as funny as it is to say, "there's no such thing as a fish" is not actually true
"science doesn't know what a fish is" is really not true
"fish" is not a monophyletic category. there is no common ancestor of everything that we call a "fish," and none of the things that we don't
"fish" is a paraphyletic category -- and a useful one! marine biologists use it! "fish" describes a general body plan and lifestyle. it is useful to be able to talk about coelacanths and tuna in a shared category, though coelacanths are more closely related to us than to tuna.
where this bugs me is the repetition of the idea that "scientists" are hidebound and uncreative, unable to comprehend anything that doesn't conform to a specific idea of categorization -- when this is fundamentally untrue! we know perfectly well what a "fish" is. the fact that it's a paraphyletic group is only confounding to pop science, as a funny factoid, not to anyone who actually understands what a paraphyletic group is.
Every time a pop science article is like "50 million year old [creature] still [doing thing that creature does]", I like to imagine it's talking about the same individual creature for that entire span. Like one specific clam with a very well established daily routine.
2025 Book Review #63 – She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Previsions and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer
This was my nonfiction for the month, and the first in quite a while that could be said with a straight face to be about science. I have no memory whatsoever of how it ended up on my radar (some listicle of ‘best books of X’ or a podcast guest sharing a recommendation, probably), but I’m happy it did. It’s not a light read by any stretch of the imagination – it’s a 600-page hardcover even discounting the endnotes – but it’s been a fun, interesting, and even educational read to pick away at over the last couple of weeks.
As the name implies, the book is about heredity in the biological sense – what we inherit from our ancestors, why and how, and all the myriad ways it’s weirder, more complex and more failable than the simple schematic explanation makes it seem. It is also about the history of the study of that heredity, the process by which the principles of inheritance, genes and chromosomes, and so on were discovered and also the ways that (in the United States and UK, at least) the early days of that study were so deeply intertwined with both the eugenics movements and legitimizing racial and imperial hierarchies. Despite the subject matter, it’s never a difficult read – the author is a science writer for the New York Times, and for both better and worse the book feels more like a collection of linked weekend longreads for their online edition than it does a textbook.
I mostly mean that in terms of style, though the book very much does have the basic unexamined assumptions about politics and the assumed perspective of its audience, you would expect. Lectures about the mechanics of microbiology, embryonic development and Mendelian inheritance are intercut with relatable potted biographies of and anecdotes about the scientists who first discovered them, or episodes of the author’s life as he got his own genome sequenced or got genetic testing done before the conception of his daughters. Most chapters also include paraphrased interviews with working researchers in something relevant to the chapter, or narrations of Zimmer visiting some scientific institute with a historical relation to it. All of that does a good job of keeping things flowing and readable, but they also double the length of the book – there are a few points where I was left rolling my eyes and wishing he would get on with it.
The book also suffers terribly from a peculiar journalistic tic. Seemingly every time an abstract or difficult-to-visualize biological process is described, Zimmer reaches for some relatable, everyday analogy to compare it to. Most of them were so forced that I go back and forth on whether it was annoying or actually kind of endearing, but in either case it’s certainly striking.
There is a degree to which any book like this has to talk about eugenics and scientific racism and how they are bad just as a sort of throat clearing. This book isn’t entirely free of those sort of annoying liberal pieties, but it’s mostly limited to a tacked-on chapter at the end talking about how bad climate change and economic inequality are; the author is actually genuinely interested in the history of the science of heredity, and that means it’s actually interested in eugenics and the movement behind them and what their fixations were. This means the book doesn’t just brush them off but actually dwells quite a bit on the beliefs underlying turn-of-the-century eugenics movements and (importantly) actually takes the time to explain exactly how and why they were wrong as matters of science as well as of morality. If anything it probably dwells a bit overlong on the fact that ‘pure’ European genetics is still the result of several waves of migrations tens of thousands of years ago, a fact I’m fairly sure not a single living white supremacist finds difficult or really cares about one way or the other, but still – digging into the specific ways scientific racism is full of shit is, in my mind, performing a bit of a valuable public service these days. So many online provocateurs treat it as forbidden secret Truth that explains the world, that a comprehensible counterargument in the same terms is a useful thing to have.
The explanations of the basics of how inheritance works do actually benefit from being accompanied by stories about the experiments which first discovered or proved them, but once the basics are established it quickly becomes pretty clear that the book is most interested in all the ways the story is so much more complicated than that. The later chapters of the book are dedicated one after the other to genetic mosaics, chimerism and the micro- and macro-varieties, epigenetic mutations, contagious tumors, hereditary bacterial infections, and various other things of that nature. Even before you get to the cutting edge mad science, the main thing you’re left with is a deep appreciation for how precarious the whole process of embryonic development is, and wonder at the fact that any babies are ever born ‘normal’ at all.
