This year I’ve read books about the Middle East, mainly Iran and Saudi-Arabia, and I’ve read books about Putin and Trump. Next in line here will be Iraq, Turkey and Egypt.

As usual I’ve read several books about the natural world. The ever important Charles Darwin turned up again with one of the most important books of all time.

I finally got around to read the old sci-fi classics Dune by Frank Herbert and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I picked up a few action packed detective novels as well as one of the many western novels about Morgan Kane. These are the kind of books that are quick and entertaining to read and almost quicker to forget.

A book that is not easy to forget would be All Quiet on the western front by WWI-veteran Erich Maria Remarque.  I read it many years ago but decided to read it again since WWI ended 100 years ago this fall. In 1914 the world stumbled into a war which lead to several empires falling, many million dead and endless suffering world-wide. It’s a very important lessons for us all. 

The technological improvements and knowledge about genetics is truly about to change alot of attitudes about what makes us human, and how our personalities are made.This knowledge will lead to amazing discoveries and personalized medicine. Genetics and genetic modified organisms (GMO) will save many many lifes in the years to come. 
I sincerely encourage people to read books such as Blueprint, How DNA makes us who we are, by Robert Plomin. Or Dine Geniale Gener by Dag Undlien, professor in genetic medicine. 

Some of the best books of the year, according to yours truly, must be:

Factfullness – Hans Rosling
Most of us are not aware of the progress that has been made in the world within the last few decades, not to mention within the last century. Hans Rosling demonstrates in his book the huge improvements that have been done, and that things can still be bad. He shows how important it is to have a close relationship with data, the scientific method and to critiqual thinking. We have to not endulge our instincts and our feelings (especially fear), because they very often leads us astray.  Or in his own words:

“I am not an optimist. Im a very serious possibilist. Its a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world. “
 

Enlightenment Now – Steven Pinker
In Enlightenment Now – The case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, Steven Pinker demonstrated the improvements the world has made the last few centuries, what caused them and what this means for dealing with the challenges of today such as climate change, populism, political and religious extremism. This is probably one of the best and most important books I’ve read ever. Pinker has the same mindset as Hans Rosling in the way he emphasizes critiqual thinking, investigating the data and follow it to where it leads. Pinker writes elequently and is well worth the read. If you rather see his lectures they are easy to find on Youtube as he is a very active public intellectual. 
Oh yeah! This was the first review that got published in a real magazine! I got published in Fri Tanke, which is the member magazine of The Norwegian Humanist Assosiation. 

Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
This is perhaps the most important book of all time. Because it connects us humans to every other organism on Earth. It is, however, not the easiest book about evolution you could read. There are several modern and more up-to-date books you could read. But if you’re interested in the topic I encourage you to read it. Last year I read Darwins travel journal: The Journey of the Beagle. This is a much more interesting book for the general public in my opinion. It is easier to read and it describes Darwins thinking and how it evolves as his journey goes on. There are lots of very interesting descriptions og people and places as well. An incredible adventure by an victorian gentleman. 

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” 

Cosmos – Carl Sagan
 The book follows the award winning tv-series with the same name and has a corresponding 13 chapters. This was the best-selling science book ever published in the English language, and was the first science book to sell more than half a million copies. Carl Sagans way with language and story telling is only matched by very few. I can definitely recommend this book and not to mention the tv-series. Just read the final passage. 

“For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begyn to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars: organized assemblages of atoms: tracing the long journey by which, here at last, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

The sixth extinction – Eliabeth Kolbert
This is a tragic love story to our planet and the destruction we bring. The extinction rate has been high ever since we left Africa 40-50 000 years ago. The last few species of the Mega Fauna are being hunted to extinction as we speak. This book is an amazing read, but it is also tragic. I really hope books like this one might help humanity slow down and even stop our destruction of our planet. There is no planet B.

On Tyranny – Timothy Snyder
Several countries now struggle with right-wing nationalist politicians gaining power. They exagerate some problems and make other problems up, and they play on real worries alot of the population have. Timothy Snyder demonstrates in this book that this is in no way a new thing and has lead to fascist, nazi and communist regimes all over the world before. This book is basically a manual for protecting our liberal democracy to prevent it from being brought down by fear, superstition and the seemingly strong-men who opt to “help us”. It’s a short and quick read but one that I hope as many as possible do. 

The hidden life of trees –  Peter Wohlleben
This is another amazing book about the relationships in nature. This time the focus is on the larger organisms. namely the trees. It turns out they communicate with eachother, with insects and with other organisms. Several plants produce chemicals that are harmful to grazers. whether those be large herbivores such as giraffes or smaller insects such as different types of ants or beetles. Either way other trees pick up on the scent from these chemicals which leads them to increase their own production before they are targeted. Trees cooperate with fungus and can help each other through the root systems. Peter Wohlleben even coined the term Wood-wide-web to describe this phenomenon. Very eye-opening book. And I promise you won’t look at trees the same ever again. 

