One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.
I bought this book in March at the Tucson Festival of Books after a fascinating event called "She persisted". Even got my copy signed! WBUR loved it. I asked the author whether it would matter that I (unlike, I think, everyone else at the event) have never read The Scarlet Letter and was assured that it would not. Just started (finally).
Continued from June. I only recently read American Gods (I know, I know!) and of course loved it. (I was late to the party but at least I read the "author's preferred text.") My brother's favorite book by Gaiman is Neverwhere, and I'll get there, but I grabbed this nice collection of stories and poems at Bookmans and am almost through.
Non-fiction
I wrote about this book and my experiment (before and after reading). The first chapter was harrowing and introduced me to the term "complicitor" and outlines Bazerman's approach, which is case-based and more "practical" than what philosophers do. I should have known that Aquinas was an original source of instruction on complicity, but I didn't.
This book was strongly recommended to me by a friend here in Tucson. My friend has studied with the author, who was partly Tucson-based (and perhaps still is). I'm excited to finally experience the wisdom of these ancient teachers. The publisher's page has a little more information.
I recently wrote about two main tendencies (or schools, or emphases) in evolutionary biology: the American interest in diversity and the British interest in design. This distinction seems to roughly parallel another dichotomy based on structuralism and adaptationism. I've never really gotten my head around biological structuralism but I'm very familiar with a lot of the ideas and writing—Gould, Wagner, D'Arcy Thompson, they're all in my library). While looking for readings on these concepts and disputes, I found a special issue of Seminars in Cell & Developmental Biology that seems devoted to them and will start with Structuralism and Adaptationism: Friends? Or foes? by Rachael L. Brown. Here's the abstract:
Historically, the empirical study of phenotypic diversification has fallen into two rough camps; (1) "structuralist approaches" focusing on developmental constraint, bias, and innovation (with evo-devo at the core); and (2) "adaptationist approaches" focusing on adaptation, and natural selection. Whilst debates, such as that surrounding the proposed "Extended" Evolutionary Synthesis, often juxtapose these two positions, this review focuses on the grey space in between. Specifically, here I present a novel analysis of structuralism which enables us to take a more nuanced look at the motivations behind the structuralist and adaptationist positions. This makes clear how the two approaches can conflict, and points of potential commensurability. The review clarifies (a) the value of the evo-devo approach to phenotypic diversity, but also (b) how it properly relates to other predominant approaches to the same issues in evolutionary biology more broadly.
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