earn more money. The second theme is "watch for for opportunities and be prepared to seize them". The third theme is to be aware of spending money, which is usually in the form of tips about how to save small amounts of it. However this third theme is also confused by advice about when to spend more money, usually for the sake of making a favorable impression on someone. The author would probably argue for a fourth theme about managing people effectively, but his advice on that topic is so confusing and contradictory that I can't figure out which part to focus on as a possible theme.

The substance of the book could be effectively condensed into 5 or 10 pages--but that wouldn't have made much money for the author or his publisher, the Wall Street Journal (which was also plugged within the book (as an unnamed business newspaper)). Actually the best summary of the book is probably the author's own comment on page 148, in entry #304, where he reports that the book is essentially a collection of verbal notes he recorded as he was walking to work one summer. He loves his electronic gadgets, evidently--except for his advice against watching television, which is probably the best tip in the book.

In summary, I'm sure glad I only borrowed it for a few days from the library. I was a skeptic before I read it, but my current conclusion is that the author is basically a wheeler dealer and legal con man. He's smart enough to avoid overtly criminal enterprises, but mostly just a sharp dealer who wouldn't want to talk about how he made his first million (and he never mentions any related details in the book), but who decided the easy and safe path to making more millions was by teaching other people how to fake sincerity.

A parting editorial comment: I'm pretty sure that he didn't even read his own book all that closely because I'm almost sure that entry #270 on page 130 was almost identical to an earlier entry. I actually went to Google Books to check, but I wasn't at all surprised to discover that no preview was available. Even the snippets would have deflated the purchase value of this book to zero.

A Short Comment on Interventions by Noam Chomsky

I just wanted to record a short reaction to the last part of his essay "The Social Security Non-Crisis" in this book. Though everything he says on the topic is sound, I myself feel that the most important argument for social security is one that he doesn't mention. Meaningful 'social security' frees people to enjoy their lives and spend their money while they are young enough to enjoy spending it, and spending that money and living more happily is also going to stimulate the economy by increasing the demands for goods and services that actually contribute to the demand for producing economic goods.

The REALLY free market alternative is that you should be trying to save lots of money while you are young, you should live like a total miser, because once you live one day beyond what you can pay for, you are free to start starving. I think the free market version works poorly because accumulating money is not a useful activity in itself, but more importantly because no one can see the future, so it is fundamentally impossible to guess how much money needs to be saved. I suppose the free market extremists could argue that everyone should try to save enough to live off the interest, but that fails the universality principle (as Chomsky usually refers to the Golden Rule). If everyone had a million dollars, the resulting devaluation of money is the same as if no one had a million dollars, so we're back to square one.

In general, and especially considering how upset his adversaries are, Chomsky's writing is remarkably boring and tedious. Not the consequences of his reasoning, which are often quite troubling, but in his presentation he simply focuses on very mundane facts and rarely resorts to anything resembling fancy analysis. Most of the time he just changes the actors to expose the hypocrisy. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is how clearly he separates words from the realities those words claim to describe--but perhaps that is only fitting for a linguist with such deep insight into the nature of language itself.

The God Delusion

Definitely a book of the sort that Dubya would never touch. However, religious fanatics (like Dubya) are still welcome--to the trap, as will soon be explained... (By the way, I'm still reading a lot these days, but not reviewing many of them here, mostly in light of the apparent lack of interest as evidenced by the scarcity of comments.)

Analytic Review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Much of this review is going to be scientifically critical of the book, even though I think it's an excellent read and well worth your time. If the search engines are properly doing their stuff, then I believe this review may most likely be found most often by religious fanatics desperately looking for ammunition to use against Professor Dawkins. Well, plenty of ammunition to be found here, but it's fundamentally a trap, so I feel obliged to give you fair warning.

To any religious fanatics among the readers: In order to really understand the criticisms here, you need to adopt a scientific frame of mind, which is fundamentally poisonous to your religious frame of mind. Just parroting the arguments won't work. If you don't actually understand the arguments, it will only take a few moments of discussion to expose you as a mindless parrot, though it's more likely that you'll mangle the arguments even before you can finish presenting them. To actually use these arguments, you have to understand them, and to understand them, you would have to destroy the foundation of your own religious fanaticism.

Let me try to suggest an analogous approach that you religious fanatics should be able to appreciate. Imagine that you really wanted to study the merits of competing religions. The scientific approach to your religious faith would require you to perform some kind of scientific experiment, such as comparing your religion to some other religion. The most obvious experiment would be to abandon faith in your current religion and start to believe in some other religion. It won't work to just study the rituals or watch how the members behave and join in. In your faith-based reality, you must HAVE the faith or the faith has no meaning to you. Of course, you can't do this, because that would mean that your original faith had become wrong--until you switched back to it. However, you can't even imagine doing that kind of experiment because 'faith doesn't work that way'.

