I picked this book up at a book fair after having read that it was a satire on bureaucracy and 'political correctness'. Although I am not the kind of person who believes that not being able to use sexist and racist insults is the end of the world and thus unlikely to agree with the author politically I nonetheless thought I might still find this kind of book interesting. I can, for example, read the original Conan novels through to the end without believing myself, as their author did, that all civilisation is corrupt and deserves to be destroyed.
Unfortunately, Robert E. Howard was a master of wit and subtlety compared to Andrew Roberts, and I only made it halfway through the Aachen Memorandum before giving up. Roberts took everything he dislikes - immigration, high taxes on the rich, animal protection, weed, speed limits, feminism, anti-racism, grade inflation, concern for healthy nutrition, and so much more, stuffed it all into one pot and then scrawled 'Europe' onto it.
The results are, unfortunately, not even intellectually coherent. The book has all European nations dissolved into a Euro-superstate, but somehow France is still able to buy the Channel Islands off England. The dominant culture is depicted as a caricature of feminist prudery, while the protagonist is constantly lecherous and voyeuristic, but he also complains that advertisements are all using sex to sell products. Europe is a total dictatorship with complete surveillance of communications, no free press, and continental armies stationed in England to forcefully squash nationalist protests, but (what follows is the only minor spoiler here) somehow the entire edifice collapses the moment somebody finds evidence that a referendum a generation ago was manipulated. The ruling ideology is clearly supposed to be left-wing and cosmopolitan, but at the same time Adolf Hitler is venerated in the schools.
How does that any of that even start to make sense? It seems as if the author believed that everybody who is not part of his own political sect is interchangeable and in cahoots with each other.
Underneath the visceral hatred of everybody outside of Britain oozing from the pages it is just about possible to see the outline of a potentially amusing thriller, but the problem is that I cannot maintain willing suspension of disbelief. Yes, the reader will soon understand that the author despises the European Union in general and Germany and Polish taxi drivers in particular, so well done communicating that, but novels also need an at least somewhat plausible and logically coherent setting, otherwise they don't work. And that is before even mentioning how blatant a wish-fulfillment self-insert the protagonist is.
I assume there was, and still is, a very particular audience for this book in one particular country, but at least in my eyes everybody else would be better served by doing something more entertaining than reading it, such as watching paint dry or counting how many grains there are in one kg of sugar.
The blog of a systematic botanist of German origin, now working in Australia. It covers botany, phylogenetics, cladistics, science in general, freethought, and occasionally sillier issues.
Showing posts with label reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reviews. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Dragonriders of Pern
Having now read the first volume of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern, an apparently wildly popular kind of science fiction-y series, I am somewhat puzzled why it is so popular and glad I did not buy more than two of them. Spoilers ahead, although given that I have so far only read the first of what are, according to Wikipedia, at least 23 novels, I probably still know very few of those.
Characters
My first thought is actually: this is a bodice ripper novel with dragons. The main male character, a guy with the unfortunate name F'lar, is kind of an abusive dick; the narration seems to consider it not only okay but even charming that he cannot properly express his feelings for his love interest (see next paragraph) except by violently shaking her whenever she did not do what he wanted. What is more, even in his own thoughts he describes their first sex as borderline rape. The only thing missing is a cover image of a "scantily clad woman being grabbed by the hero", to quote a relevant Wikipedia page.
The main female character, Lessa, shows nearly all key traits of a Mary Sue, at least in my eyes. She is unusually beautiful, of very noble blood, a singularly gifted telepath, and of course she bonds with the most impressive dragon ever, an unusually large and fertile golden queen dragon. She had a tragic youth but does not appear at all traumatised. The men admire her and other young women are jealous of her. (Also, other women who aren't her friends are generally depicted as sluts.) Everything she does, no matter how stupid at first sight, ultimately turns out to have been exactly the right thing to do.
Really one gets quite fed up with both F'lar and Lessa at some points.
The world
Pern is a planet that was in the distant past colonised by humans. Every 200 or 250 years a rogue planet called the Red Star comes close enough to Pern for c. fifty years to throw down spores called Thread. This Thread voraciously consumes all organic matter. The ancient Pernese reacted by genetically engineering local wildlife into fire breathing, flying dragons and bonding them to telepathically gifted humans, who form the top tier of a rigidly feudal society. Together, these teams of dragon and rider rise up in large squadrons and burn the Thread out of the sky while it is falling. Also, the dragons can teleport (!) and, under special circumstances, jump through time.
The need to bond dragons to humans is well justified in that the dragons are fairly short-sighted and impulsive without human guidance, showing for example a tendency to gorge on food. And unfortunately the early settlers soon lost their space age technology, what with having a very small starting population and a metal-poor planet, so that solving a technological challenge by leaving your descendants GMO animals seems like a good plan.
The funny thing is, and here it probably just shows that I am a biologist, that I can easily take the teleporting and fire breathing in stride but am rather bugged by the biology.
First, the Thread. How the hell does that even start to make sense? Maybe later books offer a better explanation, but Thread eats organic matter so voraciously as to be physiologically impossible; it is more like concentrated acid than like a living, growing organism. What is more, it eats and grows so quickly that it soon consumes everything and dies in turn. This is just not how life works, and the word parasite, although used explicitly by F'lar, is completely misapplied, as a parasite would be stupid to kill its host so quickly. And how does the Thread persist for thousands of years on the Red Star if it is so voracious? What does it eat there? It just does not make sense.
Next, the dragons. Again, teleporting, physically impossible but no serious hurdle for my willing suspension of disbelief. Fine. Fire breathing, ditto. The main time travel gimmick of the story, it has to be said, is actually really stupid, both because it is caused by itself and because the narrative puzzle that it solves is introduced just a few pages before. (Seriously, this should have been developed in the first quarter of the book, feeding the reader little clues here and there over the next chapters, but no... Imagine a crime mystery novel where the murderer gets introduced for the first time on page 209 and then convicted on page 211 and you get an idea of how this felt.)
But what really bugs me about the dragons is their reproductive biology. There are five colour groups:
Finally, at the time of the first novel the dragonriders have just spent 400 years reduced to a single dragon nest, with only a single queen at each given moment in time, so that she would always have had to mate with her brothers. Realistically the inbreeding would have been lethal, but instead it turns out (at the beginning of the second book) that those 400 years have made the dragons larger and more fertile than before! You fail genetics forever.
But okay, maybe others will dismiss the genetics, reproductive biology and physiology issues just as I dismiss the physical ones. The main problem is still that the book was actually not very well written. I had read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell just before the first Pern novel, and I am sorry to say the difference was striking.
Characters
My first thought is actually: this is a bodice ripper novel with dragons. The main male character, a guy with the unfortunate name F'lar, is kind of an abusive dick; the narration seems to consider it not only okay but even charming that he cannot properly express his feelings for his love interest (see next paragraph) except by violently shaking her whenever she did not do what he wanted. What is more, even in his own thoughts he describes their first sex as borderline rape. The only thing missing is a cover image of a "scantily clad woman being grabbed by the hero", to quote a relevant Wikipedia page.
The main female character, Lessa, shows nearly all key traits of a Mary Sue, at least in my eyes. She is unusually beautiful, of very noble blood, a singularly gifted telepath, and of course she bonds with the most impressive dragon ever, an unusually large and fertile golden queen dragon. She had a tragic youth but does not appear at all traumatised. The men admire her and other young women are jealous of her. (Also, other women who aren't her friends are generally depicted as sluts.) Everything she does, no matter how stupid at first sight, ultimately turns out to have been exactly the right thing to do.
Really one gets quite fed up with both F'lar and Lessa at some points.
The world
Pern is a planet that was in the distant past colonised by humans. Every 200 or 250 years a rogue planet called the Red Star comes close enough to Pern for c. fifty years to throw down spores called Thread. This Thread voraciously consumes all organic matter. The ancient Pernese reacted by genetically engineering local wildlife into fire breathing, flying dragons and bonding them to telepathically gifted humans, who form the top tier of a rigidly feudal society. Together, these teams of dragon and rider rise up in large squadrons and burn the Thread out of the sky while it is falling. Also, the dragons can teleport (!) and, under special circumstances, jump through time.
The need to bond dragons to humans is well justified in that the dragons are fairly short-sighted and impulsive without human guidance, showing for example a tendency to gorge on food. And unfortunately the early settlers soon lost their space age technology, what with having a very small starting population and a metal-poor planet, so that solving a technological challenge by leaving your descendants GMO animals seems like a good plan.
The funny thing is, and here it probably just shows that I am a biologist, that I can easily take the teleporting and fire breathing in stride but am rather bugged by the biology.
First, the Thread. How the hell does that even start to make sense? Maybe later books offer a better explanation, but Thread eats organic matter so voraciously as to be physiologically impossible; it is more like concentrated acid than like a living, growing organism. What is more, it eats and grows so quickly that it soon consumes everything and dies in turn. This is just not how life works, and the word parasite, although used explicitly by F'lar, is completely misapplied, as a parasite would be stupid to kill its host so quickly. And how does the Thread persist for thousands of years on the Red Star if it is so voracious? What does it eat there? It just does not make sense.
