Since I’m at the beach this week, it seems like a good time to leave you with a review of Ruth Kassinger’s Slime, a broad survey of all the ways scientists and entrepreneurs are solving problems with algae. Algae have the potential to help us feed more people and provide better nutrition, to fuel transportation at personal and industrial scales, and to help clean up some of the environmental messes we’ve made. More than once while reading the book you may sense that algae sound too good to be true. Kassinger is clearly enthusiastic; at the same time, she is frank about the commercial struggles and failures algae businesses have already faced. Most of the projects she describes are in proof-of-concept or prototype stages and have significant hurdles to overcome if they are to scale to the point of global impact. Still, the opening chapters remind us that algae have already shaped the world several times over, so their potential is not entirely theoretical.
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Book Review/Discussion
Science Book Review: The Big Nine – How the Tech Titans & Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
Amy Webb, author of The Big Nine – How the Tech Titans & Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity, describes herself as a futurist, a job I wasn’t entirely sure actually existed outside of science fiction. Sure, plenty of people reason about the future and some do so in rigorous and quantitative fashion, but often in very narrow and specialized areas–predicting stock markets or elections or planning for consumer trends. Futurism strikes me as needing more of a generalist, and Webb seems to fit the bill. She takes the kind of broad view necessary to convey just how all-pervasive AI has already become and its potential for even greater influence. At the same time, she provides adequate detail and specificity in multiple domains so that all readers have something concrete they can relate to. Actually, the book reads like a blend of science fact and fiction as Webb tells us where we’ve been and imagines where we might go. So maybe futurist is something of a science fiction job after all.
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Science Book Review: Complexity – A Guided Tour
When I reviewed Underbug a couple of weeks ago, I supposed many readers would enjoy the storytelling skill of author and journalist Lisa Margonelli even though I was hoping for more science. Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell has plenty of math and science, which is fine by me yet may not be to everyone’s taste. As it happens, the subjects of both books overlap; the complexity of termite mounds is one stop on Mitchell’s tour. Notably, neither book offers a compelling conclusion to the search for unifying principles that generate complexity; just defining the term in a quantifiably useful way continues to elude complexity scientists. Margonelli and Mitchell agree that we are still waiting for Carnot.
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Science Book Review: Underbug – An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology
I know the maxim, but you have to respect the aesthetic of cutting holes out of the dust jacket for a book about termites. I’m game for learning about termite biology anyway, and that attention to detail in the presentation of Lisa Margonelli’s Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology sealed the deal. Imagine my surprise, then, when the book was not as much about termites as I was hoping. Termites feature prominently, but it’s one of those “it was really about us all along” kind of stories. I suspect many of you will be just as happy to read Margonelli’s thoughtful commentary on our relationship to technology and its role in the projection of power. Silly me though; I was here for the entomology.
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Science Book Review: How the Body of Christ Talks
Given my interest in using contemporary science metaphorically, I could hardly pass up a book expanding on the church-as-body metaphor with human physiology and the practice of conversation. How the Body of Christ Talks by C. Christopher Smith is an invitation to deeper conversation for Christian congregations, although organizations of all sorts will likely find value in Smith’s observations and advice. He prefaces these with brief vignettes about how our physical bodies work, all motivated by a central premise that life is an ongoing conversation among our various cells. I appreciated the texture these analogies provided to the text, but for those wary of metaphors or of cell biology, rest assured that none overstay their welcome, quickly giving way to more explicit discussion of discussion.
Probably the strongest endorsement I can give How the Body of Christ Talks is that from very early on I was struck with a strong desire to be a part of a congregation seeking to apply what Smith describes. He regularly describes the practice of conversation at his own church, Englewood Christian Church in Indianapolis; it may have crossed my mind once or twice to wonder just how impractical (fairly) and awkward (very) it would be to relocate to Indiana to join them. They have been holding weekly conversation gatherings for over twenty years, apparently figuring how to make those functional and what benefits were obtained as they went along. Smith’s book is then essentially a compilation of lessons learned, supplemented with anecdotes from other congregations and a motivating theology.
The risk with such an approach is that what worked for Englewood may not work at your church. I cannot vouch for the book on the basis of having successfully applied it, but I do think Smith has done a reasonable job of being practical but not overly prescriptive and of incorporating principles and practices tested elsewhere. For example, chapter 4 outlines three formal, published conversational tools, each of which is particularly suited to facilitating particular types of conversations on specific sorts of topics within groups organized in different ways. These provide enough of a blueprint sketch for a church to implement without feeling overly constrained.
In spite of the generally practical bent to the book, where I was most disappointed was the lack of advice for anyone not a part of a congregation that has embraced the art of conversation. If your church is thinking about becoming more conversational, I expect the book would be a useful resource to read through (and discuss!) together. But if you found yourself persuaded by Smith’s call to dialogue and you are not a leader of a church, I suppose you can hand the book to your pastor and trust they will be persuaded as well. Relatedly, there are no resources for online conversations, an area which is apparently not of interest to Smith or requiring a separate treatment.
As Smith explores the practicalities of conversation, it is also interesting to see how the body metaphor blurs into actual application. The physiology of how our cells converse intrudes into the psychology of our discourse. This is perhaps most apparent in chapter 7, “Preparing Our Whole Selves for Conversation.” There Smith includes tips for embodied beings to consider how physical matters like rest influence how we relate to each other. Managing emotions is likewise a matter of the physical and the mental. This path from physiology to psychology eventually meanders into sociology as well, as successful conversations benefit from understanding group dynamics as well.
Here I am reminded of a comment from the BioLogos conference a few weeks ago. When organizing our thoughts about evolutionary natural history, we can use a small set of significant transitions as milestones. Each of these transitions involves individuals uniting into a collective. Examples include the transition from separately replicating genes to unified chromosomes and the transition from individual cells to multicellular organisms like us. I believe it was Jeff Schloss who noted that humans exist in a liminal place within such a transition. We have some capacity to organize into coherent, evolutionarily relevant social groups yet we have not allowed our individuality to be fully subsumed by group identities, not in the way that my individual cells have given over completely to being ‘me.’
And so we find the most critical point of divergence in Smith’s organizing metaphor. Our cells necessarily engage in constant conversation because they have no existence apart from it. Humans are more fundamentally individualistic, perhaps in a more pronounced way at present. This breakdown in the analogy is not a weakness of the book, however; this tension between our individualist nature and our need to be in community is front and center. Indeed, the clear and present need for remedial training in how to also be an ‘us’ and not just a ‘you and me’ motivates Smith’s writing. We may never resolve this tension, but we can certainly acknowledge that our neighbors aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, so we might as well get better at getting to know them better.
I requested and was provided a preprint manuscript for this review without further conditions from the publisher.