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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Watts' The Way of Zen. So far his discussion of relativity has been clarifying.
I'm currently reading Jonathan Losos' Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution. It's a book that I've been aware of for a bit but only got around to now; it explores the convergence vs. contingency debate in evolutionary biology and attempts to tackle questions like "how deterministic is evolution?".
Losos in the book focuses quite heavily on the perspectives of two scholars, one who exemplifies the "convergence" perspective and the other espousing "contingence": the former being Simon Conway Morris, and the latter being the late Stephen Jay Gould. I have a decent working knowledge of both of their positions, and I have very little regard for either of them. Conway Morris is a devout Christian who seems to be using evolutionary convergence to import his own personal brand of theism back into science, whereas Gould was an incredibly politically motivated scientist who let his profoundly leftist ideological bias inform not only his evolutionary theory but also his criticism of cognitive measures like IQ and g, and whose reputation was nothing short of mud in his own field.
The book is pretty even-handed, though. Losos starts out by detailing pretty standard examples of evolutionary convergence (e.g. the placental mole vs the Australian marsupial mole), and evolutionary idiosyncrasy (e.g. the entirety of New Zealand, which provides a pretty interesting alternative vision of a bird-dominated biosphere with adaptions radically different from their mammalian counterparts despite filling similar niches). He then delves into the field of experimental evolution to further answer this question. One of the experiments he covers are the famous ones on guppies, where guppies were moved from high-predation to low-predation environments. In the low-predation areas, male guppies in a period of only a few years became colourful due to the lack of predation pressure allowing sexual selection to run amok. This would seem to provide strong evidence in favour of convergence, but the form the colourfulness took was not predictable: some populations became more vibrant by increasing the amount of all colours, whereas others became more iridescent. Whether this data point skews in favour of Conway Morris or Gould is left up to the reader.
I'd say it's pretty entertaining - I was already previously quite acquainted with the subject material and the way it's written is fairly easy to parse so it's not a particularly strenuous read.
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