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Excerpts from Scientific American
review:
No man is an island. In fact, people
are less happy and healthy alone
than when they are in a group--of kin,
of countrymen or indeed of anybody
with whom they can identify, however
fleetingly. But tribes are tricky, at
once so solid and yet so
evanescent--je suis Marxiste, runs the
apocryphal French graffito, tendance
Groucho. We switch allegiance from
one Thousand-Year Reich to another
at the drop of the hat. At the dictates
of some distant demagogue, your
good neighbor can become a deadly
foe. .... Our Inner Ape, written by a
scientist with a lifetime's experience
around apes, is perhaps the most
humane treatment of the human
condition you can read, for all that it
is mostly about chimpanzees.
So-called common (but extremely
rare) chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)
live in male-dominated societies
characterized by shifting allegiances
and extreme violence. So far, so
Berreby. Their close cousins, the
even less frequent pygmy chimps, or
bonobos (P. paniscus), live in
matriarchal societies where the stress
is on reconciliation, all anxieties
smoothed over by liberal applications
of sex, in all possible combinations. If
chimps are from Mars, bonobos are
from Venus. Really? It's tempting to
see these creatures as cartoon
characters, caricatures of ourselves,
done up as clowns or, more seriously,
as metaphors for the human
condition. De Waal plays this up to
engage our interest but is at pains not
to overdo it. Chimps and bonobos are
not Looney Tunes humans; neither
are they human ancestors, but
creatures with a long evolutionary
history of their own, which has
provoked its own adaptive responses,
its own repertoire of behaviors.
Chimps are many things, but they are
not One of Us. The essential
difference between humans and
chimpanzees is that we form nuclear
families, whereas chimps, so human
in many ways, have no such
institution. Although we stray from the
path more often than we care to
admit, human society is all about the
age-old business of boy meets girl
and sets up home under a roof, so
much so that it explains such things
as the size of our testicles, the
manifest oddities of the female
reproductive system, and why we
prefer to have sex in private. At root,
we define ourselves with reference to
our families and closest kin and work
outward from there. But we can learn
a great deal more of our own
humanity by comparing ourselves
with something closely related but
still Other. And this, in the final
analysis, is the lesson of both books.
Tribal allegiance means nothing
unless there are other tribes out there
against which we can get our
measure.

Henry Gee, who lives in London, is a
senior editor of Nature and former
Regents' Professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles. He is author
of The Science of Middle-earth (Cold
Spring Press, 2004) and Jacob's
Ladder: The History of the Human
Genome (W. W. Norton, 2004). --This
text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Scientific American
A devoutly Christian geneticist
such as Francis S. Collins, author
of The Language of God and
leader of the Human Genome
Project, can comfortably accept
that "a common ancestor for
humans and mice is virtually
inescapable" or that it may have
been a mutation in the FOXP2
gene that led to the flowering of
human language. The genetic
code is, after all, "God’s
instruction book." But what sounds
like a harmless metaphor can
restrict the intellectual bravado
that is essential to science. "In my
view," Collins goes on to say,
"DNA sequence alone, even if
accompanied by a vast trove of
data on biological function, will
never explain certain special
human attributes, such as the
knowledge of the Moral Law and
the universal search for God."
Evolutionary explanations have
been proffered for both these
phenomena. Whether they are
right or wrong is not a matter of
belief but a question to be
approached scientifically. The
idea of an apartheid of two
separate but equal metaphysics
may work as a psychological
coping mechanism, a way for a
believer to get through a day at
the lab. But theism and
materialism don’t stand on equal
footings. The assumption of
materialism is fundamental to
science.
George Johnson is author of Fire
in the Mind: Science, Faith, and
the Search for Order and six other
books.

From the hardcover jacket:
At the center of Mountains Beyond Mountains stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor,
renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius”
grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical
school found his life’s calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the
lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. This magnificent book
shows how radical change can be fostered in situations that seem insurmountable, and it also
shows how a meaningful life can be created, as Farmer—brilliant, charismatic, charming, both
a leader in international health and a doctor who finds time to make house calls in Boston and
the mountains of Haiti—blasts through convention to get results.

Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer
changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that "the only real
nation is humanity" - a philosophy that is embodied in the small public charity he founded,
Partners In Health. He enlists the help of the Gates Foundation, George Soros, the U.N.’s World
Health Organization, and others in his quest to cure the world. At the heart of this book is the
example of a life based on hope, and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb
“Beyond mountains there are mountains”: as you solve one problem, another problem presents
itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too.

