Tuesday, February 25, 2003
On the way back home on the train I started writing an article for TCP tentatively titled "The Diskette is Dead. Long Live the Memory Bar!" The idea for it has been percolating in my thoughts soon after picking it up. I surprised myself in being able to write about half of the intended article in the short amount of time I had. The final word in portable data storage? Probably not –especially considering the option of CD-Rs and eventually comparably-priced DVD-Rs – but it makes a helluva good stopgap, and a workable middle-ground between diskettes and CD-Rs.
After putting the kids to bed Erika managed to arrange a babysitter for our "date" Friday evening. Then I opened up my notebook, went online and snagged a couple of tickets for "Mama Mia". Erika really wants to see it, and at the moment we can, so... Ever since Annie was born we've had a long dry spell when it comes to theatre. Nice to make up for it with this and "Wingfield on Ice" a couple of weeks back. Admittedly there was a time when going to see a show based on nothing but ABBA songs would have filled me with abject horror. Now it just seems an innocuous part of the musical landscape.
Received my first ever order from Amazon.ca: a copy of Brian Eno's "A Year with Swollen Appendices", "Voices of Morebath" by Eamon Duffy as well as a copy of "The Carnivorous Carnical" by Lemony Snickett, which I picked up on Michael W.'s behest. I bought from Amazon.ca instead of my usual Chapters/Indigo because they didn't stock the "Voices of Morebath", which I first heard about while reading an article about it some time ago in an issue of BBC History magazine.
A good piece of news: Vanessa has been accepted into the French immersion program at Williamson Road school.
Book Review: Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice for All Creation, by Olivia JudsonI first heard about this book while listening to an extensive segment on Quirks and Quarks when the author was being interviewed, and gave some examples from her book. The more I heard, the more I wanted to read this book for myself. It sounded like a hoot. The basic premise is that the writer, in the guise of Dr. Tatiana, is an "agony aunt" for all sorts of creatures who are having – by human standards – a hard time of things sexually-speaking. All of this serves as a jumping off point to talk about how sex and behaviour is ultimately guided by the force of evolution.
It is, as the book's subtitle suggests, "The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex". I can't help but think that the "All Creation" part in the main title is there to crook a snook to the wooly-minded creationists out there. (Speaking of which, it is interesting to note that the subtitle is somewhat buried on the cover of the North American edition, while it is far more prominently displayed on the U.K. edition).
The premise is certainly amusing: letters of complaint pour in from a female fish that accidentally inhales her husband and becomes pregnant, a male hyena complaining about the fact that the females of his species sport phalluses, a female mantis asking why her boyfriends become more vigorous in the act after she bites their heads off and so on. But the initial "letter" is there solely as a launching point for the writer to talk about a particular angle about sex and evolution. I have to admit that all of the facts she throws at us at once is dizzying, sometimes changing from the similar habits of one species to another from paragraph to paragraph. While interesting, I sometimes found myself drifting, and in the mass of detail found myself lost trying to remember what the underlying theme was. This I think is more my fault that the writer's – this is a book that deserves a second reading in order to properly digest things (in a non-mantid way. ;-)
The point that most clearly comes through is how evolution have guided and shaped the behaviour of the creatures Dr. Tatiana looks at. This is the most revealing aspect of the book as she looks at how evolutionary forces are ultimately at the root of everything seen in the book. So if a behaviour is genetically-based and it manages to provide some advantage for either direct or related progeny, that gene is likely to survive. If a member of a species only rarely runs into other members of its species, hermaphrodism is likely (after all, it greatly increases the chance of having progeny – imagine being a snail who travels miles and miles looking for other snails, only to find one and then discover it to be of the same sex. ;-) Genes shuffled and re-shuffled through sex have a greater chance of surviving such things as infections than a population who genes let a whole population get cut down at once – the "Red Queen" idea behind how sex itself evolved. While a number of these arguments weren't new to me, they are certainly presented in an entertaining way.
While I found the density of the material a bit overwhelming, Olivia Judson writes well and convincingly. My only real disappointment was the size of the book – there's about a hundred or so pages of nothing but bibliographic notes finishing of the book. Less reference notes, more Dr. Tatiana next time please! It was interesting to read at the end of the book how the author took a different tack and instead of being an agony aunt took the role of a typical North American talk show host interviewing an organism that claimed not to have had sex for the past 40 million years or so. It seemed like a change of gears for the writer, and its format held my attention better – picturing an armadillo talking about the benefits of cloning or a snake hissing that the asexual Bdelloid rotifer was ultimately doomed to extinction made things more lively, and made me wonder if this was perhaps a foretaste of what to expect in a sequel. I certainly hope there is a sequel – this type of book and material begs for it. Worth a read (or in my case now, a re-read).
A rather bare-bones promotional Web site supporting the book is available for those interested in learning more about the book.
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