Next, the dragons. Again, teleporting, physically impossible but no serious hurdle for my willing suspension of disbelief. Fine. Fire breathing, ditto. The main time travel gimmick of the story, it has to be said, is actually really stupid, both because it is caused by itself and because the narrative puzzle that it solves is introduced just a few pages before. (Seriously, this should have been developed in the first quarter of the book, feeding the reader little clues here and there over the next chapters, but no... Imagine a crime mystery novel where the murderer gets introduced for the first time on page 209 and then convicted on page 211 and you get an idea of how this felt.)
But what really bugs me about the dragons is their reproductive biology. There are five colour groups:
- the very rare golden queen dragons, which are female and fertile, and whose female riders automatically become the boss women in dragonrider society;
- the relatively rare bronze dragons, which are male and fertile, and whose male riders have high status (the riders of the bronzes who mate with queens get to be the boss men in dragonrider society);
- brown dragons, male and sterile, bonded to male humans;
- blue dragons, male and sterile, bonded to male humans;
- green dragons, female and sterile, weirdly also bonded to male humans.
Finally, at the time of the first novel the dragonriders have just spent 400 years reduced to a single dragon nest, with only a single queen at each given moment in time, so that she would always have had to mate with her brothers. Realistically the inbreeding would have been lethal, but instead it turns out (at the beginning of the second book) that those 400 years have made the dragons larger and more fertile than before! You fail genetics forever.
But okay, maybe others will dismiss the genetics, reproductive biology and physiology issues just as I dismiss the physical ones. The main problem is still that the book was actually not very well written. I had read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell just before the first Pern novel, and I am sorry to say the difference was striking.
Saturday, July 22, 2017
The Prince
I have arrived in Shenzhen, China, for the International Botanic Congress. I meant to upload a few pictures of the Luohu district today but it seems as if my cell phone does not want to talk to my laptop, so perhaps I can do that when I am back.
On the flights I was unable to get much work done beyond making corrections to a manuscript, so I read a book and watched movies of varying quality: Star Wars Rogue One, Suicide Squad, and Throne of Elves. It is all a matter of expectations; they weren't high, so I enjoyed all three, although the last of them partly for being so different from how a European would have done it, and while happily ignoring the humongous plot holes of the second. The funny thing about Rogue One is that it is actually in part a reasonably good attempt at rationalising why the heck the Empire would have built the Death Star with such an idiotic weakness, although it still remains implausible that nobody else noticed it during construction and just added another wall on the way.
Ah well. Anyway, the book I read nearly through on the flights - because it is not actually all that long - is Machiavelli's Il Principe. The book needs no introduction as it is a classic, but I had never read it until I happened to pick it up in a German retranslation at the last book fair I visited.
The scholar who wrote the foreword stresses that Machiavelli's reputation is undeservedly bad, that his work is really a groundbreaking piece of political philosophy. With Il Prinicipe and its sister work on republics he is considered to have pioneered political writing that sees humans as capable of influencing history within certain realistic limitations instead of being the passive objects of divine providence, and that argues for a pragmatic approach to politics instead of an unachievable spiritual ideal or political utopia.
And yes, I can see where that is coming from, although given my political socialisation I always remain sceptical of seeing history as a chain of outstanding people having influential ideas. (I think it is much more likely that if Machiavelli had not written this book others would still have organically moved towards more pragmatic political philosophy, as that was simply the Zeitgeist.)
But I can also see clearly where his bad reputation comes from. Not only is he fairly open about criticising past politicians and military leaders, including popes, for their personal and public failures, which would obviously invite opprobrium. He also matter-of-factly advises the audience to betray their allies for political gain and to murder the entire family of a previous ruler so that their bloodline is extinguished and no remaining heir can challenge the new order.
Again, both Machiavelli and the author of the foreword argue that this is just realistic. If you want to secure power and strengthen your state then this is what you must do. Machiavelli also doesn't see any issues with such behaviour because he has a very dim view of humanity in general. For example, to him it is no problem to break treaties because your treaty partners are, well, humans and as such should be expected to break the treaty themselves at the first good opportunity. That's just how dastardly humans are, fide Machiavelli at least.
Now realism is one thing. I can understand Machiavelli's advice in many cases, for example when he considers whether it is more important and easier to have the general population on one's side or the nobility (in today's context, the one percenters), and how to achieve either. And I also understand that one has to be realistic about the established rules one is subject to; if everybody habitually lies then a single honest person will indeed perish where another liar may have prospered. But I think he and that modern scholar miss to what a large degree opportunistic breaking of rules changes the rules for the worse, and what the consequences are.
Be it keeping true to treaties or showing mercy to one's enemies, the point of following rules or gentlemen's agreements is that only then can you expect that others will follow them to your benefit. When, for example, it became customary in the early to high middle ages of Germany that nobles competing for the crown would not eradicate the opposing family but instead force the male members to retire into monasteries, and only kill them if they blew that chance by coming back and raising another army, the idea was presumably that once the shoe is on the other foot one would also be given the chance to leave politics instead of coming home to find one's wife and underage children face down in puddles of blood, as Machiavelli would have it.
In other words, I am coming away from Il Principe with the impression that he was too clever by half. He took pragmatism just far enough to come out on the other side and fall back into short-sightedness.
On the flights I was unable to get much work done beyond making corrections to a manuscript, so I read a book and watched movies of varying quality: Star Wars Rogue One, Suicide Squad, and Throne of Elves. It is all a matter of expectations; they weren't high, so I enjoyed all three, although the last of them partly for being so different from how a European would have done it, and while happily ignoring the humongous plot holes of the second. The funny thing about Rogue One is that it is actually in part a reasonably good attempt at rationalising why the heck the Empire would have built the Death Star with such an idiotic weakness, although it still remains implausible that nobody else noticed it during construction and just added another wall on the way.
Ah well. Anyway, the book I read nearly through on the flights - because it is not actually all that long - is Machiavelli's Il Principe. The book needs no introduction as it is a classic, but I had never read it until I happened to pick it up in a German retranslation at the last book fair I visited.
The scholar who wrote the foreword stresses that Machiavelli's reputation is undeservedly bad, that his work is really a groundbreaking piece of political philosophy. With Il Prinicipe and its sister work on republics he is considered to have pioneered political writing that sees humans as capable of influencing history within certain realistic limitations instead of being the passive objects of divine providence, and that argues for a pragmatic approach to politics instead of an unachievable spiritual ideal or political utopia.
And yes, I can see where that is coming from, although given my political socialisation I always remain sceptical of seeing history as a chain of outstanding people having influential ideas. (I think it is much more likely that if Machiavelli had not written this book others would still have organically moved towards more pragmatic political philosophy, as that was simply the Zeitgeist.)
But I can also see clearly where his bad reputation comes from. Not only is he fairly open about criticising past politicians and military leaders, including popes, for their personal and public failures, which would obviously invite opprobrium. He also matter-of-factly advises the audience to betray their allies for political gain and to murder the entire family of a previous ruler so that their bloodline is extinguished and no remaining heir can challenge the new order.
Again, both Machiavelli and the author of the foreword argue that this is just realistic. If you want to secure power and strengthen your state then this is what you must do. Machiavelli also doesn't see any issues with such behaviour because he has a very dim view of humanity in general. For example, to him it is no problem to break treaties because your treaty partners are, well, humans and as such should be expected to break the treaty themselves at the first good opportunity. That's just how dastardly humans are, fide Machiavelli at least.
Now realism is one thing. I can understand Machiavelli's advice in many cases, for example when he considers whether it is more important and easier to have the general population on one's side or the nobility (in today's context, the one percenters), and how to achieve either. And I also understand that one has to be realistic about the established rules one is subject to; if everybody habitually lies then a single honest person will indeed perish where another liar may have prospered. But I think he and that modern scholar miss to what a large degree opportunistic breaking of rules changes the rules for the worse, and what the consequences are.
Be it keeping true to treaties or showing mercy to one's enemies, the point of following rules or gentlemen's agreements is that only then can you expect that others will follow them to your benefit. When, for example, it became customary in the early to high middle ages of Germany that nobles competing for the crown would not eradicate the opposing family but instead force the male members to retire into monasteries, and only kill them if they blew that chance by coming back and raising another army, the idea was presumably that once the shoe is on the other foot one would also be given the chance to leave politics instead of coming home to find one's wife and underage children face down in puddles of blood, as Machiavelli would have it.
In other words, I am coming away from Il Principe with the impression that he was too clever by half. He took pragmatism just far enough to come out on the other side and fall back into short-sightedness.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Sturgeon's law
While on the topic of the book fair, I have to say that as much as I love browsing through the books and finding gems, it is also one of the moments that produce a certain sense of alienation from the majority of humanity in me. The only other moment that parallels it is "standing in front of the magazine rack in a supermarket".
As far as I am concerned, there are generally no more than two to three journals in the average magazine rack that one could reasonably count as a loss if somebody were to torch the lot. In fact, not only would there be no loss to the wealth and welfare of humanity if titles like "Kim Kardashian's new bikini body" or "Nicole Kidman's relationship crisis", most of them blatantly invented anyway, went up in flames, but burning the paper to generate energy would be considerably more productive than using it to print this kind of dreck. And people are actually wasting hard-earned money on all of it.