That said, the mad science is a highlight. Zimmer spent several years reporting on CRISPR as the technology was first developed and you can tell he’s got some more personal investment in it than the book’s other subjects, if only by how much detail we get in the iterations of experiments using it. Perhaps because of that, the inevitable discussion of genetic engineering and test tube babies is far more even-handed (positive, even!) about the technology than I would normally expect pop nonfiction to be. There’s nary a Gattaca reference to be seen, and a clear understanding that a lot of the lines people try to cut between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ genetic therapies and treatments are arbitrary and scientifically meaningless. The book does perhaps overcorrect slightly into boosterism, but only slightly – and really, prospects like two (or more!) people of any sex and any level of fertility being able to have biological children are both exciting and just interesting. That’s not even mentioning things like curing Huntington’s Disease or mosquito-borne malaria.
I am not sure I can really recommend a 600-page hardcover about anything without reservation, but if you can stand the house style and are interested in the subject, I would absolutely recommend giving this a look.
The first "I didn't bother to finish this" of the year!
016. The Missing Lynx by Ross Barnett. This is a book about extinction, and how what we think of as “wilderness” is already severely depopulated. The subject is the British Isles and the organization is chronological, starting with animals that went extinct during the Pleistocene and ending with animals extirpated in the modern era. Actually, we end with beavers, which have been successfully reintroduced to Great Britain, and a discussion of how reintroductions and habitat restoration can help but the logistics of introducing big predators makes it unlikely no matter how ecologically sound it is. My favorite part of the book has to do with the population genetics of extinct mammals, which we now have a decent amount of information about, including how repeated waves of migration and closely related species hybridizing aren’t just limited to human history, but found in other large mammals such as hyenas, lions and bison.
016a. The Day It Finally Happens by Mike Pearl. Utter dogshit. This book purports to be a look at the scientific likelihood of science fiction scenarios happening, but the author is much more “tech bro” than actually scientifically literate, and the assumptions made talking about the scenarios are preposterous. I gave up on the book after the chapter on “The Day Humans Become Immortal”, which assumes a) all humans will be granted access to medical immortality, b) a human only needs an acre each to provide both living space and food and c) the increasing population would cover the surfaces of all the planets in the solar system. Half of which don’t have surfaces. It was at this point that I realized that the author had nothing to say that was worth wasting my time with.
017. The Vermont Monster Guide by Joseph A. Citro, art by Stephen R. Bissette. This is a fun, breezy little read about Vermont monsters, including cryptids, urban legends and Forteana. Some of my favorite monsters in the book are literally campfire tales—monsters that star in stories told at Boy Scout camps. The biggest attraction of the book is the artwork, done with a thick-lined ink style that I absolutely adore. I tore through this in about 45 minutes and had a blast the whole time.
018. The Soup Bible, consulting editor Debra Mayhew. Because sometimes you just gotta read a cookbook cover to cover like it was a real book. At least, if you’re me and you’re bored and looking for new recipes. I did find some, but overall the book was a big disappointment. For something claiming to be “all the soups you will ever need”, the dishes in this book are very samey. Somewhere between ⅓ to ½ of them are blended vegetable soups finished with dairy. There are multiple recipes for some soups, like four different minestrones, but other basic soups like chicken noodle are missing. The editorial hand was pretty weak, and different collaborators’ styles are distractingly obvious; from the fact that most (but pointedly not all) of the authors dissuade you from using canned tomatoes to the one who does suggest it defining passata every time it’s mentioned (it’s an Italian tomato puree), but Japanese ingredients like gobo and konnyaku are not explained. There’s a few recipes I’m going to copy down for my own use, but I’m glad I got it at a library rather than paying for it.
019. When the Earth Was Green by Riley Black. The author of this one is on tumblr! Go check out @rileycatrocks , they rule. The book is a series of snapshots through Deep Time, highlighting how plants and animals affected each other’s evolution and ecology. Each chapter is a vignette based around a particular site, and the interactions range from how plants moving onto land changed biogeochemical cycles to two sabertooth cats enjoying themselves with a catnip high. And each chapter has an appendix, where the author talks about how she decided what to cover and where she had to fill in the gaps of the fossil record with educated hypotheses. As someone who is very keen on metacognition, having a book where about ¼ of the page count is devoted to the author explaining why sh made the choices she did is delightful.