No scientist brings more experience from
the laboratory and field, none thinks more
deeply about social issues or addresses
them with greater clarity, than Jared
Diamond as illustrated by Guns, Germs, and
Steel. In this remarkably readable book he
shows how history and biology can enrich
one another to produce a deeper
understanding of the human condition.
Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University
Professor, Harvard University

Thomas M. Disch, The New Leader
An epochal work. Diamond has written a
summary of human history that can be
accounted, for the time being, as Darwinian
in its authority.

William H McNeil, The New York Review of
Books
An artful, informative and delightful book.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Martin Sieff, Washington Times
Serious, groundbreaking biological studies
of human history only seem to come along
once every generation or so. . . . Now
[Guns, Germs, and Steel] must be added to
their select number. . . . Diamond meshes
technological mastery with historical
sweep, anecdotal delight with broad
conceptual vision, and command of
sources with creative leaps. No finer work of
its kind has been published this year, or for
many past.

Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In this "artful,
informative, and delightful" (William H.
McNeill, New York Review of Books) book,
Jared Diamond convincingly argues that
geographical and environmental factors
shaped the modern world. Societies that
had had a head start in food production
advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer
stage, and then developed religion --as well
as nasty germs and potent weapons of war
--and adventured on sea and land to
conquer and decimate preliterate cultures.
A major advance in our understanding of
human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel
chronicles the way that the modern world
came to be and stunningly dismantles
racially based theories of human history.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta
Kappa Award in Science, the
Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the
Commonwealth club of California's Gold
Medal. Amazon.com
Explaining what William McNeill called
The Rise of the West has become the
central problem in the study of global
history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared
Diamond presents the biologist's answer:
geography, demography, and ecological
happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly
reviews human history on every continent
since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes
only the broadest movements of peoples
and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one
eye has the rather distant vision of the
evolutionary biologist, while the other
eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of
New Guinea, where he has done field work
for more than 30 years. --This text refers to
the Hardcover edition.