Similarly, I cannot help but observe, as I look across the dozens of tables in the book fair, that there are entire sections on astrology and "alternative medicine". These kinds of books have only one goal, and that is to make their readers more ignorant and less capable of critical thought. (You might argue that the ultimate goal is to sell, okay. But they will only sell if they first achieve the goal I mentioned. A swindler first has to swindle, only then can they extract money.) In a way it is, of course, nice to see them being sold again for a few bucks to finance a crisis hotline, but there is no way around the fact that as long they are in circulation some of these works will continue to harm gullible people by getting them to rely on snake oil and forgoing real treatment for their illnesses.
As for fantasy and science fiction novels, there are so many crappy books out there that it is extremely hard to find the few worthwhile ones between them. And I don't even have very high standards - some of the ones mentioned in my previous post are not exactly Nobel Prize in literature material either. But for an example of the 90% crud that makes browsing books so hard, I would like to present a novel that I bought on a whim at the previous fair we went to:
Stan Nicholls, Legion of Thunder. Book 2 of Orcs: First Blood.
Being part of a series is not decisive evidence of being crud, but it is a first warning sign. At a minimum I am starting to think that the better authors are the ones that write a series so that each novel can stand by itself. Think Martin Scott's Thraxas, Barry Hughart's Master Li chronicles, or Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels; each book is a self-contained story. When everything has to end on a cliff-hanger, however, it just looks cheap and like trying too hard. There is also the risk that the story will never be brought to a resolution and instead end with author existence failure.
Now as for the book itself, I was fooled into buying it because I had read other, fairly good books by different authors written from the perspective of the usual fantasy underdogs like orcs or dark elves. In the present case, however, the plot of the novel can comfortably be summarised as follows:
Protagonists search for McGuffins (yes, plural; they have to collect several).
Protagonists get into fight.
Protagonists search for McGuffins.
Protagonists get into fight.
Protagonists search for McGuffins.
Protagonists get into fight.
Novel ends on a cliff-hanger.
The fights appear to be the main attraction here, as they are written in a very voyeuristic manner. Apparently some readers really look forward to knowing which evil mook gets a knife into the eye, which one gets its arm cut off, and how far the blood sprays.
But the insults to the reader's intelligence don't stop there. In the background there is a big bad sorceress who is so comically evil and so prone to randomly killing her own followers that she should have been murdered in a palace coup years ago. During what is clearly meant to be a pivotal moment in her character development, she demands of one of her sisters, who is ruling over a people of aquatic semi-humanoids, to help her hunt for the protagonists, who are moving entirely on land. Her sister rejects the demand, and so she magics her dead.
The things is, it never really becomes clear how helping would have looked like. Why didn't her sister simply agree, on the lines of: "I will gladly help you, let me just command all my soldiers who can operate on dry land to assist you OH WAIT I DON'T HAVE ANY"?
Seriously, the world does not need this kind of book to use up paper that could be used to print decent ones.
As far as I am concerned, there are generally no more than two to three journals in the average magazine rack that one could reasonably count as a loss if somebody were to torch the lot. In fact, not only would there be no loss to the wealth and welfare of humanity if titles like "Kim Kardashian's new bikini body" or "Nicole Kidman's relationship crisis", most of them blatantly invented anyway, went up in flames, but burning the paper to generate energy would be considerably more productive than using it to print this kind of dreck. And people are actually wasting hard-earned money on all of it.
Similarly, I cannot help but observe, as I look across the dozens of tables in the book fair, that there are entire sections on astrology and "alternative medicine". These kinds of books have only one goal, and that is to make their readers more ignorant and less capable of critical thought. (You might argue that the ultimate goal is to sell, okay. But they will only sell if they first achieve the goal I mentioned. A swindler first has to swindle, only then can they extract money.) In a way it is, of course, nice to see them being sold again for a few bucks to finance a crisis hotline, but there is no way around the fact that as long they are in circulation some of these works will continue to harm gullible people by getting them to rely on snake oil and forgoing real treatment for their illnesses.
As for fantasy and science fiction novels, there are so many crappy books out there that it is extremely hard to find the few worthwhile ones between them. And I don't even have very high standards - some of the ones mentioned in my previous post are not exactly Nobel Prize in literature material either. But for an example of the 90% crud that makes browsing books so hard, I would like to present a novel that I bought on a whim at the previous fair we went to:
Stan Nicholls, Legion of Thunder. Book 2 of Orcs: First Blood.
Being part of a series is not decisive evidence of being crud, but it is a first warning sign. At a minimum I am starting to think that the better authors are the ones that write a series so that each novel can stand by itself. Think Martin Scott's Thraxas, Barry Hughart's Master Li chronicles, or Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels; each book is a self-contained story. When everything has to end on a cliff-hanger, however, it just looks cheap and like trying too hard. There is also the risk that the story will never be brought to a resolution and instead end with author existence failure.
Now as for the book itself, I was fooled into buying it because I had read other, fairly good books by different authors written from the perspective of the usual fantasy underdogs like orcs or dark elves. In the present case, however, the plot of the novel can comfortably be summarised as follows:
Protagonists search for McGuffins (yes, plural; they have to collect several).
Protagonists get into fight.
Protagonists search for McGuffins.
Protagonists get into fight.
Protagonists search for McGuffins.
Protagonists get into fight.
Novel ends on a cliff-hanger.
The fights appear to be the main attraction here, as they are written in a very voyeuristic manner. Apparently some readers really look forward to knowing which evil mook gets a knife into the eye, which one gets its arm cut off, and how far the blood sprays.
But the insults to the reader's intelligence don't stop there. In the background there is a big bad sorceress who is so comically evil and so prone to randomly killing her own followers that she should have been murdered in a palace coup years ago. During what is clearly meant to be a pivotal moment in her character development, she demands of one of her sisters, who is ruling over a people of aquatic semi-humanoids, to help her hunt for the protagonists, who are moving entirely on land. Her sister rejects the demand, and so she magics her dead.
The things is, it never really becomes clear how helping would have looked like. Why didn't her sister simply agree, on the lines of: "I will gladly help you, let me just command all my soldiers who can operate on dry land to assist you OH WAIT I DON'T HAVE ANY"?
Seriously, the world does not need this kind of book to use up paper that could be used to print decent ones.
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Fitzpatricks War
So I have just finished Theodore Judson's Fitzpatrick's War, a book I mentioned having bought a few weeks ago and that I took onto the holiday trip. It was very well written and deserves its accolades, but I also found it profoundly disturbing. Which is why I am writing about it. Be warned of SPOILERS ahead.
The book describes a 25th century, steampunk future from the perspective of an army engineer. To summarise the setting, after the collapse of our current civilisation the world has largely recovered with slightly changed political boundaries. The Anglo-Saxon realm is called Yukons and is now fundamentalist Christian and quasi-feudal. Latin America and Africa are more or less the same as now, as is China only it is painted as fanatically communist and rules all of East and Southeast Asia. Moslems have conquered and converted continental Europe except Russia, now called Slavic Remnant.
Technology has advanced in chemistry (polymers and explosives), medicine (Yukons regularly live beyond 100 years) and biology (GMOs galore) but has to make do without any electricity, as the Yukons are running a satellite network that disrupts electric currents across all the planet (including nearly all of their own realm). This means no computers, no wind or solar power; machines are all steam-driven and run on biofuels.
The story has three main topics:
First, how basically decent people end up committing atrocities. We see the protagonist supporting everything from political assassination to genocide first because he does not want to risk his career, then because he is afraid of being punished, and finally because he is afraid of putting his loved ones in harm's way. Those are plausible motives, and so at every step it remains believable that he is, individually, a good person.
Second, it explores how a small nation (the Yukons number only 30 million) could militarily dominate a world of several billion people if they had a sufficient technological edge, the satellite network mentioned above.
Third, it explores how a small conspiracy could manipulate events so that their favoured nation (the Yukons, duh) remains (a) militarily dominant and (b) locked in feudal stasis for centuries, so as never to become "decadent", while (c) knocking all other peoples of the globe down periodically with the long term end goal, at least as stated by the agent of that conspiracy, of genociding them all to the degree that they are reduced to a smattering of "cavemen".
I believe that the book shines in the first of these themes. The other two are a bit more difficult. This is not even because those are the parts that disturbed me, per se. The war atrocities are deliberately described in a voyeuristic and graphic manner, yes, but they are meant to unsettle and challenge the reader, so this quite simply excellent writing.
The problem is really that I do not consider those two remotely plausible as described in the book - it is a question of being unable to maintain willing suspension of disbelief. Not just because of one detail either, there is a whole list of issues sticking out:
It seems hugely impossible that a nation of 30 million could militarily and economically dominate the world described in the book. Let's assume, for the same of simplicity, that Yukons can work from 15 to 90 years of age, and that they die at 100. That means 75% of their population, or 22.5 million, are working age. The book repeatedly states that two thirds of them are farmers, leaving 7.5 million to produce and maintain an army, navy, and air force that cannot only effortlessly trounce what one billion Chinese throw at them but also maintain a technological edge. On top of that, those 7.5 million will of course have to do all the peacetime manufacturing, education, trade, construction, repairs, arts, and research for the Yukons, all while frozen at a quasi-feudal social structure where factories of more than 120 workers are explicitly stated to be forbidden. Oh, and of course women in Yukon society are limited to being teachers, authors, maidservants or housewives, so we are really talking about 3.75 million people doing all the rest.
The problem is of course that the author could not have made the setting more plausible by increasing the Yukon population tenfold, because clearly then we would not be looking at a plausible feudalism any more.