020. Religion and its Monsters by Timothy K. Beal. This is a major work of monster theory, and it’s been on my radar for a while. Glad I finally got to get a chance to read it, as it did not disappoint. Beal’s argument is that the fear of monsters has connections to feelings of religious awe, and that the relationship between gods and monsters is a lot more complicated than some authors would have you believe (I’m looking at you, Jordan Peterson). The first half of the book talks about chaos monsters in West Asian religious traditions, moving from Marduk and Tiamat to the conflicting approaches to Leviathan and its ilk seen in the Torah before a brief discussion of the Book of Revelation and its dragon as anti-god. The second half is about how this corpus is reflected in modern monster culture, from Hobbes’ Leviathan to the Misfits. Cards on the table, I am someone who identifies strongly with monsters and views them with religious awe already, so I am 100% the target audience for this one. And this is one of the best “thinking with monsters” books I have read.
What are the consequences of making a 2-dimensional number?
You might not think of numbers as ‘dimensional,’ but they clearly are. We actually learned this in elementary school: -5, 0, 5, they all exist on what we call “The Number Line.” (1D). But, is there a way we can extend this? How can we make a 2 dimensional number?
Making the real number line (an elementary school review):
Let’s start by constructing the original number line that we all know and love. Where do we start? At zero. It represents nothing. Zero is almost always going to be our starting point. From there, we move up by adding numbers.
If I add 0+1, I end up at 1. If I just keep adding one a bunch of times, I construct the rest of the number line. We can also go backwards! We do this by adding -1 (or subtracting). This acts a a mirror to our original number line.
1, and -1, they act as ‘unit values’ that make up all the other numbers. Multiplication acts as a sort of scaling factor (like how 1*42 = 42).
Making the ‘vertical’ number line:
We’ve reviewed the old number line, now let’s move out of it. Again, let’s start at zero. But instead of using 1 or -1, we create a new unit value. One that moves upwards. Let’s call it ‘u.’ Short for up, or something like that. And we can go downwards by adding -u. I don’t want you to think this is some new crazy thing. For example, u+u = 2u, same as 1+1=2. It’s the same thing as before, but vertical.
Combining them! (Writing our 2d number):
So here are the 2d numbers Youve been waiting for! We will get to the ACTUAL wacky stuff (what happens when we make them interact with eachother). The consistency of mathematics would force us to make a new rule for multiplication, and the choice you make will change the behavior of numbers themselves... But for now, let’s start with building them
How do we write it? There are two parts, one horizontal, and one vertical. We make them in the same way we did before: by adding! The standard form is written as a+bu. Where an and b are normal numbers, and u represents the up unit. So 3+2u is a number that starts at zero, moves to the right by 3, and then moves up by 2. We have changed from moving on a number line, into moving on a 2d plane.
Adding 2d numbers together is pretty simple. Add the horizontal parts together, then add the vertical parts together. Heres an example: (3+2u) + (1+2u). Add the horizontal parts (3+1), add the vertical parts (2+2). We get a result of 4+4u!
The crazy stuff (our ‘consequences’):
The rule for addition was pretty straightforward. For multiplication, we would have to FOIL it out. Don’t worry, I’ll do it for you! There’s only one term you really have to look at. So say we have (a+bu)*(c+du). If I do all that out, I end up with this: ac + (ad+bc)u + (bd)u^2
Oh no, there is a major problem. Our 2d numbers should be in a form of a+bu. But if you look at the end, there is a u^2 term. What do we do? We have to find a way to make u^2 condense back into standard form, or it’ll break our 2d grid, where multiplying anything could lead to an infinite number of dimensions that we can’t do much with. Here are the different ‘paths’ we can take.
Path 1: make u^2 = 1
This seems straightforward. If u^2 becomes 1, then the extra term just goes to adding to the horizontal part. Plus, it’d look kind of symmetrical in our multiplication rule.
Heres the thing. If we make the rule that u^2 = 1, then the way we measure math and geometry completely changes! Multiplication on 1d acted as a scaling factor. In 2d it still does, but it also rotates the point around the plane. In u^2 = 1, the entire geometry starts to shift, distance is measured differently, and multiplication results in weird hyperbolic rotations! Also, if u^2 = 1, you can create non-zero numbers that multiply together to make zero. This ends up making it so we can’t do division normally, or consistent to how we would before.
Not to say that this entire thing isnt useful! These numbers do exist, they are called “split-complex numbers,” if you want to know more. There are totally applications and ways that this rule works very well in. Like Einsteins theory of relativity, where spacetime itself bends hyperbolically.
