Thu
09-Jun-2005

book meme thing

This looks almost as destructive as that bout of Top 50 Albums me and a few others recently indulged in after Beltane. Jim has just forwarded me the book meme thing.

Number of Books I Own
Hmmm, there's a load I keep at the parental abode in Devon, and a few I keep here in London. Can't be more than 300 or so though.

Last Book I Bought
Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi. This is what I'm reading at the moment - it's an absolutely fascinating look at what genetic and developmental mutations reveal about the way the human body is grown and ordered. There's all kinds of interesting stuff in there. I'm just reading about the the female spotted hyena, which has a huge clitoris relative to all other mammals. The spotted hyena clitoris actually has a urethra and becomes semi-erect in dominance displays. There is no vagina and also what appears to be a scrotum, though this is actually a pad of fat tissue. It seems that in developmental terms, the spotted hyena female is a pseudohermaphrodite, a female that has been partially masculinised in the womb. In this species, this mutation has become the norm, and though the evolutionary costs are high - females give birth through the clitoris and the first time they do so the clitoris is so narrow that birth takes hours, 60 per cent of the cubs suffocate and 9 per cent of the mothers die - they are not insurmountable.

Last Book Read
I finally got round to reading Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained which, while it doesn't explain consciousness, does a very good job of demolishing lots of fallacies about the nature of the brain and the self. It's also very witty and well written, which is always pleasant in a science book. His central concern is to kill off the ghost in the machine, or the soul, and his main observation is that despite the apparent unity and continuity of our experience, consciousness does not involve the existence of a single central self, but can be understood as a collection of perceptions and thoughts mapped to parallel, multitrack brain processes. There are some very weak bits on memes and the evolution of consciousness where it all gets a little too sociobiological, but even here there are some beautiful little thought experiments and speculations. One is the idea that consciousness evolved with language out of primates talking to themselves. They began by making noises signalling things to other members of their group, such as "danger" or "fruit", but also found themselves making these noises when there were no other members of the group around. In such circumstances, the brain process sending out the signals about fruit finds itself communicating, via the animals own mouth and ears, with other brain processes that it does not have a direct neural connection to internally. As a result it comes to better levels of understanding about its environment and in time this talking to yourself becomes an internalised, stream-of-consciousness mechanism.

Five Books That Meant A Lot To Me
Lewontin, Rose and Kamin Not in Our Genes
Hermann Hesse Siddhartha.
TS Eliot Selected Works
Philip Pullman His Dark Materials Trilogy
Olive Skene Johnson The Sexual Rainbow: Exploring Sexual Diversity

Passing this on to
I don't have any literate blogging friends. I'm sure Tom P'll do a list once his blog is up and running again.