The conspiracy mentioned above maintains its grip on world events over centuries without suffering infighting, corruption, defection, espionage, serious conflicts with the government, mission creep, or just plain mistakes. This means that whatever we are talking about we are not talking about a setting inhabited by believable human beings. Which is doubly jarring given how believably the people outside of that conspiracy are written.
The conspiracy can also apparently maintain a space program and a satellite network with what seems like a few hundred (maybe at most a few thousand) members and whatever resources it can divert from the aforementioned minuscule, non-electrified agricultural society. All from one Pacific island. Right.
GMO microbes are said to be able to remove salt from the soil. The individual elements making up salt are very reactive, and salt is very inert. The upshot is that it is energetically very expensive to turn salt into something else. I am not a chemist, but as a biologist my hunch is that this is hardly possible. (What might work would be plants that draw salt from the soil and store it so that it can be carted away in their bodies.)
GMO locusts are said to be able to eat every single piece of plant material, apparently without being poisoned by any of those plant species, and are apparently not eaten by humans or other animals, or otherwise fought by a highly organised, populous nation. And apparently one facility in North America, which we should note again is a small agricultural society, can produce enough of them to defoliate all of China. I do not want to minimise the severity of past locust epidemics, but this seems hugely implausible.
All in all the author appears to believe, or at least pretend for the purposes of the story, that GMOs are magic and can achieve anything. Wikipedia tells me that he has written another Science Fiction book in which metal-eating microorganisms are a major plot point, as they destroy all modern technology. If that were energetically possible it would probably have evolved by now, like those nylon eating bacteria did, but even then it would have to be chemoautotrophic and thus grow at such a slow pace that it would we much less of an issue than rust or sunlight.
Similar surprises are in store from chemistry. Not only do the Yukons conveniently have incendiary weapons that can turn a whole square kilometre into "glass", they also even more conveniently have a polymer to spray on all their equipment that neutralises such a super-weapon if used against them. I am reasonably sure that if one is physically possible then the other cannot be. I am not writing all of this because I cannot enjoy reading a book with magic in it, but because it torpedoes any value one might get out of speculating about whether such technological superiority is realistic. Seems as if it isn't if magic has to be involved.
There are also simple internal contradictions. The official Yukon war goal is to get enemy nations to sign the Four Points: Scrapping their air forces; scrapping their war navies, free trade access for Yukon ships, and an annual tribute of 10% of their gross national products. The unofficial war goal of the Yukon leader is to amalgamate all cultures of the world into a single harmonious global culture. The war is conducted by first defeating the Chinese militarily and then, after they have been neutralised as a threat, killing off virtually the entire Chinese population. It should be obvious that doing that is counter-productive to the two last points in the official war goals as well as to the unofficial goal; one cannot trade with, raise tribute from, or culturally unite a mass grave. So obvious indeed that the Yukon leader would not plausibly have gone forward with the genocide. And yes, it is clearly his own initiative and not done behind his back by the conspiracy.
This is before mentioning that the treatment of the genocide is rather self-contradictory across the book. The reader is first shocked with graphic descriptions indicating that China is virtually depopulated, with only a few ragged, sick and starving people left here or there, who will presumably also die over the next few years or at best form the nucleus of scattered villages that have reverted to the late stone age. There is talk of hundreds of millions having died, after it has been established that hundreds of millions is the starting population of that country. The epilogue then talks of the Chinese government, travel through China, a nature reserve being set up with the help of said government, and even a Chinese naturalist. Those two descriptions do not make sense in the same book.
Finally, a minor plot point raised in support of the idea that the conspiracy could work successfully over the centuries is that the commoners of the Yukon nation are happy to accept patriotic lies and feel no shame about what they are doing to the rest of the world. A major plot point in the downfall of the megalomaniac Yukon leader is that (in contrast to the decadent nobles) all the commoners are utterly disgusted by the war atrocities that happen during the story. This is either a major case of wanting to have it both ways or a subtle pointer that we should not believe the conspiracy operative when he brags about their invincibility. It does not seem to me, however, that the latter interpretation fits the rest of novel.
After having exorcised all this, I have to state again that the novel is seriously well written as far as the characters are concerned. A particularly nice touch is the framing of the story as an autobiography annotated by a loyalist historian who considers the protagonist to be a liar. The historian's footnotes lighten up the otherwise at times depressing reading experience. So despite my above misgivings I enjoyed reading it, can recommend it, and may try out other novels by the same author.
The book describes a 25th century, steampunk future from the perspective of an army engineer. To summarise the setting, after the collapse of our current civilisation the world has largely recovered with slightly changed political boundaries. The Anglo-Saxon realm is called Yukons and is now fundamentalist Christian and quasi-feudal. Latin America and Africa are more or less the same as now, as is China only it is painted as fanatically communist and rules all of East and Southeast Asia. Moslems have conquered and converted continental Europe except Russia, now called Slavic Remnant.
Technology has advanced in chemistry (polymers and explosives), medicine (Yukons regularly live beyond 100 years) and biology (GMOs galore) but has to make do without any electricity, as the Yukons are running a satellite network that disrupts electric currents across all the planet (including nearly all of their own realm). This means no computers, no wind or solar power; machines are all steam-driven and run on biofuels.
The story has three main topics:
First, how basically decent people end up committing atrocities. We see the protagonist supporting everything from political assassination to genocide first because he does not want to risk his career, then because he is afraid of being punished, and finally because he is afraid of putting his loved ones in harm's way. Those are plausible motives, and so at every step it remains believable that he is, individually, a good person.
Second, it explores how a small nation (the Yukons number only 30 million) could militarily dominate a world of several billion people if they had a sufficient technological edge, the satellite network mentioned above.
Third, it explores how a small conspiracy could manipulate events so that their favoured nation (the Yukons, duh) remains (a) militarily dominant and (b) locked in feudal stasis for centuries, so as never to become "decadent", while (c) knocking all other peoples of the globe down periodically with the long term end goal, at least as stated by the agent of that conspiracy, of genociding them all to the degree that they are reduced to a smattering of "cavemen".
I believe that the book shines in the first of these themes. The other two are a bit more difficult. This is not even because those are the parts that disturbed me, per se. The war atrocities are deliberately described in a voyeuristic and graphic manner, yes, but they are meant to unsettle and challenge the reader, so this quite simply excellent writing.
The problem is really that I do not consider those two remotely plausible as described in the book - it is a question of being unable to maintain willing suspension of disbelief. Not just because of one detail either, there is a whole list of issues sticking out:
It seems hugely impossible that a nation of 30 million could militarily and economically dominate the world described in the book. Let's assume, for the same of simplicity, that Yukons can work from 15 to 90 years of age, and that they die at 100. That means 75% of their population, or 22.5 million, are working age. The book repeatedly states that two thirds of them are farmers, leaving 7.5 million to produce and maintain an army, navy, and air force that cannot only effortlessly trounce what one billion Chinese throw at them but also maintain a technological edge. On top of that, those 7.5 million will of course have to do all the peacetime manufacturing, education, trade, construction, repairs, arts, and research for the Yukons, all while frozen at a quasi-feudal social structure where factories of more than 120 workers are explicitly stated to be forbidden. Oh, and of course women in Yukon society are limited to being teachers, authors, maidservants or housewives, so we are really talking about 3.75 million people doing all the rest.
The problem is of course that the author could not have made the setting more plausible by increasing the Yukon population tenfold, because clearly then we would not be looking at a plausible feudalism any more.
The conspiracy mentioned above maintains its grip on world events over centuries without suffering infighting, corruption, defection, espionage, serious conflicts with the government, mission creep, or just plain mistakes. This means that whatever we are talking about we are not talking about a setting inhabited by believable human beings. Which is doubly jarring given how believably the people outside of that conspiracy are written.
The conspiracy can also apparently maintain a space program and a satellite network with what seems like a few hundred (maybe at most a few thousand) members and whatever resources it can divert from the aforementioned minuscule, non-electrified agricultural society. All from one Pacific island. Right.
GMO microbes are said to be able to remove salt from the soil. The individual elements making up salt are very reactive, and salt is very inert. The upshot is that it is energetically very expensive to turn salt into something else. I am not a chemist, but as a biologist my hunch is that this is hardly possible. (What might work would be plants that draw salt from the soil and store it so that it can be carted away in their bodies.)
GMO locusts are said to be able to eat every single piece of plant material, apparently without being poisoned by any of those plant species, and are apparently not eaten by humans or other animals, or otherwise fought by a highly organised, populous nation. And apparently one facility in North America, which we should note again is a small agricultural society, can produce enough of them to defoliate all of China. I do not want to minimise the severity of past locust epidemics, but this seems hugely implausible.
All in all the author appears to believe, or at least pretend for the purposes of the story, that GMOs are magic and can achieve anything. Wikipedia tells me that he has written another Science Fiction book in which metal-eating microorganisms are a major plot point, as they destroy all modern technology. If that were energetically possible it would probably have evolved by now, like those nylon eating bacteria did, but even then it would have to be chemoautotrophic and thus grow at such a slow pace that it would we much less of an issue than rust or sunlight.
Similar surprises are in store from chemistry. Not only do the Yukons conveniently have incendiary weapons that can turn a whole square kilometre into "glass", they also even more conveniently have a polymer to spray on all their equipment that neutralises such a super-weapon if used against them. I am reasonably sure that if one is physically possible then the other cannot be. I am not writing all of this because I cannot enjoy reading a book with magic in it, but because it torpedoes any value one might get out of speculating about whether such technological superiority is realistic. Seems as if it isn't if magic has to be involved.
