Zuk (Univ. of California, Riverside; Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World, 2011, etc.) takes on those who say we are ill-suited to modern life because we are trapped in our Stone Age bodies.
That’s pure “paleofantasy,” writes the author, and a denial of evolution. Humans emerged in the Pleistocene, beginning 1 million years ago, and have continued to evolve since. Zuk cites dozens of studies of changes in gene frequencies (the mark of evolution) when our genomes are compared with ancient DNA. One classic example is the ability of many adults to digest milk, thanks to the retention of a working lactase enzyme. Prior to the birth of agriculture and the domestication of animals—only a few thousand years ago—the lactase gene was turned off in early childhood. Adaptations to living at high altitudes are also recent, and genetic analyses show that Andean dwellers accomplish it differently than Tibetans. These and countless other examples attest to the continued interactions of our species and cultures with nature and the environment, with consequences that affect diet, disease risk/resistance and lifestyles. So it makes no sense that we should eat the “paleo” diet of meat and root vegetables like hunter-gatherers, run barefoot (as in pursuit of game) or take as models of sex behavior what our primate friends do. Zuk is particularly sharp in this area, pointing to how diverse sexual behavior is for chimps, bonobos, gorillas, gibbons and orangutans. The mistake that the back-to-paleo folks make is the belief that human evolution stopped at some point thousands of years ago. Zuk explains that evolution (in all organisms) can and does happen by genetic drift (an isolated group may, over time, concentrate particular genes), by gene inflow (when new groups mix with an existing group), by mutation (gene errors) and by natural selection, which looks at traits associated with greater reproductive success. Nothing beats good hard data to debunk myths, and Zuk offers plenty.
Pub Date: March 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-08137-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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