Acceleration of Human Evolution, Alternatives for Blogging, Autism and Indian Ladies

If the above subject heading seems internally disconnected, imagine please what my poor brain is undergoing as I read books in these subject areas, concurrently.

It is my habit to read three or more books in various stages of completion so I have a choice to suit my frame of mind and physical circumstance.

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending

The most intriguing of the books I am currently reading is The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Human Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. I might not have found out about this book as I did, even before it was published, were it not for Professor Harpending and I being descended from a common ancestor, Gerret Hargerinck of Nieuwenhuys, Netherlands, born in 1640. Gerret and his sons, Jan and Hendrick, emigrated to Nieuw Amsterdam, now New York City. The family changed the name a few times until it settled on ‘Harpending,’ with branches of the family spreading out to upstate New York, to Kentucky and to one or two of the northern tier states, plus Utah where my distant cousin Henry now lives. My branch was in Kentucky.

But that’s another story for another day, except that I have a standing request for Google to send me links to any new web pages containing the names Harpending and Pavellas. That’s how I found out about The 10,000 Year Explosion.

The first thing I like about the book is that it challenges current wisdom in its field and related fields. These would be, as far I can tell: human biology, evolutionary biology in humans and other living forms, anthropology, history, human genetics and possibly others.

The second thing I like about the book is that it appeals to my own brand of common sense. Other than where it necessarily uses the language of science to buttress its authors’ assertions, it is breezy and easily understood by this non-scientist.

There is already a buzz about it on the internet, most of it positive, as far as I can see, but some negative because it seems to violate some currently politically correct views on the nature of being human.

I am halfway through the book and will not discuss it further here; my purpose, as usual, is to bring something interesting to the attention of the readers of this journal. And, there is plenty enough discussion about the book available on the Internet.

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As for “Alternatives for Blogging,” this idea came to me recently from a friend who heard from someone else that Google’s Blogspot (this here one you are looking at) will soon or sometime stop hosting any archives older than six months. I wrote back to the fellow who told my friend, he did some more checking, and couldn’t verify this notion, after all. But, he did have some gripes against Blogspot regarding the terms and conditions and recommended I change to WordPress.

Before I chose Blogspot, in April 2007, I did buy WordPress2: Learn WordPress the Quick and Easy Way, by Maria Langer and Miraz Jordan. I’m not good with details, or at least am impatient, so I ultimately chose Blogspot because the format was set up for me and the hosting is free. I have since learned much about HTML and have modified my template, considerably and am disinclined to learn a new way.

I will, however, review the book and other writings of the authors to see if I might be better off learning the WordPress way, but not in a hurry.

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In December, 2007, I wrote an article, here, on the Autism Disorder Spectrum, which article I entitled Born on a Blue Day, after the book of the same name.

A friend who has an interest in the subject lent me the book Autism From Within—A Handbook, by Hilde De Clercq. My friend translated the book from Dutch into English.

I have not yet read the book in full, but I can recommend it to parents and others who feel (or know) that a family member or friend has any degree of autism. It is a very intimate account of a mother’s experience in guiding her autistic child through schools and through all manner of social circumstances where people are carelessly ignorant about, even antipathetic to, children with this condition. It is very soulful.

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Last, the book Ladies Coupé was assigned by my book discussion group. It was written by Anita Nair.

Upon reading the first several pages I became weary with the anticipation I was about to read another novel about the feelings of women. I like an action or adventure story every once in a while, and these have been few in my reading group.

I persisted, however, as I always do and soon became absorbed in the stories presented here, containing as much as wonderful poetry as polished prose.

The main character, a woman of India (as are almost all the characters) is 45, unmarried and wanting to change her life for a variety of reasons, well described throughout the book. She takes a train trip, traveling in the “Ladies Coupé,” a compartment for women unaccompanied by men. Her purpose is to learn from these women, of varying ages and circumstances, in order to make a decision about her own life.

The stories of the other womens’ lives are at least as interesting and compelling as her own, and we are treated to a look at various facets of Indian life and culture, both attractive and unattractive to this reader.

One woman’s chapter was extraordinary: Chapter 6, “Oil of Vitriol.”

This woman is educated as a chemist but is reduced to teaching chemistry at the high school where her husband is headmaster. The chemical metaphors and poetry of this woman’s thoughts are alone worth the reading of the book. An example:

Arsenic. Her name was Kalavati. With grey hair and a turmeric tinted face. Teacher of mathematics and a poisoner of minds. Reeking of garlic and with a temperament that verged on the extreme. Arsenic knew nothing of the middle path, the in-between stage. Either she was your best friend or your worst enemy. 

…[T]etrasulpur tetranide. The trickiest of the lot. Nawaz…changed his colour with the temperature of the room. Vociferous when there was a general discussion; sitter on fences when opinion was divided, and almost invisible when an argument reached its climax. While he was stable enough, he could also explode in response to any sudden friction…

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As I finish these books, others will replace them. Candidates: King Lear by Shakespeare; Working, by Studs Terkel, lent to me by a fellow writer in the Stockholm Writers Group; Rasero, by Francisco Rebolledo, sent to me by a fellow reader in the U.K. through our membership in BookCrossing; and, The Edge of Reality, by Debra Hagan Dillinger whom I met on the internet.

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A Brief History of The Human Race

This book by Michael Cook should have been written in 1950 so I could have learned to love the subject of history in my youth, as my father vainly urged me.

It provides what I had often longed for: a general framework, with big boxes for subject areas, into which I could logically put, for later intelligent retrieval, the endless streams of information we students were supposed to memorize for reasons and purposes never clear to me.

The book is organized into four major parts:

Why is History the Way It Is?

The Smaller Continents

The Eurasian Landmass

Toward One World?

From Human Evolution: A start for population genomics by S. Blair Hedges; Published in Nature 408, 652-653 (7 December 2000)“Modern humans—in the sense of people anatomically indistinguishable from us—date back a good 130,000 years, and perhaps considerably longer.” [From page 4 of the book].

I was reminded of the following video I recently saved, in that the book gives one a dynamic view of the ebb and flow of peoples, cultures and events that influenced our arrival at this point in world history.

Imperial History of the Middle East in 90 Seconds, produced by “Maps of War”

Throughout the book the author pauses briefly to ask rhetorical questions, and answers them clearly, entertainingly and usefully:

Why did history happen when it did? Why has it all been packed in the last 10,000 years?

Did humans make the only kind of of history they could?

Why did events and significant changes in human populations happen when they did? Could they have happened differently [paraphrased]?

My wish that this book should have been written in 1950 could not possibly have been fulfilled. Much of the scientific research and findings currently available to the author was not available then, especially within the sciences of human, and even animal, genetics.

But it is available now to suffering students in high school (gymnasium, here in Sweden) and college or university. It certainly is also for those whose love of history is already established.

Please click on the image for a better view