Insektenes planet – Anne Aslaug Sverdrup-Thygeson (Planet of the insects)
The title of this book translates to “The planet of the insects”, and I’m not sure it has been translated to english.
It is about all the intricate relationships between insects, plants, fungus and not to mention us animals. Very interesting book and you really appreciate the little buggers much more. My favorite story from this book must be the relationship between a moth, ants and the oregano bush. The ants help bring oxygen down to the root system through their pathways. But at the same time if they become too many they will start to eat at the roots. The plant is not a passive victim here, but release the classical oregano odor. which invites a moth that drops its caterpillar into the ant nest. The caterpillar feed on the ants and reduce their number to a level that won’t hurt the plant. Amazing! 

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
E.O. Wilson

What we think about when we’re trying not to think about climate warming – Per Espen Stoknes
Per Espen Stoknes dentifies the five main psychological barriers to climate action, but addresses them with five strategies for how to talk about global warming in a way that creates action and solutions, not further inaction and despair. Facts and data don’t really change people’s mind. Good storytelling that involve people’s emotions do. This is probably something we all need to pay more attention to in the years to come. Stoknes also has a really good TED-talk I can reccommend. 

All in all it’s been a really good year when it comes to reading. I’ve managed to read a book every two weeks, which is way more than I could hope for. I´ve logged a little more than 30 books and written 15 reviews all in all. I had a goal of reading and reviewing at least 20 books in 2018. Which means that I achieved the first part and even read 50% more than my goal. Unfortunately that came at the price of not writing enough reviews. Who knows.. Maybe I’ll write some of the reviews in the year to come. 

I think I’ll set my reading goal at 15 books for 2019. If I post a new review every three-four weeks I should be good. Speaking of posting I need to find a new platform as the current one is closing. Maybe I’ll start the new year all fresh with a brand new platform. I’ll check out WordPress as I’ve heard alot about them. Not to mention that the ever watchful eye of Facebook has been showing me advertisements for WordPress. Sure would be a petty to let the algorithm down. 

I usually end my reviews with giving each book a rating. In this case I’ll give the entire year 2018 a rating of 5 out of 6 stars. Good year!

Happy new year people!

440 books left! 

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Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
by Douglas Adams, 192 pages

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters…lies a small and unregarded sun…orbiting this.. is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose lifeforms are amazingly primitive.”

The adventure starts out at Arthur Dents, the main character, house. Outside the house is a bulldozer and lots of construction workers who are there to tear down his house to make room for a road. Arthur is refusing to move, which momentarily stops the bulldozer. After a while Arthur is talked into going to the pub with his friend Ford Prefect. Down at the pub he reveals that he is in fact an alien and the entire Earth is about to be destroyed. The Vogons are destroying the Earth because it is in the way of an intergalactic space road of some kind. 

Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent is saved from being annihilated together with the every other being on Earth by hiding in a Vogon spaceship. You might think having your planet destroyed might lead to a panic attack. And you are right. Arthur Dent freaks out, but luckily Ford Prefect is carrying an intergalactic guidebook. Precisely.. you guessed it. 
The Hitchhiker´s Guide to the Galaxy. and the cover reads “Don´t Panic” in big letters. 

The adventure continues with one hilarious absurdity after another. and you can never really know what to expect next. Its a great read and if you think it´s quite similar in style to Monty Python, you are right. Douglas Adams did do some work as a screen writer for them. 

“on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so muchthe wheel, New York, wars and so on whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.”
 
We meet a depressed robot, the president of the universe, and even a super computer who has calculated the answer to life, the universe and everything. Yup.. you guessed it. The answer is 42! We encounter the Babel fish, which is a little fish you insert into your ear and thereby translates all languages for you. There are falling blue whales and we are all encouraged to always carry a towel. Which is the most useful thing you might ever carry.

This book has been waiting for me since my early teens, when I first tried to read it. I remember several of my friends kept quoting the book all the time. I even had a text based computer game on the Amiga 500, which I did play a little. So I should have read it a long time ago, but for some reason I never got around to it. Until a few months ago, when I found it on Storytel.no, which is a Norwegian supplier of audio books. It was even narrated by no other than Stephen Fry

I had an amazing experience listening to the book when I was out running or doing my daily commute to work. Several times throughout the book I had experiences of deja-vu. It turns out my head was more soaked in references to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy than I previously thought.

