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Reading & Recommendations
I am really overboard when it comes to books, and have a large library of books of all types. I am mainly reading science, history, philosophy/religion titles at present, and I think I am currently reading somewhere between 4-6 books simultaneously. Here's some titles I've recently read (within the past year or so) that I would highly recommend.
1. Jay Latham, Galaxy of Fire, Sunstar Press, 2001. My cousin Jay (1948-2000) wrote this book before his untimely death about his adventures in the US Marine Corp during Vietnam, on into his tenure with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's TM organization (remember that the Maharishi was the Yogi and spiritual teacher for the Beatles, Mia Farrow and others back in the 60s), including his travels in India and Nepal.
2. Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. This book got me incredibly interested in genetics and how the discipline is impacting the interpretation of Darwin's theory. It also contrasts the different positions in the field (circa 1996). I found Dennett's blasting of Gould's theory of Punctuated Equilibria to be entertaining in the least. I guess those guys don't get along too well. ;-) Dennett's overview of the idea of Memetics (the profusion and random proliferation of ideas, metaphors and idioms throughout a society) is one of the best I've read on the subject (although the idea was first put forth by Richard Dawkins many years ago).
3. Jared Diamond, Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality. I found this to be fascinating conjecture and theory on why we find sex to be so "fun", pleasurable and enjoyable. I guess there has to be *some* imperative to drive us to do it, for the sake of the species. It's just that I had never thought about it in such reductionist terms before.
4. David Keys, Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization. I find the author's exploration of the likelihood of a natural disaster affecting the outcome of modern history (from 5th century C.E. to the present day) to be compelling. Yet another example of how the flapping of butterfly wings (in this case, a massive volcano eruption in the Indonesian archipelago) can cause incredible cascade effects rippling through geology, climatology, culture and civilizations around the world for centuries--reshaping the outcome and shape of local and global history as we now know it.
5. Stephen Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. This book was one of several that got me really interested in applying complexity theory--namely the principles of adaptive, self-organizing systems--to problems in computer science and engineering.
6. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. This is an excellent treatment of new theories of complexity and the role in the emergence of life, and how order is created, spontaneously, out of disorder, critical mass, and lots of random combinatorics. It is targeted to the lay reader, as opposed to his book The Origins or Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, which is a more formal treatment with the mathematics and biology for the theory's development.
7. Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. I found this fascinating exploration of why it is that males of a species expend so much energy on securing a mate (why do *we* do it--the hair, the cars, the clothes, the primping, pumping up, pounding of the chest...."look at meeeee", as Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones would say...). Expending excessive energy to advertise one's fitness as a potential mate has a sense of logic to it. The trick is to balance this tendency against the need for personal survival, where this extravagant and apparently superfluous use of energy goes counter to the notion of survival. But, then again, why care about survival, unless you can pass on your genes? Well, humans have evolved culture, so that gives us yet another weapon in the fight for the best mates, and also provides another imperative beyond simple genes as the basis of preserving for posterity who we once were.
8. Alan Watts, The Way of Zen. This is one of the first, and still best written, IMHO, books on the history and philosophy of Zen Buddhism. I've read and re-read it over the years. I pick up more out of it each time I read it.
9. Sekkei Harada, The Essence of Zen: Dharma Talks Given in Europe and America. Another really good book on the precepts of Zen Buddhism. Harada is no-nonsense and no mumbo-jumbo, and his lecture style is down to earth. The paradox of Zen is that in order to attain it (Satori, or enlightenment), you can't really study it, you can't think about it, you can't really learn it, in the sense of book learning--you have to directly experience it in daily living, through meditation and through direct perception of the "here and now". I like this guy's style. Again, I read this one over and over, getting more out of it each time. (I've spent a lot of time on trains in Japan, so this one and the Watts book were the companions I carried on the commute.)
10. Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything, and A Brief History of Everything. Wilber's books are very interesting, in his synthesis of latest thinking from all over the spectrum of knowledge--evolutionary biology, economics, psychology, history, physics, etc., to name a few--and his building a unified framework or world view that is profoundly inclusive of ideas from all of these fields. He is a "mapmaker" of sorts, an abstractionist and pattern-finder, plotting out how things relate in the various spheres of knowledge, and hanging them together in a single richly-textured fabric--of categories, structures, hierarchies and relationships. Everything from religion to evolution to particle physics are fit within the framework. I have some questions about the validity of some of the premises on which he hangs some of his notions, but the quadrant system he presents--and the common patterns he observes in all of these various spheres of knowledge--is quite amazing. It is interesting and thought provoking reading, if you are interested in a synthesis of the latest ideas on how "everything" hangs together (the "theory") and how it has come to be this way (the "history").