From Scientific American
According to scripture, "How are the mighty fallen in
the midst of battle" (II Samuel 1:25). To war, Jared
Diamond in his new book, Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed, adds self-inflicted
environmental degradation, climate change,
disastrous trading relations, and unwise responses to
societal problems. In his earlier, Pulitzer Prize–
winning Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond, a
professor of geography at the University of California
at Los Angeles, celebrated the rise of communities
and nations despite microbial and self-imposed
adversities. Collapse is the downside of those
dynamics, the societies that didn't make it, barely
made it, or are destined, as Diamond sees it, for the
fall. In this exhaustively researched new book, he
pre-sents carefully detailed case histories of failed
societies—islands in warmish waters (Easter,
Pitcairn, Haiti), an island in coolish waters
(Greenland), a continental semidesert (the Anasazi
of the Southwest U.S.), a continental tropical forest
(the Maya of Mexico). Diamond begins with the
failed state of Montana. Montana? Well, a Pulitzer
Prize–winning tenured professor can take the liberty
of giving priority to his passions. So Diamond the
ardent fly-fisherman, defender of ecological
pristineness, sympathetic friend of the farming
"locals" has come to the sad conclusion that
Montana is going to the dogs. Once one of the
richest states of the union, it now ranks among the
poorest, having squandered its nonrenewable
mineral resources and savagely over-logged its
forests. Maybe worst of all, some cad put pike into
the trout waters. Although Montana is not about to
fall off the map, leaving us with 49 states, the
elements responsible for its decline are also
responsible for societies that have fallen by the
wayside. Diamond's central proposition is that
wherever these globally disparate societies failed
the chief cause had been anthropogenic ecological
devastation, especially deforestation, imposed on
ecosystems of limited resources. Those other
western Americans, the Anasazi, settled in the New
Mexico area about A.D. 600. There they built
spectacular cliff housing, worked their marginal
agricultural land, and chopped down all the trees
without any plans for reforestation. Starving to the
desperate point of cannibalism, wracked by
internecine warfare, they met their end some 600
years later. To the south, the Maya mostly had it all:
technological knowledge to build architecturally
wonderful cities, writing, and crops of corn. What
they did not have were large domestic animals, or
the foresight to replant after they clear-cut forests, or
the political sense to refrain from inter-city warfare.
Mayan soldiers and city dwellers were, as Diamond
puts it, "parasites on farmers," who could no longer
produce surplus food on their now barren, treeless
land. The Maya began to go into decline about A.
D. 1000 and said goodbye to the world about 1675,
mopped up by the Spanish. Diamond argues that
the isolated island societies suffered a similar fate to
the Anasazi and Maya for similar reasons. Pitcairn
Island, Easter Island and Greenland all collapsed
after the settlers had exhausted the fragile food and
timber resources. Deforestation was particularly
critical; after the larger trees were harvested,
nothing was left to make the seagoing canoes
needed for voyaging to other sources of food and
material and for recruiting new people, especially
wives, into their dwindling, interbreeding
populations. In these historical accounts of fallen
societies, untrammeled population growth did not
play a significant role. Not until the section on
modern societies with modern troubles does
Diamond invoke Malthus, offering Rwanda as the
prime Malthusian model of too many people with
too little land. He makes an unconventional
interpretation of the savage Rwandan conflict. It was
not a mutually genocidal affair propelled by ancient
hatreds. At the village level the Hutu and Tutsi had
lived together amicably—until geometric
population growth far exceeded the arithmetic
increase in land and improved agricultural
technology, fulfilling the thesis of Malthus's 1798
Essay on the Principle of Population. The brutal
killing was, according to Diamond, primarily over
your neighbor's land, not his tribal affiliation. As the
book' s subtitle suggests, there are societies that
have come to success by right thought and action.
The Japanese, for example, saw the light and
preserved and replanted their forests (although they
have not renounced their national wood esthetic;
the trees now come from the forests of vulnerable
states such as Papua New Guinea). The Dominican
Republic preserved its forests and prospered. Its
neighbor Haiti ravished both land and forests. And
look what happened to them. I wrote these last words
while flying home from a National Academy of
Sciences meeting called to reconsider bringing
back that contentious, effective and dirt-cheap
chemical, DDT. Now the choice will have to be
made between the ultraconservationists' prohibition
of DDT and the equally ardent arguments of a new
coterie of American scientists who are demanding
the return of DDT to try to halt the carnage of the
malaria parasite, which kills two million to three
million children and pregnant women every year.
Sorry, Professor Diamond, even in our time of
enlightened science, societies don't always have an
easy, clear choice to survive, let alone succeed.
Collapse is a big book, 500-plus pages. It may well
become a seminal work, although its plea for
societal survival through ecological conservation is
rather like preaching to the choir. It is not a page-
turner, especially for slow readers of short attention
span (like this reviewer). Some of Diamond's "case
studies" may be overkilled by overdetail. The last
section, on practical lessons, seems disconnected
from the central Collapse story and almost
constitutes a separate book. But, having discharged
the reviewer's obligation to be critical, my
recommendation would definitely be to read the
book. It will challenge and make you think—long
after you have turned that last 500th-plus page.

Robert S. Desowitz is emeritus professor of tropical
medicine at the University of Hawaii. He is author of
five books on ecological and political issues relating
to infectious diseases, the most recent being
Federal Bodysnatchers and the New Guinea Virus
(W. W. Norton, 2003). --This text refers to the
Hardcover edition.

From Scientific American
"Fictional fascination with cloning has rarely focused
on scientific fact but usually on issues of identity and
how the sanctity of life will be challenged when 'ditto
machines' of one kind or another create 'cookie
cutter humans.' This obsession has led to endless
confusion about what is possible and what is not." So
writes Wilmut, leader of the team that 10 years ago
cloned Dolly, the first animal created from an adult
cell. He and Highfield, science editor of the Daily
Telegraph in England, set out to separate fact from
fiction. They succeed beautifully and go on to
provide a forceful moral argument for cloning and its
power to fight, and even eradicate, some of the most
terrible diseases in existence. At the same time, this
pioneer of cloning remains staunch in his opposition
to using the procedure for human reproduction.
The book, despite its weighty concerns, avoids a
moralizing tone and is exceedingly pleasant to read.
To give a taste of the style: in explaining the arthritis
that developed in Dolly's knee--unrelated, so far as
they can tell, to cloning--the authors conclude that
perhaps the condition "was inevitable for a corpulent
sheep who had been indulged all her life and liked to
stand up and beg on her rear legs."

