What the . . . ?

An eclectic bunch of books has passed across my transom (to pinch a Spinal Tap line) in recent weeks, and you deserve the benefit of my unfounded opinions just by virtue of having dropped by (well done, you!), even if it just means I manage to warn you off a couple of these:


Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb.

By all accounts there’s a definite division among Anglo-American biologists over the significance attached to the role of genes in evolution. In the U.K. there’s still a very strong attachment to Dawkins’s selfish gene theory to the exclusion of any alternative, whereas in the States, whether out of jealousy or good science, they regard themselves as having progressed much further; recent findings in epigenetics and molecular biology undermine the entire selfish gene argument without undermining the very important, nay, central, role that genes play in evolution. Jablonka and Lamb call themselves Lamarckists (and explain why they don’t put that self-description in quotation marks even though the theory they advance is not strictly speaking Lamarckism) because they argue that the evidence points to a role for acquired characteristics in natural selection. How seriously we should take their claims I am not equipped to judge—the extent of my reading in this area stretches to Dawkins, Gabriel Dover, Lynn Margulis, and Brian Goodwin but no further—but this book is easy enough to understand in spite of the sometimes daunting terminology or complexity of argument, so there should be no misunderstanding their argument. If you read slowly and re-read sentences, as I had to, you eventually get their meaning. I was more taken by the sections on genetic and epigenetic evolution than the subsequent chapters on behavioural and symbolic evolution, not because they were any the less readable but simply because I bought the book for what it had to say about the new modern synthesis in biology. Worth checking out if that’s your bag.


Dandy in the Underworld, by Sebastian Horsley.

I bought this book against my better judgement, having mocked the risible Sebastian elsewhere (see here and here, for instance). Perhaps it was guilt. Perhaps not. Either way, the debt is paid in full. It appears that Horsley has never recovered from the horror of discovering that he is no different from anyone else (quite a shock for the scion of a dairy empire), and this book constitutes an account of his efforts to render himself distinctive and individual. Sadly, his efforts appear to consist in plagiarizing others rather than developing a style of his own: Quentin Crisp, Marc Bolan, Oscar Wilde. There is some amusing second-rate wordplay here and there, but seeing as Horsley clearly believes that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, I think we’ve already said too much.


Generation Kill, by Evan Wright.

This book piqued my interest because a new TV series in the States is based on it and previews in the U.S. media have been impressive. I can only hope the series is no more than loosely based on the book. Despite the blurb, this is definitively NOT war reporting on a par with Michael Herr’s Dispatches. On the contrary. This book exemplifies everything that is bad and wrong about embedding journalists with troops. Impartiality, objectivity, and journalistic integrity and ethics disappear from the get-go. We are treated to a trip to Iraq with professional killers in a volunteer army who shoot almost everything that moves and then we are expected to empathize with them when they express moral reservations about their mission or entertain feelings of guilt for having shot children or other innocent civilians. I don't even recall Wright talking to any Iraqis in the entire book. With the exception of the translator, and he hardly counts. Wright doesn't even seem to think there's any potential conflict of interest or moral dilemma arising when one of the soldiers in his Humvee passes him a machine gun, saying something along the lines of, “you didn’t think you were just going to share our chow and water, did you?” Execrable.


The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, by Jacques Rancière.

A reader of C&S recommended this to me ages ago, but I struggled to find it at a price I was willing to pay. Ironically enough, I found that the French Amazon site has several copies available in English for less than those on the British Amazon site. Even more ironically, when I boasted about this to someone very dear to this blog, he pointed out that there is a free download of the text online here. Bugger.

This is a slight book, at 176 pages, but worth a look at for the story it tells of French schoolteacher Joseph Jacotot, whose discovery that teachers don’t need to know anything in order to teach threatened the entire education system in 18th-century France. Required to teach Flemish students who knew no French while he knew no Flemish, Jacotot arrived at the idea of giving the students copies on Fenelon’s Telemachus, one in French and one in Flemish, and instructed them to learn French by a process of inference, comparing the two texts. The results of this exercise resulted in students producing essays in French exemplary for their turn of phrase, correctness of grammar, and all round general excellence in the newly acquired language. From this discovery, Jacotot developed and expanded a system of education according to which fathers without education would be able to teach their children, in spite of not knowing what they were teaching, an approach that, if successful, constituted an explicit threat to the state education system. The discovery also resulted in Jacotot's emancipatory pedagogy, one of the principles of which is that all human beings are endowed with equal intelligence. It seems apposite to quote Wilde at this juncture, does it not?: “Man is born ignorant. It is education that makes him stupid.”

The second half of the book is devoted to an account of the (ultimately successful) efforts to suppress Jacotot’s teaching system, but as Jacotot himself pointed out, while the system itself might be quashed, intellectual emancipation cannot be, since the human mind will always teach itself.

Quite so.