There are also simple internal contradictions. The official Yukon war goal is to get enemy nations to sign the Four Points: Scrapping their air forces; scrapping their war navies, free trade access for Yukon ships, and an annual tribute of 10% of their gross national products. The unofficial war goal of the Yukon leader is to amalgamate all cultures of the world into a single harmonious global culture. The war is conducted by first defeating the Chinese militarily and then, after they have been neutralised as a threat, killing off virtually the entire Chinese population. It should be obvious that doing that is counter-productive to the two last points in the official war goals as well as to the unofficial goal; one cannot trade with, raise tribute from, or culturally unite a mass grave. So obvious indeed that the Yukon leader would not plausibly have gone forward with the genocide. And yes, it is clearly his own initiative and not done behind his back by the conspiracy.
This is before mentioning that the treatment of the genocide is rather self-contradictory across the book. The reader is first shocked with graphic descriptions indicating that China is virtually depopulated, with only a few ragged, sick and starving people left here or there, who will presumably also die over the next few years or at best form the nucleus of scattered villages that have reverted to the late stone age. There is talk of hundreds of millions having died, after it has been established that hundreds of millions is the starting population of that country. The epilogue then talks of the Chinese government, travel through China, a nature reserve being set up with the help of said government, and even a Chinese naturalist. Those two descriptions do not make sense in the same book.
Finally, a minor plot point raised in support of the idea that the conspiracy could work successfully over the centuries is that the commoners of the Yukon nation are happy to accept patriotic lies and feel no shame about what they are doing to the rest of the world. A major plot point in the downfall of the megalomaniac Yukon leader is that (in contrast to the decadent nobles) all the commoners are utterly disgusted by the war atrocities that happen during the story. This is either a major case of wanting to have it both ways or a subtle pointer that we should not believe the conspiracy operative when he brags about their invincibility. It does not seem to me, however, that the latter interpretation fits the rest of novel.
After having exorcised all this, I have to state again that the novel is seriously well written as far as the characters are concerned. A particularly nice touch is the framing of the story as an autobiography annotated by a loyalist historian who considers the protagonist to be a liar. The historian's footnotes lighten up the otherwise at times depressing reading experience. So despite my above misgivings I enjoyed reading it, can recommend it, and may try out other novels by the same author.
Monday, March 28, 2016
The Australian Native Bee Book
We went for a walk at the Australian National Botanic Gardens on the weekend, and I saw Tim Heard's The Australian Native Bee Book at the Botanical Bookshop.
I have always loved hymenopterans, and especially the eusocial ones (bees, wasps, ants). As the focus of the book is on eusocial stingless bees, I pretty much had to buy it. You see, during my field trips to South America years ago I frequently ran into the genus Trigona and its relatives. Here the nest entrance of a colony in a hotel courtyard in eastern Bolivia:
They are much smaller than honeybees and, as the name implies, do not have a sting. I knew that they are traditionally kept for honey in Central America, but because each hive produces only a fraction of the honey produced by a honeybee hive that practice is sadly dying out. Unfortunately, I never learned much more about their biology and diversity.
The Australian Native Bee Book focuses on keeping Australian stingless bee hives for honey, propolis, pollination services, and simply for conservation and education. Everything relevant is covered, from hive building across colony division to pests and parasites.
I will not attempt to keep any myself - we don't have the space, and these bees do not actually occur in the colder climate of Canberra - but one gets just as much out of the book on the biology, behaviour and diversity of these insects. It is really and truly one of those "everything you ever wanted to know but didn't know where to look up" scenarios. Their nesting, life cycle, global biogeography, taxonomic history, foraging strategy, and much more are described.
At the same time the style shows that rarely achieved combination of using clear explanations, superb images, and unpretentious language that will make sense even to a complete layperson (as I am with regard to bee-keeping) without being dumbed down or misrepresenting anything (which I can judge for some other topics like systematics or biogeography). To cite just the part on why the native stingless bees are not all called Trigona any more, something that is obviously close to one of the main topics of this blog:
I would definitely recommend this book to those who loves bees, and especially the eusocial ones.
I have always loved hymenopterans, and especially the eusocial ones (bees, wasps, ants). As the focus of the book is on eusocial stingless bees, I pretty much had to buy it. You see, during my field trips to South America years ago I frequently ran into the genus Trigona and its relatives. Here the nest entrance of a colony in a hotel courtyard in eastern Bolivia:
They are much smaller than honeybees and, as the name implies, do not have a sting. I knew that they are traditionally kept for honey in Central America, but because each hive produces only a fraction of the honey produced by a honeybee hive that practice is sadly dying out. Unfortunately, I never learned much more about their biology and diversity.
The Australian Native Bee Book focuses on keeping Australian stingless bee hives for honey, propolis, pollination services, and simply for conservation and education. Everything relevant is covered, from hive building across colony division to pests and parasites.
I will not attempt to keep any myself - we don't have the space, and these bees do not actually occur in the colder climate of Canberra - but one gets just as much out of the book on the biology, behaviour and diversity of these insects. It is really and truly one of those "everything you ever wanted to know but didn't know where to look up" scenarios. Their nesting, life cycle, global biogeography, taxonomic history, foraging strategy, and much more are described.
At the same time the style shows that rarely achieved combination of using clear explanations, superb images, and unpretentious language that will make sense even to a complete layperson (as I am with regard to bee-keeping) without being dumbed down or misrepresenting anything (which I can judge for some other topics like systematics or biogeography). To cite just the part on why the native stingless bees are not all called Trigona any more, something that is obviously close to one of the main topics of this blog:
Rasmussen's phylogeny also shows that the remainder of the Australian stingless bees called Trigona (and their Asian relatives) are not related to American Trigona. The first Trigona named was a South American species, so that group got to keep the name according to the rules of naming animals. This meant that the Australian/Asian bees needed a new name. (...) Nobody likes it when plant and animal names change, but there are clear reasons for, and advantages to, making these changes. It does not make sense to call all these species Trigona when they are not closely related. It clouds our thinking about patterns.Beautifully put, and very succinctly explained.
I would definitely recommend this book to those who loves bees, and especially the eusocial ones.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Discordant paraphylies executed
Strangely, editors of systematics journals do not appear to tire of opinion pieces rehashing the discussion about paraphyletic taxa that had already been laid to rest in the 1970s. The newest example of such a publication showing up in my alerts is Seifert et al. 2016 in the journal Insectes Sociaux, who take issue with suggested taxonomic changes in ants.
As usual I would like to tease apart the argumentation, examine it for its merits, and consider if there is anything new in it that constitutes a good reason to accept paraphyletic taxa. But first, the title of the piece, which is (sorry to say) one of the most unwieldy titles I have ever seen on a scientific publication:
As usual I would like to tease apart the argumentation, examine it for its merits, and consider if there is anything new in it that constitutes a good reason to accept paraphyletic taxa. But first, the title of the piece, which is (sorry to say) one of the most unwieldy titles I have ever seen on a scientific publication:
Banning paraphylies and executing Linnaean taxonomy is discordant and reduces the evolutionary and semantic information content of biological nomenclatureIf I may attempt to rephrase a bit, I think the authors mean the following:
Banning paraphyletic taxa is incompatible with Linnaean taxonomy and reduces the evolutionary and semantic information content of biological nomenclature...although that is still too long, and it is not clear what is meant with evolutionary and semantic in this context. At any rate, this already suggests what the two main arguments in favour of paraphyly might be. Both of them are not exactly new and have repeatedly been dealt with at length, but of course the hope is that the present paper acknowledges the cladist responses and provides additional counter-arguments instead of ignoring them.
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Conan the Cimmerian
I have made it a habit over the last few years to collect what one might want to call fantasy/science fiction pulp literature classics, either at the local charity book fair or, sometimes, by buying collections outright from online book sellers. Examples include Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom and Venus series and, recently, Robert E. Howard's original Conan stories and the second book of Alan Burt Akers' Dray Prescot series.
Honestly I do not buy these books because I expect to be overwhelmed by their literary quality. I buy them because they are classics; they have influenced generations of fantasy and SF authors, movies and memes, and consequently I would like to get a feel for them. I also do hope that they are entertaining, and here I am actually quite flexible.
A work does not have to be politically correct, I can take it as a product of its time as long as the author is not, well, repulsively reactionary even for their own time. It does not have to be superbly imaginative if the story is gripping, and it does not have to have a superb story if it is at least imaginative in its setting.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, is rather predictable and formulaic:
10 Hero falls in love with princess
20 Princess gets abducted by villain or monsters
30 Hero battles against overwhelming odds to save his love
40 Just as the hero has rescued his love ... goto 20
But the stories are still fun to read because he is very inventive with the biology, politics, technology, culture and sociology of the Martians and Venusians, and apart from the recurrent damsel in distress theme his stories are actually quite okay even from a contemporary political perspective.
His Mars (Barsoom), for example, has green, red, yellow, white and black races. The really evil ones are the greens, blacks... and the whites. And when their evil leaders are defeated... even they can reform, under the leadership of one of their own race. Shocker - the black Martians do not actually need a white master to be civilised! And the kind of 'good' Martians we are supposed to identify with are the red ones... which are the product of interbreeding between whites, blacks and yellows. Clearly Burroughs was not a race essentialist or particularly concerned with racial purity. What is more, he did produce a later Barsoom novel with a fighting, self-confident heroine, defying his readers' expectations.
