Venki Ramakrishnan. Why we die.

    Nobel Prize winner V. Ramakrishnan (Biology and Medicine, 2009? for the study of ribosomes) is a first-class mind. He refutes most of the myths about mortality. When there is a theory of mortality, he explains that the things are more complicated than meets the eye. All in all, we don't know why we die. There are many mechanisms of aging and apoptosis on the cellular and sub-cellular level but none can consistently explain longevity of organisms across the species.

    Some of the reasoning of Ramakrishnan is deficient. For instance, similarly to Dawkins, he argues that group selection is impossible because in the case of mutation beneficial for the group but imposing cost on the individual, the individuals without this mutation would outcompete the mutated individual in their progeny. 

    This is not convincing because, for instance, there could be several mutually incompatible mutations both leading to evolutionary success. In an imaginary example, a bird of prey can be more successful hunter by flying quieter or flying faster. These properties may be incompatible by fluid mechanics or genetics. Individual having both mutations faces a double energy cost. So it is likely that the population would include both species. Economists call this a separating equilibrium. 

    Owls are not eusocial, so the story ends here. But, for a tribe, a population of excessively aggressive individuals due to random mutation, who consume resources much in excess of minimal needs (soldiers), and individuals who produce food in excess of their individual needs (peasants), obviously is beneficial in terms of survival of both. The tribe becomes well defended and well fed, which is impossible by preponderance of a single group in genetic makeup. 

    There is another train of thought concerning decreasing returns of workers with aging and the need for retirement. However, this reflects the look from the ivory tower of Cambridge, also similar to Dawkins'. The problem is that the countries steadily increase the pension age. But the jobs available for those without Cambridge private pensions are exceedingly rare. And most of them are poorly suitable for the age. I provide a short list.  

                      School bus driver.

                      Security guard.

                       Medical orderly. 

                       Airline baggage handler.

                       And so on. 

Sarah Scoles. Countdown.

  A book written on the basis of Sarah's interview with the people (scientists, engineers, etc.) who maintain nation's nuclear weapons. Sarah, unlike many science journalists, is sufficiently competent to dissemble the information obtained from them but, for the life of me, I could not understand what the book was about. I suspect that she had to clear the book with the censors and they, as the Soviet censors of old, butchered the text till a full unrecognizability. 

Natalie Cabrol. The Secret Life of the Universe. An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life

    During my childhood and youth, the search for the life in the Universe was the domain of crackpots and madmen. Now, it is the main driver of planetary research and few grants in it can be awarded without a promise of a potential significance for astrobiology. 

    The book by Natalie Cabrol stands out from many similar books by its systematic approach, grouping the exoplanets by their astrophysical characteristics and discussing the possibilities of life or lack thereof in each. Especially exciting is her description of the traces of life in our Solar System. It is not a superb writing but quite an achievement in putting in a small, by the modern standards, book, so many insights into the search for life in the Cosmos. 

Frank Tallis. Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Discovery of the Modern Mind.

      

         Tallis is a brilliant storyteller with sometimes razor sharp insights into intellectual world surrounding St. Sigismund, influences on him and his influences on the world civilization. He is a Viennese aficionado with a flair for dramatic. Also, his book is a treasure trove of unexpected facts about Freud's views and work. The book sheds light on his impossible greatness given that late in life he himself began to recognize that psychoanalysis is more an anthropological construct than a therapeutic method and had foreseen its replacement in psychiatry by psychopharmacology. 

    For a practicing analyst, he tells surprisingly little about the structure of psychoanalysis and his venturing into biology is pure crap ([1], pp. 290-293) [2]. And, of course, no nonfiction book emanating from the New York publishing milieu can avoid random (and rather incongruous) mentions of Putin and Ukraine. 

[1] A convergence of mythologies of unrelated tribes and peoples was convincingly explained by U. Eco (some remember that his day job was in semiotics) without references to epigenetics. Namely, that primeval beliefs are centered on the comparison of external objects with a human body. 

[2] Bygren's 1984 observations of intergenerational heart problems after the famine can be easily explained by the fact that, in times of hunger, survival favors people who randomly accumulate bodily fat faster than others. Naturally, in the subsequent generations, this feature increases the prevalence of heart disease. 

        The application of a similar logic to the descendants of the Holocaust/Shoah survivors is more tenuous. But following the previous example, one may surmise that, among the survivors, the people with an extreme propensity to sense danger fared marginally better. Yet, for their descendants being permanently under stress could cause substantial problems of adaptation. 

 

Edward II themed costume party at the Elysee.