philosophy

Book review – Kingdoms, Empires, & Domains: The History of High-Level Biological Classification

10-minute read
keywords: history of science, taxonomy

This is the third of a three four-part series on the history of taxonomy. In the last two reviews, I zoomed in on two important historical figures, Linnaeus and Buffon. Obviously, trying to understand how the living world is organized occupied the minds of many more people, and also has a far deeper pedigree than the 18th century. How deep? How about we take stock of the last 26 centuries. Kingdoms, Empires, & Domains by molecular biologist Mark A. Ragan is an encyclopaedic behemoth that charts the history of our thinking about high-level biological classification. The phrase “animal, vegetable, mineral” might ring a bell, but that division was never universal and there was always a shifting borderland around this, to say nothing of how modern developments have upended our understanding. If that sounds even remotely interesting, buckle up: engaging with this book will be a significant if worthwhile investment. Ragan combines a deeply researched history that draws on primary literature and authoritative translations with a tightly focused and well-structured text. The result is a scholarly monograph that is remarkably engaging. Its massive scope makes it one of those once-in-a-generation books that will be indispensable for science historians and academic libraries.

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Book review – Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

7-minute read
keywords: ethology, philosophy, psychology

The Virginia opossum is one of nature’s glorious weirdos. This North American marsupial will play dead when feeling threatened: she will fall over paralysed, eyes and mouth wide open, turn her tongue blue, drop her body temperature and heart rate, and, for good measure, drool, pee, poop, and excrete a foul-smelling green goo from her anal glands, all at the same time. “Playing” dead rather undersells it. Having just reviewed How Animals Grieve, this is the second of a two-part review exploring how animals experience and understand death, a topic studied by comparative thanatology. This young discipline sits somewhere at the intersection of ethology and comparative psychology, though associate professor Susana Monsó is instead a philosopher. With Playing Possum, she has written an exceedingly interesting book that is as accessible to a general audience as it is relevant to specialists. In the process, she convincingly argues that an understanding of death is likely very widespread in nature, but also that comparative thanatology has a whole lot of growing up to do.

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Book review – Living on Earth: Life, Consciousness and the Making of the Natural World

7-minute read
keywords: anthropology, evolution, neurobiology, philosophy

In 2016, scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith made a huge splash with his book Other Minds in which he explored the evolutionary origins of a mind quite unlike ours, that of the octopus. In 2020, he followed this up with the altogether more cerebral Metazoa in which he explored the evolution of animal minds more broadly. I reviewed both books favourably. Now, another four years later, Living on Earth is presented retrospectively as the conclusion to this trilogy exploring the origins of intelligence. In a book that is never less than thoughtful, Godfrey-Smith examines how life shapes, and has been shaped by, its environment.

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Book review – Biocivilisations: A New Look at the Science of Life

9-minute read
keywords: evolution, philosophy

A recurrent theme in the books that I review is that we underestimate what other animals are capable of and, by extension, overestimate humans. One thrust of Biocivilisations is that many of the hallmarks of human civilisations have parallels in the worlds of plants, animals, fungi, and microbes. Less of a popular science book that marvels at life’s achievements, this is more a full-throated attack on reductive materialism and mainstream biology that leans on philosophy, metaphor, and a substantial dose of unconventional ideas. In turns fascinating and frustrating, there is a lot to unpack here.

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Book review – Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

10-minute read
keywords: ornithology, philosophy

Ecologist Carl Safina needs little in the way of introduction, having written the lauded Beyond Words and Becoming Wild, and a score of earlier books. For me, he ranks right up there with modern science popularisers such as Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, and the late Frans de Waal for his thought-provoking and intensely beautiful writing. His latest book sees him captivated by a bird as he nurses back to health an orphaned screech owl. But Alfie & Me is far more than a memoir about one man’s friendship with a wild animal, as it sends him on a personal quest to better understand humanity’s relationship with nature throughout history. Come for the owls, stay for Safina’s philosophical reflections and piercing analysis of how the West came to see the natural world as a commodity to exploit and exhaust.

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Book review – Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

9-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, neurobiology, philosophy

Despite millennia of arguments, the question of whether we have free will or not remains unresolved. Last year October, two neurobiologists stepped into the fray, giving me the chance to dip my toes into the free-will debate. I just reviewed Robert Sapolsky’s Determined which presented a case against. Though successfully showing that we have less of it than we think, I remain unconvinced by his total rejection of free will. For the second half of this two-part review, I turn to Kevin J. Mitchell’s Free Agents which, also starting from neurobiology, presents a tightly argued and compelling case in favour.

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Book review – Determined: Life Without Free Will

10-minute read
keywords: neurobiology, philosophy

Do we have free will or not? Despite millennia of debate, this question stands as one of those seemingly unresolvable conundrums. I admit it has never kept me up at night; yes, biology influences and constrains our behaviour, but it sure feels like we have free will. Beyond that, however, I confess to ignorance on this subject. With the caveat that I do not expect one or even two books to definitively settle this matter, I was very excited by the simultaneous publication last October of Determined: Life Without Free Will and Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. Well, guess I have no choice on this particular occasion: this pair just cries out for a double review.

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Book review – A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness

9-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, neurobiology, philosophy

The nature of consciousness is one of the hardest problems in biology. What exactly is it? Where did it come from? And are non-human animals conscious? Philosophers and scientists range from ascribing consciousness to all life (biopsychism), or even all matter (panpsychism), to attributing it exclusively to humans. Seemingly beyond the purview of empirical science due to its subjective nature, there is a lack of “intuitively attractive solutions” (p. xiii). In the opinion of Walter Veit, an assistant professor in philosophy, that just will not do. In this slim but advanced-level book, he outlines a mightily interesting thesis of how consciousness could have gradually evolved, which aspect of it likely appeared first, and why we urgently need to step away from taking human consciousness as our yardstick.

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Book review – The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet

10-minute read
keywords: earth sciences, history of science, philosophy

This is the final part of my four-part review series on the Gaia hypothesis (see also part 1, part 2, and part 3), James Lovelock’s notion that the Earth is a giant self-regulating system that maintains conditions suitable for life on the planet. I selected this book as a counterpart to the hard-science analysis of Tyrrell’s On Gaia (also published in 2013) to take a step back and read about the wider reception of Lovelock’s ideas. As it turns out, professor of philosophy Michael Ruse additionally delves into the historical and philosophical precursors to the notion of Earth as a living planet. An intellectually rigorous if sometimes challenging book, The Gaia Hypothesis gives a very satisfying overview of why Lovelock got the reception he did and, for me, marks Ruse as a notable writer to keep an eye on.

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Book review – The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning

7-minute read
keywords: history of technology, philosophy

It is tempting to think of the internet as a revolutionary and transformative tool. But neither is really true, contends professor of history and philosophy of science Justin E.H. Smith. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, he argues that the idea has been in the air for centuries and that the lofty aspirations and dreams of its founders—that it would improve society—have died. Some of the observations here are absolute gems, though you will have to follow Smith through some diversions to get to them. Unfortunately, the book leaves the reader hanging at the end and does not deliver on some of its promises.

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