So now let's talk Conan, because that was the last series I read through, in the sense of buying a two volume collection of all the stories written by Howard himself, meaning not including any of the, shall we say, extended universe stories added by later authors.
Honestly I do not buy these books because I expect to be overwhelmed by their literary quality. I buy them because they are classics; they have influenced generations of fantasy and SF authors, movies and memes, and consequently I would like to get a feel for them. I also do hope that they are entertaining, and here I am actually quite flexible.
A work does not have to be politically correct, I can take it as a product of its time as long as the author is not, well, repulsively reactionary even for their own time. It does not have to be superbly imaginative if the story is gripping, and it does not have to have a superb story if it is at least imaginative in its setting.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, is rather predictable and formulaic:
10 Hero falls in love with princess
20 Princess gets abducted by villain or monsters
30 Hero battles against overwhelming odds to save his love
40 Just as the hero has rescued his love ... goto 20
But the stories are still fun to read because he is very inventive with the biology, politics, technology, culture and sociology of the Martians and Venusians, and apart from the recurrent damsel in distress theme his stories are actually quite okay even from a contemporary political perspective.
His Mars (Barsoom), for example, has green, red, yellow, white and black races. The really evil ones are the greens, blacks... and the whites. And when their evil leaders are defeated... even they can reform, under the leadership of one of their own race. Shocker - the black Martians do not actually need a white master to be civilised! And the kind of 'good' Martians we are supposed to identify with are the red ones... which are the product of interbreeding between whites, blacks and yellows. Clearly Burroughs was not a race essentialist or particularly concerned with racial purity. What is more, he did produce a later Barsoom novel with a fighting, self-confident heroine, defying his readers' expectations.
So now let's talk Conan, because that was the last series I read through, in the sense of buying a two volume collection of all the stories written by Howard himself, meaning not including any of the, shall we say, extended universe stories added by later authors.
Friday, March 4, 2016
I have no idea why anybody uses LaTex
When I was in what would here be called high school, in the early 1990ies, I already had a mathematics teacher who was evangelising for LaTex in the classroom. I never bothered looking into it more deeply, as writing scientific papers in MS Word or LibreOffice worked quite well. But I kind of thought it would have its advantages, otherwise it would not have its niche.
In the last few weeks now I had to deal with a manuscript that was written in LaTex, i.e. I had to integrate the text into a larger Word document and I later had to peer review it. There are many things in life that I do not understand, often with regard to why people believe certain things or behave in certain ways. I can now add to the sum of my ignorance my complete lack of understanding why anybody would want to use LaTex.
Let's ignore for the moment that treating a text document with some bolding and some italics as a programming project already seems needlessly complicated. Yes, it would be easier to mark something and press ctrl-i than to put command tags around the phrase, and a text that is not interrupted by tags is also easier to proof-read, but fine, not the point now.
Point is, a few weeks ago I tried to get the text of this LaTex document into a larger Word document, together with other text elements. The author was unable to export it into Word for me, and another colleague agreed that it wasn't possible. Great. So while, for example, LibreOffice can easily export into a gazillion other formats, a user of LaTex apparently has to rely on all their collaboration partners also having LaTex installed. That seems somewhat inconvenient. I ultimately found a trial version of a Word add-on that allowed me to convert (at the cost of some major formatting disasters), and I sincerely hope I never have reason to buy the full version.
Now I had to review a later version of the same manuscript, and because I had to make lots of minor suggestions I very much wanted to use tracked changes instead of having to laboriously add individual comments to a PDF version. When I was told that LaTex has track changes functionality, I reasoned that using LaTex would also be the best for the authors, as in that way they would be able to easily open the annotated version they would receive from me, and the formatting would be untouched. And who knows, maybe it is a good idea to have LaTex installed anyway, in case another such manuscript comes past my desk in the future.
So let's look into getting LaTex for my Windows computer at work... aha, they recommend proTeXt. Let's see... "You can download the self-extracting protext.exe file from CTAN; it is well over 1GB."
AHAHAHAHAHA... no. They have got to be kidding, right?
What is the argument here? 'We are even clunkier and less efficiently programmed and less user-friendly than Word, but on the plus side...' Well, what? Easier to write mathematical formulas, perhaps? Is that it?
I will stay with LibreOffice and Zotero for the moment, thank you very much.
In the last few weeks now I had to deal with a manuscript that was written in LaTex, i.e. I had to integrate the text into a larger Word document and I later had to peer review it. There are many things in life that I do not understand, often with regard to why people believe certain things or behave in certain ways. I can now add to the sum of my ignorance my complete lack of understanding why anybody would want to use LaTex.
Let's ignore for the moment that treating a text document with some bolding and some italics as a programming project already seems needlessly complicated. Yes, it would be easier to mark something and press ctrl-i than to put command tags around the phrase, and a text that is not interrupted by tags is also easier to proof-read, but fine, not the point now.
Point is, a few weeks ago I tried to get the text of this LaTex document into a larger Word document, together with other text elements. The author was unable to export it into Word for me, and another colleague agreed that it wasn't possible. Great. So while, for example, LibreOffice can easily export into a gazillion other formats, a user of LaTex apparently has to rely on all their collaboration partners also having LaTex installed. That seems somewhat inconvenient. I ultimately found a trial version of a Word add-on that allowed me to convert (at the cost of some major formatting disasters), and I sincerely hope I never have reason to buy the full version.
Now I had to review a later version of the same manuscript, and because I had to make lots of minor suggestions I very much wanted to use tracked changes instead of having to laboriously add individual comments to a PDF version. When I was told that LaTex has track changes functionality, I reasoned that using LaTex would also be the best for the authors, as in that way they would be able to easily open the annotated version they would receive from me, and the formatting would be untouched. And who knows, maybe it is a good idea to have LaTex installed anyway, in case another such manuscript comes past my desk in the future.
So let's look into getting LaTex for my Windows computer at work... aha, they recommend proTeXt. Let's see... "You can download the self-extracting protext.exe file from CTAN; it is well over 1GB."
AHAHAHAHAHA... no. They have got to be kidding, right?
What is the argument here? 'We are even clunkier and less efficiently programmed and less user-friendly than Word, but on the plus side...' Well, what? Easier to write mathematical formulas, perhaps? Is that it?
I will stay with LibreOffice and Zotero for the moment, thank you very much.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Patrocladistics 3: The logic behind it
After looking at what patrocladistics is, how it works, and what happens if we add intermediate ancestors, this third and last post on the method is dealing with the underlying justification. Some throat clearing seems appropriate: what do I mean with justification?
I am interested in two questions here. The first is the justification for doing something at all, or, to be perhaps more precise, the justification for believing that an activity is conductive to a given goal. Assume, for example, that you are paying a company to build a house for you. One day you walk past and you notice that the builders do not actually seem to be raising any walls, instead they are sitting around a sandpit playing with mud pies. The question is now why they are playing mud pies. You are paying this hour's work in the belief that it goes towards your house - how does this further the undertaking?
Now maybe there is a good reason. Perhaps the foreman could reply that you are not actually looking at mud pies but at a revolutionary new brick-making technology. Who knows? But if he just replies, well, we fancied making mud pies, then you would most likely not consider that to be a very good justification, because there is no connection between that answer and the goal of getting your house up. Similarly, if we want to build a sensible classification, we need an approach that is justified as logically leading to a sensible classification, and not just an answer on the lines of, well, we fancied the result this approach produces.
I should also add that I am not really interested in trying to invent a justification myself, or in examining some post-hoc rationalisation that a completely different pro-paraphyly taxonomist may have developed several years later. I am primarily interested in how the paper originally presenting patrocladistics to the community justified the approach.
The second question is why the analysis should be conducted in the very specific way suggested by the authors, independently of the answer to the first question. In the case of the builders, regardless of whether they have convinced you of the virtues of mud pies as a replacement for bricks, you may still ask why they would be using chopsticks to form their mud pies when little shovels or even spoons would perhaps be more efficient. In the case of patrocladistics, I will likewise temporarily put aside the issue of whether it makes sense and ask if any justification is provided for the specific way in which patrocladistics are conducted in the paper.
I am interested in two questions here. The first is the justification for doing something at all, or, to be perhaps more precise, the justification for believing that an activity is conductive to a given goal. Assume, for example, that you are paying a company to build a house for you. One day you walk past and you notice that the builders do not actually seem to be raising any walls, instead they are sitting around a sandpit playing with mud pies. The question is now why they are playing mud pies. You are paying this hour's work in the belief that it goes towards your house - how does this further the undertaking?
Now maybe there is a good reason. Perhaps the foreman could reply that you are not actually looking at mud pies but at a revolutionary new brick-making technology. Who knows? But if he just replies, well, we fancied making mud pies, then you would most likely not consider that to be a very good justification, because there is no connection between that answer and the goal of getting your house up. Similarly, if we want to build a sensible classification, we need an approach that is justified as logically leading to a sensible classification, and not just an answer on the lines of, well, we fancied the result this approach produces.