Editors of Scientific American

'This book should be read, can be read,
by almost everyone. It describes with
great skill a new face of the theory of
evolution.' W.D. Hamilton, Science

'Learned, witty and very well
written...Exhilaratingly good.' Peter
Medawar in The Spectator

'The exciting theories and their wide
implications are explaned with clarity,
wit and enthusiasm.' Peter Parker,
Sunday Times

`Dawkins demonstrates that complex,
theoretical or mathematical ideas can
be expressed rigorously, in plain English.
The book remains an excellent way for
those who have not been trained in
evolution to understand modern
arguments.' Trends in Ecology and
Evolution

"A splendid example of how difficult
scientific ideas can be explained by
someone who understands them and is
willing to take the trouble" The New
Yorker

'the reader will come away with a clear
understanding of kin selection,
evolutionary stable strategies, and
similar staples of the literature on
evolutionary theories of animal
behaviour. This is a considerable
achievement.' Times Higher Education
Supplement

'buy this book, read it and recommend it
to your students...There is still nothing
else quite like it. Not only are the new
chapters and endnotes worthy additions
to the original, but the 1976 text comes
up as fresh as a primrose and, in its way,
nearly as perfect.'l Animal Behaviour

The New York Times Book Review, Lee M. Silver
It is a nearly jargon-free expedition that hops from one human chromosome to the next (23 in all)
in search of the most delightful stories.

From Scientific American
The human genome is becoming a celebrity. It already has its own fan magazines, in the form of
two professional journals devoted exclusively to genome research, and its own web sites,
including National Human Genome Research Institute and at the private company Celera
Genomics. The unveiling of the first draft of its complete primary sequence--which Celera has
promised to produce within the year--is as eagerly anticipated as the next Madonna album. Now,
thanks to science writer Matt Ridley, it even has its own autobiography: Genome: The
Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.

It is no surprise that Ridley, an avid proponent of the Darwinian view of the world, perceives the
genome not as a cookbook or a manual but as a quintessentially historical document--a
three-billion-year memoir of our species from its beginnings in the primal ooze to the present day.
The first popular book written by Ridley, who has a Ph.D. in zoology and covered science for The
Economist for nine years, was The Red Queen, an engrossing account of sexual selection. His
second volume, The Origins of Virtue, delved into the sociobiology of good and evil. Genome
continues the author's interest in evolution and at the same time offers excursions into molecular
biology, medicine and biotechnology.

.It is an exciting voyage. We learn about the homeobox genes, which guide the development of
the entire human body from a single cell. The gene for telomerase, an enzyme that repairs the
ends of frayed chromosomes, is the focus for a discussion of aging and immortality. Ethnic
differences in the frequency of a particular breast cancer gene are used to describe the relations
among population genetics, prehistoric migrations, and linguistic groups, while the gene for the
classical ABO blood groups is the springboard for a discussion of genetic selection and drift. The
book describes genes that we share with all living creatures and those that are unique to our
species, genes that are essential to every cell and those that seem to serve no useful purpose at
all, genes that predict disease with complete certainty and those that only tilt the scales......
DEAN H. HAMER is a molecular biologist, co-author of Living with Our Genes and The Science of
Desire, and chief of gene structure and regulation at the National Cancer Institute.

Here's a really fun and provocative quartet on the interface of science and religion....The Language of God,
Our Inner Ape, The Selfish Gene, and The God Delusion. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome
Project, is a born-again Christian - yet he advocates a faith that embraces scientific knowledge, and he
advises against limiting God to the gaps in our scientific understanding. (That is, he advises against relying
on God to explain natural phenomena, such as the origin of life. To do so, puts God out of business as
science advances.) He sees proof of God in the "universal moral code", at work in all human societies. But
the plot thickens.... Frans de Waal, a leading primatologist, has spent a career observing what looks like
human moral and social behavior in chimpanzees and bonobos. So is the universal moral code right under
Collin's nose (in our genes?) Next, check out Richard Dawkin's classic, The Selfish Gene, paying special
attention to the chapter about the game theory/evolutionarily stable strategy analysis of the Prisoners'
Dilemma. Finally, in Richard Dawkin's newest work, the God Delusion, he contends that secular humanism
is innate, and we don't need religion to guide us to moral behavior. (The Language of God is worth checking
out at the library, but I don't recommend purchasing it. The other three merit owning and loaning.) JS