You religious fanatics are crucially unable to deal with the reality of truth in the limited way we humans can deal with that truth, which is also a partial and evolving truth--and therefore you can't actually deal with the reality of scientific criticism. You think probabilistic estimates of truth are a weakness, whereas they are just a reflection of our human limitations and the way the real world works. The point of science is precisely that we can get better--but we can never become perfect. We can acquire more knowledge, but we can never acquire absolute knowledge of the actual world. (The world of mathematics is a special case--but as noted below, it lacks the attribute of existence.) In contrast, the point of faith is to pretend to perfection--which always breaks down to some simplistic and empty shortcut, such as 'faith in Jesus' or 'the Bible is the inerrant word of God'.

If you are a religious fanatic, you might as well stop now. You'll never be able to understand or use these criticisms. Dawkins would apparently argue for trying 'to save you' from your ignorance, but I regard that as basically preposterous. I think the mind of a religious fanatic is damaged beyond any hope of freedom or wisdom. (Shades of Dijkstra's reaction to BASIC?) In the best case, you might switch to a less harmful form of fanaticism. Your ignorance is proud and willful--where 'proud' is defined by your 'saved' status and 'willful' is your own will. I'm reminded of a religious fanatic I know who likes to projectively blame the willful part on the so-called will of god. God's chosen people, eh? (What a clever meme, but the book's treatment of memes is also good, and I won't comment further on that topic.)

I also must confess that I'm quite unconcerned about wasting your religiously fanatical time in some relatively harmless reading if you choose to ignore my polite warning. Most religious fanatics believe in miracles, though I'd regard it as a kind of miracle if I 'reached' the mind of any sincere fanatic.

Now let's go back to the more general target readership, which in the case of this typical blog, is just a projection of the author's own style of thinking. I claim to be a rational scientist of sorts, so I hope that a rational scientist will be entertained or even enlightened.

Time for an overall summary: I think this book is quite good, handling many complicated topics with deftness and some humor. In most places I'm in complete agreement with the author. I think, there are a couple of places that could be improved, and only one place where I think substantial rewriting is called for. That's a short passage of a couple of pages, and in such a large book, that's quite a good job by the author. Going a bit beyond the scope of the book, I would also like to comment on the fundamental logical collapse of religion into evolution.

Mostly for the sake of politeness, I had better clarify my usage of "religious fanatic". One of the weaknesses of this book is that it seems to basically lump all religious people together, and it seems the only metric of interest is whether they are more or less harmful. The basic view in the book is that all of the religious followers are just harmful.

In contrast, I think there are legitimately religious people who are NOT fanatics and who are basically harmless (with apologies to the shade of Douglas Adams as admired by the author). My view is actually closely related to what Dawkins addresses under the label "NOMA", for "non-overlapping magisteria". The book addresses this topic fairly well, so all I'll note is that there are some religious people who can accept the world as it is, even including science and logic, which uniformly forces them to reject any literal interpretation of the founding documents of any of the conventional religions, obviously including the Bible and going right up to the latest and most amusing Scientology tracts. Such people basically hold that there is another sphere of meaning beyond the ken of science, even though most of them also try to pick and choose some conventionally religious elements to fit into their larger view. However, the sincerely religious people of this ilk are not defensive about their beliefs, and very few of them would even be motivated to read this book or its reviews. (At the same time, I have to note that such people seem very scarce, at least in my experience. Also, I think that a super-intelligent god would have been aware of information theory before we discovered it in the last century, and such a god would therefore have used information theory to make sure any messages were not mangled in transmission.)

The topic of atheists actually leads to one of my anecdotal disagreements. He argues that atheists are not religious fanatics, and that agnostics are just fence sitters. I have actually known a very devout atheist, and I would not be so kind. He was just as fanatical as any religious fanatic I can recall, and with no better justification. As regards the agnostic side of this question, Professor Dawkins regards himself as an agnostic, though very close to the atheist end of the scale of religious belief. I also regard myself as an agnostic, though basically because a negation cannot be proven. At the same time, I'm convinced you need to use extremes of mental gymnastics to imagine such a diabolical god who would lie to our faces on such a scale. Should we give some credit to the Christians who blame Satan while somehow exonerating God for his poor delegation skills?