I should also add that I am not really interested in trying to invent a justification myself, or in examining some post-hoc rationalisation that a completely different pro-paraphyly taxonomist may have developed several years later. I am primarily interested in how the paper originally presenting patrocladistics to the community justified the approach.
The second question is why the analysis should be conducted in the very specific way suggested by the authors, independently of the answer to the first question. In the case of the builders, regardless of whether they have convinced you of the virtues of mud pies as a replacement for bricks, you may still ask why they would be using chopsticks to form their mud pies when little shovels or even spoons would perhaps be more efficient. In the case of patrocladistics, I will likewise temporarily put aside the issue of whether it makes sense and ask if any justification is provided for the specific way in which patrocladistics are conducted in the paper.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Patrocladistics 1: How does it work? And a contrived example
As the approach is often mentioned in pro-paraphyly publications as an objective method of delimiting paraphyletic taxa, I thought I should look into patrocladistics again and examine it in a blog post or three. In the following I will approach patrocladistics from three different angles:
1. What is patrocladistics and how does it work? This is very straightforward.
2. How does the patrocladistic approach perform when ancestors are added?
It is often easy enough to explain how something works in the abstract, but it is perhaps more enlightening to throw different problems at a method and see under what conditions it is more or less useful or may be mislead. For example, explaining how BEAST does its phylogenetic inferences does not necessarily by itself tell us how it will perform when faced with, say, 25% missing data. I often criticise the pro-paraphyly movement for what I see as their reliance on the fortuitous absence of intermediate fossils to separate out paraphyletic groups. Conversely, members of that movement have a tendency to criticise cladists for supposedly ignoring ancestors. So in the case of patrocladistics, I wanted to see what happens if the method is provided not only with extant taxa but also with ancestors.
3. What is the rationale behind patrocladistics?
In other words, if somebody who is agnostic about the whole phylogenetic versus 'evolutionary' systematics issue were to ask why they should do a patrocladistic analysis, or what the biological or philosophical justification for such an analysis is, what would the answer be?
This post will cover the first point.
1. What is patrocladistics and how does it work? This is very straightforward.
2. How does the patrocladistic approach perform when ancestors are added?
It is often easy enough to explain how something works in the abstract, but it is perhaps more enlightening to throw different problems at a method and see under what conditions it is more or less useful or may be mislead. For example, explaining how BEAST does its phylogenetic inferences does not necessarily by itself tell us how it will perform when faced with, say, 25% missing data. I often criticise the pro-paraphyly movement for what I see as their reliance on the fortuitous absence of intermediate fossils to separate out paraphyletic groups. Conversely, members of that movement have a tendency to criticise cladists for supposedly ignoring ancestors. So in the case of patrocladistics, I wanted to see what happens if the method is provided not only with extant taxa but also with ancestors.
3. What is the rationale behind patrocladistics?
In other words, if somebody who is agnostic about the whole phylogenetic versus 'evolutionary' systematics issue were to ask why they should do a patrocladistic analysis, or what the biological or philosophical justification for such an analysis is, what would the answer be?
This post will cover the first point.
Friday, November 6, 2015
Reading Stormfront, Book One of the Dresden Files
The last three weeks have been a bit full; first field work, then meeting, then moving house, and then a bad cold. But although we are still sitting between boxes waiting to be unpacked, I finally feel like writing something again.
At the last Lifeline book fair I bought a couple of books. Let's start with the first I read, Jim Butcher's Stormfront - Book One of the Dresden Files. Minor spoilers obviously ahead.
At the last Lifeline book fair I bought a couple of books. Let's start with the first I read, Jim Butcher's Stormfront - Book One of the Dresden Files. Minor spoilers obviously ahead.
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Isaac Asimov's Foundation
I spent much of the week at a meeting in Tasmania. On the last day I had time to browse a book store and finally bought the first Foundation novel after I had only found sequels and prequels at the local book fair so far.
It is not so much a novel as a compendium of several shorter stories, each with their own characters and representing several stages of the development of the eponymous Foundation. I have written before about some of the other books in the series (Foundation and Empire, Foundation's Edge). Although my observations on this book are similar to those on the later ones, somehow it doesn't feel quite as blatant.
It is not so much a novel as a compendium of several shorter stories, each with their own characters and representing several stages of the development of the eponymous Foundation. I have written before about some of the other books in the series (Foundation and Empire, Foundation's Edge). Although my observations on this book are similar to those on the later ones, somehow it doesn't feel quite as blatant.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
PhyloPic
A few weeks ago we discussed a paper in our journal club that used dinosaur silhouettes in its figures and referenced PhyloPic as the source. So today I finally decided to check the website out.
PhyloPic is a repository of black/white silhouettes of organisms across the tree of life. The idea is that everybody can sign up and submit their artwork under some kind of creative commons or public domain license, and everybody can use the silhouettes to do just what the authors in the aforementioned paper did: decorate phylogenetic tree figures in publications or talk slides, educate, etc.
The idea sounds great, so I played around a bit today to see how well it works. The experience was, alas, a bit mixed.
PhyloPic is a repository of black/white silhouettes of organisms across the tree of life. The idea is that everybody can sign up and submit their artwork under some kind of creative commons or public domain license, and everybody can use the silhouettes to do just what the authors in the aforementioned paper did: decorate phylogenetic tree figures in publications or talk slides, educate, etc.
The idea sounds great, so I played around a bit today to see how well it works. The experience was, alas, a bit mixed.
Friday, April 10, 2015
Chance dispersal, 'normal' dispersal, and long distance dispersal ... confused yet?
Having now picked up Michael Heads' second contribution to the recent issue of Australian Systematic Botany, Biogeography by revelation: investigating a world shaped by miracles, I am glad that I read the other one first. On the one hand, the present paper is really just a 23 pages long criticism of a single book, Alan de Queiroz' The Monkey's Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life; on the other, its argumentation is remarkably redundant with the first paper. It even contains another discussion of the ratite birds! Was it really necessary to write both of these papers, and for the same journal issue at that, considering that this criticism of de Queiroz is merely a special case of the criticism of mainstream biogeography that has been expressed in the first one?
And because it is all about one book, the paper is also, at least in my eyes, a remarkably uninteresting contribution to the discussion. I have no intention of reading The Monkey's Voyage, so I cannot judge if any quote mining is going on or not. But let us for assume the sake of argument that Heads' criticisms are, in this case, right on the mark; that de Queiroz really is that most elusive of straw men, a biogeographer who not merely sees an important role for founder effect but who actually rules out the possibility of vicariance as a speciation mechanism. Would that make the panbiogeographic approach, here strangely called 'vicariance theory', any more defensible?
Of course not. If you could find a person who irrationally rejects the possibility of vicariance a priori, that would still not in any way whatsoever make the a priori rejection of speciation after long distance dispersal less irrational. So in the grand scheme of things there is really not much point in addressing anything the present paper argues about de Queiroz.
Similarly, a very large part of the paper is taken up by case studies where the author argues for vicariance scenarios. Again, let us assume for the sake of argument that vicariance is the correct answer in all these cases, every single one of them. Now would that make the panbiogeographic approach any more defensible?
Again, no. The real question of interest is whether a panbiogeographic analysis is science, and because it always builds the conclusion into its starting assumptions (the ancestor was already distributed everywhere) there are good reasons to argue it isn't.
As much as Heads tries to frame the controversy as 'dispersal theorists' versus 'vicariance theorists', to the best of my knowledge at least there are really hardly any, if any, dispersal theorists anywhere, at least not any fitting his characterisation. Who I have met and read are numerous mainstream biogeographers who accept vicariance, range extension, long distance dispersal, local extinction, range shifts and (depending on who you ask and what geographic scale we are talking) sympatric speciation as possible biogeographic processes, deciding between them case by case depending on the available evidence.
And on the other side "the panbiogeographic approach, as illustrated here, explains allopatry by vicariance and overlap by dispersal" (Heads, 2015). Notabene: One single process to explain speciation, all others are forbidden. There is no symmetry to these two positions.
Still, there are a few things that occurred to me when reading this paper that didn't when I read the first one.
And because it is all about one book, the paper is also, at least in my eyes, a remarkably uninteresting contribution to the discussion. I have no intention of reading The Monkey's Voyage, so I cannot judge if any quote mining is going on or not. But let us for assume the sake of argument that Heads' criticisms are, in this case, right on the mark; that de Queiroz really is that most elusive of straw men, a biogeographer who not merely sees an important role for founder effect but who actually rules out the possibility of vicariance as a speciation mechanism. Would that make the panbiogeographic approach, here strangely called 'vicariance theory', any more defensible?
Of course not. If you could find a person who irrationally rejects the possibility of vicariance a priori, that would still not in any way whatsoever make the a priori rejection of speciation after long distance dispersal less irrational. So in the grand scheme of things there is really not much point in addressing anything the present paper argues about de Queiroz.
Similarly, a very large part of the paper is taken up by case studies where the author argues for vicariance scenarios. Again, let us assume for the sake of argument that vicariance is the correct answer in all these cases, every single one of them. Now would that make the panbiogeographic approach any more defensible?
Again, no. The real question of interest is whether a panbiogeographic analysis is science, and because it always builds the conclusion into its starting assumptions (the ancestor was already distributed everywhere) there are good reasons to argue it isn't.