Path 2: u^2 = 0
Okay, so we tried making u^2 = 1, that works in certain cases, but overall it changes the geometry and makes everything confusing. What about just, getting rid of the term entirely? Again, it changes the geometry, and distance itself changes. When we try multiplying in this system, the number ends up getting scaled directly upwards. The amount it does, is dependent on the horizontal distance. In this system, it ends up modeling these weird parabolic shapes actually. There is another use though.
If you take calculus, you know that if you have an infinitesimal thats squared, we usually say it just goes to zero and we ignore it. They mostly use these numbers for that. They are called “dual numbers.”
Path 3: u^2 = -1
This one seems like the weirdest at first actually. Usually we learn that squaring a number will never be a negative number ( because -1*-1 = +1). But that was before, when we were restricted to the single number line. Now that we have 2 dimensions, it all mathematically works out! Multiplying here usually ends up moving you in circular, or maybe elliptical, rotations.
Here is the incredible part. The geometry does not change in some weird non-Euclidean way. This is the only path that keeps everything (basically) the same! We can divide just fine, measure distance in the same way, and it’s much easier to look at and stuff.
It also means, that instead of having these ‘unsolvable,’ equations that have negative square roots, we actually have a way to simplify them!
If you ever hear anyone talk about ‘imaginary numbers,’ this is exactly what these are. Except, they aren’t so imaginary. They are just the natural consequence of multiplying numbers that were made by 2 number lines, while keeping the same intuitive math that we had before.
End (sorry this was so long lol):
So, these are the consequences of 2d numbers. You make them by creating a second number line that is vertical. You can add them by adding the corresponding parts. But to multiply them? You have to decide what types of problems you are trying to solve, and which type of geometry you want to keep. Then follow from there.
(Anyway, if anyone wants to correct me, tell me I explained something wrong, or add anything new, please do!
I’ll be honest, I’m not actually as familiar with split-complex or dual numbers than I should be lol)
I’m honestly kind of amused by the amount of shit I’ve gotten by revealing I’ve been published in pop science pubs because most of the hate is about not being a serious scientist and like I’ve never claimed to be a serious scientist and I certainly am not doing research or making bold pronouncements. Science communication is about communicating other people’s (the actual researcher’s) ideas and findings into language and content that the average interested layman would find interesting. Like I’m not gonna make any breakthroughs but I am getting ideas to people who might go ‘wow fascinating.’
It’s apples and oranges and the people who don’t get that are honestly 80 percent of why I get work.
Do you have any linguistics book recommendations for laymen please pleaseeeee I'm desperate
If you want an introduction to linguistics, I highly recommend picking up the textbook for your local university's LING 101 class, rather than a book specifically directed at laypeople.
On top of the usual problems with popular science books - the commonness of quackery in the genre, the reliance on intuition, the forced and flaccid tone of profundity that especially ramps up at the end of every chapter - popular linguistics books in particular are rife with political implications. Linguistics is both a cultural and a psychological topic, which makes it easy for anyone with an agenda (or even no agenda, just underlying bigotry) to write a book and get their ideological fingers up into readers' brains in ways that are sometimes subtle.
Consider the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the idea that the language(s) a person speaks changes the kinds of thoughts they're likely to have. That sounds reasonable, right? If someone asked you to think of a plant, you'd probably pick a plant you had a word for. And by the same principle, maybe people who speak a language without a future tense have a harder time conceptualizing the future! This is the kind of intuitive-but-profound-seeming observation/speculation that pop science books love.
It was also a big part of the rationalization/justification for the Indian residential school system and the suppression of Native languages.
(Also technically English doesn't have a future tense, but no one ever mentions that in the context of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis because the entire point of the thing is to exoticize non-European languages for fun and profit.)
These sorts of just-so stories found in pop linguistics books have profound political implications about mental or cultural diffences (read: usually inferiority) of those who speak languages foreign to the the audience, and more often than you'd think they bypass the bigotry bullshit detectors of otherwise well-intentioned readers - because of the informative tone of the work, the intuitive sense it makes for a language to change the way people think, and above all, "It can't be racist, it's about their language, not their race!"
A textbook can make these errors too, of course - the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis does come up in many introductory textbooks. The difference is that 1. a textbook is far more likely to mention that a given idea is "controversial" or "disputed," since unlike pop science they don't need to keep up the tone of mind-blowing profundity to make sales; and 2. since these sorts of bullshit cognitive linguistics theories are fully in the realm of "wouldn't it be interesting if", there's just not enough to say about any one of them to take up more than a page or two in a book that actually needs to contain information.
So yeah tl;dr just pick up a LING 101 textbook. There'll probably be less bigotry, and you'll actually learn about linguistics instead of the author's pseudoprofound wank.