The part of the book that reviews the various arguments for the existence of god is quite good and seems complete (though my own academic studies of these topics were many years ago). He also does a good job of surveying the arguments against the existence of any god, though he doesn't actually mention one of my current favorites: Most of the so-called mainstream religions insist that man was created in God's image while at the same time insisting that God is perfect and powerful. However, given how imperfect we human beings are, there has to be some kind of contradiction there. I can actually partially resolve the paradox by considering the mathematical domain of mental models, say of the triangle or of a perfect line in Euclidean space, but the problem of that approach is that existence is NOT one of the attributes of such mental models, and even physical space itself is ultimately curved and 'imperfect'. We all have awareness of that sort of shadow of perfection, but the real world cares not. It simply is as it is (which is broadly addressed in the book under the topic of the anthropic principle).

One of the specific arguments that bothered me in spite of his disclaimers and vague references to competing hypotheses was the notion of evolutionary selection in favor of gullibility in children. Rather I would argue for evolutionary selection in favor of being lovable, where obedience to the parents is only one of the favored attributes of being lovable. I regard generalized belief in authority figures as an extension of the child's faith in the parents, and especially faith in the 'godlike' primary caregiver. It's basically hard to raise children, and lovable children have a much better chance of making it, even today, though much more so in the hunter-gatherer days in which virtually all of our own evolutionary development took place. (As far as the development of our culture is concerned over the last few thousand years, our own evolutionary development is essentially negligible, as I've noted elsewhere in relation to the Fermi Paradox. I actually was lucky enough to persuade Bill Maher to ask a related question to Professor Dawkins on his Real Time program, if you like tenuous personal links.) The medical evidence is that most children didn't even survive their first year, no matter how lovable they were and how much their parents actually loved them. I do acknowledge that seems to be a naturally rebellious period in adolescence, but I suspect that is probably desirable in an evolutionary sense for disrupting nuclear families and encouraging genetic diversity--but the child's religious views have been determined and solidified well before that point.

What I regard as a major area of disagreement in the book involves his Chapter 9, where he thinks there is a special and anomalous status around such usages as "a Christian child" or "a Jewish child". He wants to treat this as a misleading label of belief, and argue in favor of such usages as "a child of Christian parents". However, it seems fairly obvious that it is more a matter of depth and that this usage is similar to some other labels that he does not consider. He compares the religious labels to other belief-based labels that would not be used for children, but he does not consider any examples of deeper labels such as "an American child", "a black child", "a Mexican child", or "an immigrant child". The essential boundary here clearly seems to be the presumption of inherited traits. Few people change their nationality from whatever they were born with, and few people change their religion from whatever their family practiced. He wants to change our consciousness in hopes of influencing people, so that more people would be aware of the possibility of changing their religious beliefs, but I think linguistic usage will follow reality, and I would even predict that there are cultures and languages where his recommended usage already prevails.

Now for what I regard as the largest weakness of the book, a topic which he only addresses indirectly, mostly under the subtopics of 'imaginary friends' (A.A. Milne's Binker) and consolation. I would put it as 'people are weak, and they know it, and they actively desire faith to compensate for their personal weakness'. Faith also addresses the reality that they are also intellectually lazy and foolish, though most of them are less willing to admit to those traits. In particular, I'm reminded of a religious acquaintance who boasts about 'her strength' based on her belief in having a superior crutch. She thinks she has a super-intelligent crutch in the form of a god who has chosen to save her, while she ever-so-humbly professes her unworthiness. Certainly not an unusual encounter, but merely a relatively recent one.

Another way to look at this weakness is that it's quite hard to be a really good and objective scientist. In a complicated world, we don't have the time to check the evidence for everything, so we have to start by taking a lot of things on faith. Sometimes we decide which things, but often not. From this viewpoint, I'd say that there are basically two attributes of scientists. The less important one is the willingness to accept new evidence. That may sound strange, but I think there are a lot of good-enough scientists who are just running on their hunches. In many of those cases, their hunches are well founded and they achieve solid results, but in plenty of cases the main thing they accomplish is to disprove their own assumptions, even if they personally refuse to admit their mistakes. However, the more important attribute of the rare great scientist is an ability to figure out WHICH evidence to search for. Sometimes it involves looking at old evidence differently. In that case, the evidence exists, but no one else can see its true meaning. After all, the ultimate meaning of any evidence is in how we interpret it. The important thing is that the scientist will look at the actual meaning of evidence (even when it is just an improvement on earlier interpretations), while the religious fanatic is looking for 'absolute' meaning as a handout from some god.