The book is satirical and pokes fun at, among other things, human self importance and at religious beliefs. Especially in light of the size or age of the universe. 

“Space, it says, is big. Really big. You just wont believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think its a long way down the road to the chemists, but thats just peanuts to space.”

It seems to me like one of the central themes in the book is that the world is huge, old, absurd and we might never really understand it all. Things are usually not what they seem. When we get to roused up we should simply stay occupied and remember the cover from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe. Meaning the book mentioned inside this book. “Don´t Panic!”
 

This book is a must read for anyone interested in geek culture, sci-fi, or why Elon Musk put a towel on board his Tesla Roadster. 

Richard Dawkins was a close friend to Douglas Adams and dedicated The God Delusion to him. When Adams died Dawkins wrote that “Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender.”

“So long and thanks for all the fish”

 

Rating: 6/6

470 books left!

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Fire & Frost
by Kai O´Connal, 255 pages

I´ve played tabletop roleplaying games for a few decades now and Shadowrun was the first game I got really involved in. Since the mid 90s it is still one of my favorite games. The world of Shadowrun is a futuristic cyberpunk dystopia mixed with magic and cybernetics. The classical fantasy people like elves, dwarfs, trolls, and not to mention dragons are also thrown into the mix. Large corporations run the world and hire shadowrunners, criminals or disposable assets, o perform illegal activities. This roleplaying game has been one of the most popular games to date and it spawned several computer games, board games and even card games.

We follow the mage Elijah and his team of runners, which are a mixed group with a troll street samurai (warrior beefed up with cyborg machine parts, a goblin rigger (someone logged on to his vehicle), and an elf physical adept (martial arts expert with magical powers). They start out in Seattle where the roleplaying game is centered and they quickly travel to other parts of the world. The groups task is locating and stealing a map with magical properties. 

“Shoot strait, conserve ammo and never ever make a deal with a dragon!”
– Shadowrun proverb

Along the way they encounter the new kind of racist organisations such as Humanis, which are not so concerned about the skin tone people have. They are prejudiced against metahumans, meaning elves, dwarfs, orcs and trolls. “Why bother about that brown fellow when that monster over there has hands the size of shovels?”

The group travel to Chicago, which in the 2070s have been infested by huge insect spirits and other fierce creatures, they venture down to the new land of Amazonia. After magic returned to the world the rainforest took on a life of its own. Lets just put it that way.  Eventually they end up in Antarctica where the entire climax of the story takes place. 

Fire & Frost is a pretty good cyberpunk action novel if you ask me. But then again I know the world of Shadowrun pretty good. I could recognize all the different aspects of the game such as the magic, how integrated technology is into everything, the cyberware etc. The story goes south in every meaning of the word when team members decide to backstab each other, which is just like the world of shadowrun usually is. 

A good upside to the book was that it had some pretty short chapters which made them easy to squeeze into a rather busy schedule. 

All in all I enjoyed this book!  If you just started playing the game and want to get a good feel for the universe this would be a good read for you. Or if you read the old Shadowrun novels you will definitely get a kick out of this one. I am not sure someone not familiar with Shadowrun would enjoy it as much though. But who knows?

Rating:  I give it a solid 4 out of 6!
Tell me what you think in the comments. 

471 books left!

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Robert Plomin (october 2018)
“By disentangling the effects of nature and nurture rather than assuming that nurture alone was responsible for who we are, this research produced startling results that suggest a completely different way to think about the roles of nature, nurture and their interplay in making us who we are.”

The discussion of nature or nurture has been raging on and off ever since DNA was discovered. Robert Plomin, an American psychologist and geneticist,  gives the reader a brief insight on the methods they use to study the relationship between genetics and psychological traits. We also get a short tour of the history, methods that failed, and what we´ve learned the last few decades. This also leads to some pretty interesting implications.  

There are similarities that run in families. And it was assumed it was due to the shared environment. But families also share genetics. In order to separate nature (DNA) and nurture (the environment) there has been two main methods; adoption studies and monozygotic (MZ) twin studies. In adoption studies the children do not share DNA with the adoptive parents so similarities would have to be caused by the environment. And likewise MZ twins are identical exactly because of their biology. But being raised in the same family it is still difficult to separate the environment from nature. The most powerful studies are studies of MZ twins separated at or close after birth. Being raised in completely different environments means that any similarity they share will have to be purely genetics. 

