Not Without Flaws

I just finished two books about ways of looking at the world. Both are worth the read, but not without flaws.

First is David Sloan Wilsons' Evolution For Everyone. Wilson believes you don't have to be an expert to understand the simple yet profound concept of natural selection. And once you start looking through that prism, your understanding of the natural world is changed, and you start asking interesting questions. You can also generate useful experiments and testable hypotheses. (One of Wilson's strong points is his ability to convey the excitement of scientific discovery.)

He talks about lots of specific, intriguing work being done, from microbes to beetles to fish to chicken to apes. He also talks quite a bit about the evolution of cooperation, in insects and also humans. Sometimes I think he goes a bit too far afield regarding the latter, but his attitude is why not see how far we can go--too many disciplines have been undernourished because they haven't been willing to apply evolutionary insight.

Second, there's The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's follow-up to Fooled By Randomness. Taleb believes that we concentrate too much on the bell curve. Sure, we're not surprised by events (and can often predict them within certain limits) 99% of the time, but the stuff that really makes a difference, and that we try to ignore, are blacks swans--highly improbable moments that change everything. And this is what we need to know more about. The bell curve can't save you in the real world.

Taleb has an entertaining style, and he writes with an eccentric and thus forgivable arrogance. The main trouble is there's not much here that isn't already said or implied in his previous book.

(He also has a short paragraph attacking Richard Posner. It ends thus: "If you run into him, please make him aware of these things." So I sent it to Posner, who replied he has no idea what Taleb is talking about.)