There is another major weakness in the book that involves non-religious evil, specifically related to his short section about Hitler and Stalin. This is probably the only place where I felt his argument was quite weak and incomplete. The crucial aspect of both Hitler and Stalin was that they were religious fanatics, but the followers of new cults, not established religions. As much as the old mainstream religions hate the concept of evolution, the process of creating new religions has changed over the years, along with the kinds of religions that are created.

The big-picture perspective is that many new cults have similar periods of militant extremism, often associated with their transition to the status of an established religion. From a sociological and historical perspective, the mechanism is pretty simple to understand. Initially the cult is harmless, most often dismissed as a lunatic fringe. As the cult grows, it may become a threat to the existing society, usually to the religious institutions but sometimes to the existing government itself. If the threat is imaginary or weak, then the cult will soon be crushed and disappear, but in many cases the threat is quite real, and the suppression of the cult fails. Quite often the self-defense period includes a militaristic response by the cult, initially just for survival, but then that same successful military organization is often used for aggressive expansion. There are many examples throughout history, and Professor Dawkins even cited some of them, though he didn't consider them from this perspective. He did consider the technological ramifications, however, and it was technology that made the scale of these recent crimes possible. It would have been hard for Hitler to create a factory for the mass production of death until after Henry Ford had created the concept of a factory for the mass production of cars... The technology remains morally neutral, and we can only speculate what Genghis Khan would have done with a nuclear weapon. (At the same time, I would argue that technology is, on the long-term average, more often used for good purposes than evil ones. The latest example is the mostly successful handling of the H1N1 influenza, which I believe had the potential to be far worse than the Spanish Flu epidemic after WW I.)

The other aspect is the change in the kind of religions which appear in the form of cults. My semi-humorous version is that "the standards of historical scholarship were very lax in those days" when the old mainstream religions were crafted. The book does talk a little bit about the historical process of editing the New Testament, but I'd have liked to see more about the Old Testament and the Koran, too. In particular, I've read that most of the Old Testament seems to have been assembled into its current form by two editors, with the first one focused on the five main books of the Old Testament, mostly drawing on Sumerian sources, before the more famous 'Redactor' did the final editing. However, those sorts of stories and fables just wouldn't work these days, and modern religions have very different bases, though several recent religions (such as the Mormons) have copied much of the archaic style. Religions like Lenin's flavor of communism or Hitler's Nazi Party were mostly economic religions, but they were following the traditional historical trajectory of rapid growth followed by suppression leading to a militaristic and extremist response.

Covering these topics properly would have greatly extended the book in this non-biological direction, so perhaps that is why Professor Dawkins treated the topic in such a shallow manner. However, I want to go even further and consider a fundamental paradox that I feel should be addressed. If the religious people insist on rejecting science and the use of our human intelligence to deal rationally with the world, then they condemn us to follow Mother Nature's path--the path of evolution. In the normal course of evolution, there is no planning. Every population struggles at the edge of starvation. The evolutionary process is to let them breed as much as possible, which naturally maximizes the evolutionary competition leading to improvement--though Ma Nature doesn't see it that way. Life is just about finding new niches to exploit, and Ma Nature doesn't worry about the casualties. Plenty more life where that came from--but it's a mighty tough life for those that are living it. (Give the Christian Scientists credit for illogical consistency--but they'll never catch on more widely. Most religious fanatics are quite willing to rationalize to allow for the use of antibiotics over God's will.)

As I was working on this review I checked Google Books (in my Internet lobe), trying to locate a specific quote in the book (only to discover that their page numbers don't match my edition). However, I think it is worth noting that a number of the books I did find were religiously motivated attacks on this book. Professor Dawkins has evidently touched quite a nerve. Actually, he mentions some of his critics within the book itself. I was actually kind of amazed that the fanatics think they can address reason with faith. What are they so afraid of? Yes, I'm personally sure that objective reality will eventually grind their fantasies to dust, but that's the way of the world, after all. (I was not amazed that none of those critics apparently believed in their own criticisms strongly enough to make their books freely available via Google Books. Then again, I'd be unlikely to read one, even if it was free. Right now I'm reading a Buddhist book, which is evidently a response to that popular Christian book about the purpose-driven life.)

Just as evidence of the closeness of my reading, I'll note that on page 175 the word "unparsimonious" was spelled incorrectly, without the first "n". I also was interested by his cryogenic freezing comments on page 402, in conjunction with a note I made considering death as the loss of a unique and inexplicably beautiful pattern.

Once again, to review my overall conclusions, I think this book is an interesting and thoughtful summary of many complicated topics. If you're interested in these topics, and I admit that I am, then you'll find it a good use of your time. However, I'm somewhat befuddled what all the fuss is about.