It is no surprise that identical twins, monozygotic (MZ) are, well, identical in most things. What was new to me was that even though some identical twins have been reared apart they are still very similar. Not only in appearance but also in personality, interests, and behavior. 
” ..MZ twins reared apart are almost as similar as MZ twins reared together, indicating that what makes them so similar is nature, not nurture.” page 19

The study of twins makes researchers able to determine how much of the variation of a trait that is caused by variation in genes. The genetic variance between the height of twins is not surprisingly quite high, but not a perfect 1.0. Fraternal twins is closed to 0,5, which is due to the fact that they share on average about half their genes. Fraternal twins (dizygotic) are just like any other siblings, since two different sperm fertelize two different eggs. From this pattern geneticists can infer that height is a very heritable trait, with most of the variation in the population due to variation in genes.

Cognitive abilities is also quite heritable, but not as much as height. The variance is about 0,75 in identical twins, and between other siblings it is less than 0,5. 
The correlation for intelligence was the same for adopted children and their biological parents as for children reared by their biological parents. The correlations between these adopted children and their adoptive parents, who share nurture but not nature, hovered near zero. page 54
 

The book is full of examples like this. A certain trait is somewhat correlated between parents and their children. Sibling usually have a correlation about 50% which is because they share on average 50% of the genes, (while their environment is very similar). 

Throughout the book Plomin makes a strong case for genetics has a large impact on just about every psychological trait they have studied. But the genetic studies also quantify to what extent the environment (meaning anything from accidents, chance to education, upbringing, social network etc) affects different traits. 
“genetics provides the best evidence we have for the importance of the environment independent of genetics. That is, heritabilities are never even close to 100 per cent, which proves that the environment is important.” page 32
 

Most traits are affected by many different genes. Some traits are affected by thousands of genes. So called single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)
Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS)  can determine whether a genetic variant is associated with a disorder or a trait. Because a trait is more or less affected by the number of genes traits fall in a spectrum. This in turn means that the abnormal is normal. Syndromes or genetic disorders are therefore extreme parts of the spectrum. This will lead to two huge implications. First of all it is now possible to anticipate which individuals that might develop certain disorders such as anxieties, dementia or psychosis. We knew that certain disorders ran in families but before proper genetic studies psychologists would have to wait for symptoms before trying to help people. Now we can monitor people and try to prevent disorders from occurring in the first place. 

Genetics is not purely deterministic, however. Genetic influences are probabilistic propensities, not predetermined programming. 

“Evidence for genetic influence has been found for home environments such as chaotic family environments, for classroom environments such as supportive teachers, peer characteristics such as being bullied, neighborhood safety, being exposed to drugs, work environments and the quality of ones marriage.” page 44.

The last one is particularly interesting. According to Plomin MZ twins have a higher corrolation than DZ twins when it comes to divorce. Which indicates that their genetic makeup is a major factor whether people can maintain a stable relationship or not. 

The Flynn Effect, the effect where IQ increases for every generation, has general been explained by an improvement in education, health, food, safety and other factors that increase human wellbeing. Basically the IQ has been increasing because the environment has been improving. I was hoping that Plomin would discuss this. Unfortunately he didn’t. Plomin also fails to support his claims that environmental factors are mostly accidental and poorly understood. I would like to know how he can say that. 

Because genetics is such a large factor in determining our psychology Plomin encourages us all to have more empathy and tolerance towards each others misfortune. When a disorder such as obesity is so closely tied to our genetic makeup we should simply stop fat shaming people who are overweight. They need empathy, help and understanding, not ridicule. The same goes for many other aspects of our personality. 

The Human Genome Project was a landmark study that mapped all the genes in the human body and it started a revolution. It cost many many millions of dollars to complete.  With increased computer power and the much better analytical tools we now have the ability to analyze anyones DNA for a very low price. There are several commercial companies offering to “help us”. Now millions of people all over the world are contributing to companies such as 23andme, Myheritage, Ancestry There are ethical questions about this for sure, but the researchers will have endless data to work with. One of the studies mentioned in the book was based on the DNA from more than a million people! 

Needless to say a book like this gets a lot of attention. Most reviews are pretty good, but some warn people about the implications of this new knowledge.
Here are just a few of the reviews I found:
The Guardian
The Standard
Nature
National Review

Basically this book is really interesting and I can highly recommend it. At times I had to wrestle with my inner cognitive dissonance, but I guess that is healthy. It is hard for a layman like yours truly to determine whether the science is valid or not. The author says the genetic basis for our psychological traits have been replicated many times. And I do note that none of the reviews I´ve seen disagrees with the science itself. 

I bought my copy of the book at Amazon. Where will you get yours? 

Do not read the book if you prefer to think of the mind as a blank slate. Or maybe that´s exactly why you should read it. 

Oh yeah! almost forgot! Robert Plomin gave the Eilert Sund lecture at Oslo University in october. This lecture sums up parts of the book pretty good and is what got me to buy it in the first place. 

Rating: 5/6

472 books left!

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