Edward Slinglerland. Drunk.

    

        Philosophical disquisition of a Sinologist turned philosopher, Edward Slingerland, who equates the pace of human civilization with the use of intoxicants. 

My first objection is that, while he pays courtesy to Darwin, Singerland mostly follows Lamarckian evolution. In a vulgar rendering it is "ancestor of the giraffe pulled its neck to touch the upper leaves and, herewith, giraffes have long necks". He trashes what he calls a "hangover theory" without much understanding or attention how random evolution works. It asserts that hominins benefiting from ripe fruit, developed an attraction to the smell of rotting fruit. Slingerland suggests that the negative side effects of eating rotting vegetation could not develop a taste for alcohol. But, for a non-acculturated plants, there is always a distribution of unripe, ripe and rotten fruit. The fact, that hominins followed the smell of rotten vegetation does not suggest that they consumed mainly the rotten samples. Second stage of the development of taste for alcohol could have been a random mutation, which, for some populations, allowed digestion of rotten fruit -- the possibility, which Slingerland recognizes but dismisses without much argument. 

This does not suggest that atavistic taste for rotten fruit explains all of the facets of human consumption of intoxicants. Here comes his second weakness -- not distinguishing between biological and socio-cultural evolution. The fact that the search for the fruits rich in fructose latched on already existing pleasure centers in the brain, and the fish soup rich in Omega-3 oils did not, is biological. The fact that humans, unlike most if not all other animals prefer to share pleasurable activities in groups is largely cultural. Not all procreation-fostering activities are evolutionary adaptations. Use of lipstick and high heels is certainly not. 

Finally, there is factual sloppiness. Mescal bean, Dermatophyllum and relatives, such as Texas Mountain Laurel, Sophora Secundiflora, do not contain mescaline in measurable quantities. Its psychedelic properties are only displayed during acute poisoning by cystine/sophorine. On the contrary, mescaline in substantial quantities is obtained from peyote cactus, Lophophora williamsii. But all in all, Slingerland weaves an amusing yarn, if his expertise in fields other than in Chinese language and culture is not taken too seriously. 

Pat Shipman. Our Oldest Companions. The Story of the First Dog.

           

Guess why this map is here? 

With the advent of paleogenetic methodology , it was thought that the origins of all animal species can be easily established. One biologist told that the whole science of animal origins got shrunk because of the possibility to analyze ancient DNA. Not so: it turned out that with our oldest companion, the archeological data simply do not square with the paleogenetic ones. The story told by Pat Shipman is so wondrously convoluted that it may take decades to untangle all the migrations of humans with non-human animal companions (a.k.a. pets) before the era of recorded history. Her book is damn wonderful. 

P.S. Pat spends a lot of pages to prove that "domestication" of plants and animals are, in fact, two different processes. This is an Anglocentric linguistic exercise. For instance, in Russian the word similar to domestication is used principally for animals, while for the plants more frequent term is acculturation.