Last week I tried to rectify the dearth of botany in my blog coverage by covering the first few chapters of Stefano Mancuso’s The Revolutionary Genius of Plants, and this week we’ll pick up where we left off. Mancuso thinks that we can learn much from plants, not least because they have such different solutions to life’s major challenges. As we discussed, one of those differences is that animals tend to have dedicated organs for various functions while plants tend to spread out functions throughout their bodies. In chapter 4, he brings up what I thought was the most intriguing difference: plants stay put. OK, maybe that’s obvious, but what’s intriguing are the implications Mancuso teases out from it.
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Science Book Review: The Revolutionary Genius of Plants Ch 1-3
Despite being a biologist, I’ll admit that I’ve neglected plant biology relative to some other areas. As a student of molecular and microbiology, I suppose I’ve not paid as much attention to macroscopic organisms in general, but one picks up a certain amount of animal biology because it is similar to human biology. And the kinds of evolutionary biology conversations that come up in Christian circles often focus on animal evolution, presumably because animals are familiar and because human evolution is the most questioned. In any event, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the sci-fi novel Semiosis introduced me to some features of actual plant biology I hadn’t appreciated. So the recent English translation of Stefano Mancuso’s The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior seemed like a good opportunity to delve more into the science behind the story. And boy was I not disappointed. There’s so much interesting material here that I think it’s worth unpacking over a couple of weeks.
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Science Corner: Christmas Reading
Get any good science-related books or gifts for Christmas? I got a copy of Viruses as Complex Adaptive Systems by Ricard Solé and Santiago F. Elena that I’m looking forward to digging into. I got my son a copy of The Cell: A Visual Tour of the Building Block of Life by Jack Challoner that he seems excited about. He also received copies of Molecules: The Elements and the Architecture of Everything and Reactions: An Illustrated Exploration of Elements, Molecules, and Change in the Universe that he has previously enjoyed from the library; both are by Theodore Gray and Nicholas Mann. My daughter prefers applying chemistry over reading about it, so she got recipe books and baking supplies. Feel free to share what you are enjoying this holiday season in the comments below.
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Science Book Club: When Science & Christianity Meet Ch 12
Are definitions descriptive or prescriptive? That’s a classic conversation about language. I enjoyed this recent Twitter exchange that encapsulates the discussion well.
Neil.
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) April 13, 2018
Neil deGrasse Tyson seems to come down on the prescriptive side, or at least would prefer that meanings remain static. Most dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster, aspire only to describe how we use and have used them. Dictionary editors don’t want to be in the business of legislating linguistics, or indeed even policing who is allowed to innovate. Fun fact: it’s predominantly teenage girls, which means I’m about 18 months away from having a front row seat to the latest in language.
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Science Book Club: When Science & Christianity Meet Ch 11
When I chose When Science and Christianity Meet for our book discussion, I thought it would keep us away from current politics. I figured The War on Science had given us enough of that for a while. Yet as the historical narrative encroaches further on the present, the relevance becomes harder to deny. If politics applies truth to arrive at policies, and if science is a way of discovering truth, then the two will inevitably be intertwined. That was the case in the Scopes trial nearly a century ago, and it’s the case now.
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