As much as Heads tries to frame the controversy as 'dispersal theorists' versus 'vicariance theorists', to the best of my knowledge at least there are really hardly any, if any, dispersal theorists anywhere, at least not any fitting his characterisation. Who I have met and read are numerous mainstream biogeographers who accept vicariance, range extension, long distance dispersal, local extinction, range shifts and (depending on who you ask and what geographic scale we are talking) sympatric speciation as possible biogeographic processes, deciding between them case by case depending on the available evidence.
And on the other side "the panbiogeographic approach, as illustrated here, explains allopatry by vicariance and overlap by dispersal" (Heads, 2015). Notabene: One single process to explain speciation, all others are forbidden. There is no symmetry to these two positions.
Still, there are a few things that occurred to me when reading this paper that didn't when I read the first one.
Saturday, April 4, 2015
How not to convince me that panbiogeography is science
A few days ago, the newest issue of Australian Systematic Botany appeared, and I was rather surprised by the contents, for two of the four papers of the issue were opinion pieces by panbiogeographer Michael Heads. One of them is even, to the degree that it discusses anything specific at all, about ratites. Why would a journal of systematic botany accept a zoological paper from a fringe school of biogeography? And why would a panbiogeographer submit his manuscripts to a regional taxonomic journal as opposed to an international one focusing on biogeography? One wonders.
I have written about panbiogeography before, and my perception was and still is that its proponents are mostly characterised by an irrational hostility to long distance dispersal. In my second post I discussed an example of Heads himself trying to force a biogeographic story into vicariance although that would mean that the plant family in question would have had to originate before the evolution of multi-cellular life.
But as in the case of 'evolutionary' systematics I remain interested in the arguments of the other side, and thus I decided to read the two papers. I have started with and will make this post about Heads' Panbiogeography, its critics, and the case of the ratite birds because it promises to provide an example of the panbiogeographic method in action.
I have written about panbiogeography before, and my perception was and still is that its proponents are mostly characterised by an irrational hostility to long distance dispersal. In my second post I discussed an example of Heads himself trying to force a biogeographic story into vicariance although that would mean that the plant family in question would have had to originate before the evolution of multi-cellular life.
But as in the case of 'evolutionary' systematics I remain interested in the arguments of the other side, and thus I decided to read the two papers. I have started with and will make this post about Heads' Panbiogeography, its critics, and the case of the ratite birds because it promises to provide an example of the panbiogeographic method in action.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Field guide to the native plants of the ACT
A few weeks ago Meredith Cosgrove self-published her Photographic Guide to Native Plants of the Australian Capital Territory.
It is a great field guide, and in my eyes much more useful than the one I used before. Every species is given a full page with several high quality photographs. Importantly, the photographs are not, as all too often, restricted to the flowers but instead cover all identification relevant characters. Thus most species will be shown in flower, in fruit, and with their overall habit, and then there are pictures of other key traits, such as leaf tips in the case of Lomandra or bark in the case of Eucalypts.
About a third of each species profile is taken up by descriptions and notes. At the bottom of each page are little bars that allow the user to check whether some character on the plant they have in front of them falls into the diversity exhibited by the species presented on the page, leaf width or flower size for example. Then there are a little map of the ACT with known occurrences and a density plot showing occurrence along the elevational gradient. All in all a very useful and informative book that will make identification of plants in the Canberra region much easier for plant enthusiasts.
Although I am very happy with it, there are two issues that other people might find unfortunate. One is that the book is restricted in its coverage to dicots and petaloid monocots; in other words, it doesn't include grasses (Poaceae, Cyperaceae, Juncaceae, Restionaceae). The second is that the plants are ordered alphabetically by family. That makes it easy to find something if you already have a bit of botanical knowledge and can recognise something as, say, an Ericaceae, but it will not help those who are totally at sea and just want to browse though all species with white flowers until they find something that looks right. That being said, there is an intuitive tabular key at the beginning that allows the reader to narrow families down by petal number and flower colour. Anyway, I personally prefer the systematic structure that has all members of one taxonomic group together.
The guide is also affordable at (Australian) $45, and with its A5 format it fits comfortably into a bush-walker's backpack. More information can be found at the publication website.
Friday, January 9, 2015
Comparison of phylogenetic tree viewing programs: TreeView, FigTree, Dendroscope
It seems as if I could productively conclude the theme of how to root phylogenetic trees by providing an overview of the tree viewers I have some experience with.
When you do a phylogenetic analysis in programs such as PAUP, TNT, RAxML, MrBayes or BEAST, you do get a phylogenetic tree, but it is not a graphic to look at. Instead, the standard format for phylogenetic trees is that of a text file in the Newick format, e.g. "(speciesA:4,(speciesB:6,(speciesC:2,speciesD:3)95:2)76:1)". The brackets show how the terminals of the tree are grouped, the numbers after the colons are branch lengths, and the other numbers following directly behind brackets are clade support values. All the information is there, but that is not a very clear way of displaying a tree, especially if it has dozens or hundreds of terminals.
The programs discussed below are used to display phylogenetic trees and to transform them into vector graphic files that can be used for the preparation of scientific publications.
The screen shots below show the same tree displayed in each program as a phylogram with clade support values.
When you do a phylogenetic analysis in programs such as PAUP, TNT, RAxML, MrBayes or BEAST, you do get a phylogenetic tree, but it is not a graphic to look at. Instead, the standard format for phylogenetic trees is that of a text file in the Newick format, e.g. "(speciesA:4,(speciesB:6,(speciesC:2,speciesD:3)95:2)76:1)". The brackets show how the terminals of the tree are grouped, the numbers after the colons are branch lengths, and the other numbers following directly behind brackets are clade support values. All the information is there, but that is not a very clear way of displaying a tree, especially if it has dozens or hundreds of terminals.
The programs discussed below are used to display phylogenetic trees and to transform them into vector graphic files that can be used for the preparation of scientific publications.
The screen shots below show the same tree displayed in each program as a phylogram with clade support values.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Back to Richard Zander's Framework: about a book review
Richard Zander, the author of the
Framework for Post-Phylogenetic Systematics (which I reviewed
for a society newsletter, see also my blog posts here, here, here, here and here) is outraged by what he calls a “particularly nasty” review of his book by Andrew Brower in the journal Cladistics. Of
course his book was never going to be received well by this bastion
of the school of systematics he is most aggressively opposed to, but he
complains that the review “lacks understanding and collegial
dignity”.
He submitted a supposedly
“light-hearted” response to Cladistics but was turned
down; and although they may exist somewhere I cannot remember ever
having seen a rebuttal to any book review in any journal before, so
that does not surprise me. His reply can therefore be found in
Phytoneuron, a journal that I had never heard of before. It
seems to be an online-only, one man operation, whose review process
is described as follows (accessed 17 December 2014):
Submissions will be promptly reviewed for content and style by the editor, based on his own knowledge and expertise. If deemed appropriate or necessary by the editor, or if requested by the author, review by other botanical peers will be sought.
Zander's reply consists mostly of a
complaint about Brower's “disparagements” and two arguments by
analogy; the latter I found so bizarre that I felt motivated to write
this post. First, however, the tone.
Thursday, November 20, 2014
The Dark Side of the Sun
I have also just recently re-read one
of Terry Pratchett's Science Fiction novels, The Dark Side of the
Sun. Its message is one that I have always struggled with when it
was presented as a more explicit claim: there is no objective view of
reality, instead we cannot avoid having a subjective perspective
depending on our identity. The scientifically most advanced alien
species in the book have realised that they have hit the limits of
what they can figure out, and so they try to gather insights from
other intelligent species. The Creapii go as far as to recreate the
natural environment of other life forms to immerse themselves in it,
to try to feel what it is like, for example, to be a human.
This idea that all knowledge is
subjective is a very po-mo concept, and I somehow suspect that
Pratchett cannot mean it quite to the strictest interpretation.
Indeed I can hardly believe that postmodernist scholars can really
mean it like that. A water molecule consists of two atoms hydrogen
and one atom oxygen. If a Creap, a Phnobe or a Drosk - three types of alien from the novel - examine water,
would they find it to consist of three hydrogen atoms instead, or perhaps to contain plutonium? Surely
not. Instead of “it has two atoms of hydrogen” they might say
“sldjlkjs lksjf l slkfdj lsj fs”, but once we clarify all the
definitions and translations we would expect to arrive at the same
number of atoms of each kind, because that is just what is observable
out there in nature.
By extension the same goes for
everything that can be tested or examined empirically. There should
be no female or male astronomy, no Jewish or Aryan physics, because
the stars are the stars and the Theory of Relativity is either a good
description of reality or it isn't.
What there is, if anything, is the good
old “what it is like to be a bat” question. In an important
sense, we humans will never know what it is like to be a bat, and I
will never know what it is like to be a woman. All we can do is
contemplate things at a purely intellectual level, such as that bats
use echolocation and that women can (usually) become pregnant, but how any of that
feels I at least will never be able to truly appreciate.
But there are two things to be
considered here. The first is that this is perhaps somewhat
regrettable but not really crucial. It is much more important to know
the stuff that we can indeed figure out as objective knowledge, the
kind of stuff that allows us to heal diseases, build working machines
and improve our agriculture, than to know how if feels to be somebody
or something that we just plainly aren't.
The second is that it cannot be helped
anyway. Even the super-advanced aliens of Pratchett's story must
ultimately make do with asking other species about their views. The
book ends with everybody talking, listening, exchanging perspectives. And that
seems to be all that is really needed.
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