The Thinker or Le Penseur sculpture by Auguste Rodin (1904) in the Musee Rodin in Paris – photographed by CrisNYCa for Wikipedia “The Thinker” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
I think therefore I am – and I have compiled my Top 10 Philosophy & Science Books.
That first sentence is of course one of the most famous and popular quotations of philosophy – from the French philosopher and mathematician Descartes.(Note to self – compile top 10 quotations of philosophy). On a related noted, my feature image is one of the most famous and popular (as well as imitated and reproduced) sculptures – The Thinker or Le Penseur by Auguste Rodin, a suitably philosophical statue. (Note to self- compile top 10 sculptures).
To be honest, most of these books are perhaps more philosophical than philosophy as such, at least in the formal academic sense. And to be blunt, I use the term philosophy here as something of a general catch-all for non-fiction that is not otherwise mythology or history, albeit usually at least philosophical in contemplating ideas and theories.
On the other hand, my favorite science books tend to cleave closer to science as such, particularly for my favorite science – biology. Even if I do tend to agree with the quotation that the only real science is physics while the rest is stamp collecting. That said, while I tend to be dismissive of the ‘soft’ sciences as opposed to the ‘hard’, I often consider the former among my philosophical or philosophy books.
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(10) STONE AGE HERBALIST –
ESSAYS IN DISSIDENT ANTHROPOLOGY:
BERSERKERS, CANNIBALS & SHAMANS / SKULL CULTS & CORPSE BRIDES
(2022-2023)
“Good anthropology should frighten and disturb”.
Well, I don’t know about frighten and disturb – but certainly titillate!
I mean – don’t the titles alone pique your curiosity? Berserkers, cannibals, and shamans? Skull cults and corpse brides? The latter conjures images of some fantasy world of necromancy – indeed, I often imagine the Herbalist writing such a world, until of course you realise he is writing about our world, just the strange dark fantasy corners of it.
And that really is the heart of that dissident anthropology tagline, albeit it is a catchy tagline (along with that of his pen name) – writing about the dark fantasy corners of our world, which all too often are swept under modern anthropology’s rug of propriety. There was a time, at least it seems to me, when anthropologists positively delighted in shining a light on those dark fantasy corners of the world or crooked timbers of humanity. I can imagine a straight line from the Herbalist back to anthropologists like Sir James George Frazer, fossicking for sympathetic magic and sacrificial kings. Or back to Herodotus for that matter.
The other aspect of his dissident anthropology is when he turns up findings that throw a spanner in the works of modern anthropology – or turns a critical eye to those sacred cows enshrined within it, particularly those that project contemporary political or social fashions to the past (or beyond the West).
Full disclosure – Stone Age Herbalist is a mutual on the X formerly known as Twitter (under @Paracelsus1092), because he was nice enough to follow me back when I started following his account as it posted about exactly the sort of thing you find in these essays. Indeed, I think the only reason I have anyone following or reading my account is from him boosting or sharing the occasional post of mine.
And I meant what I said that his account is essentially the same sort of thing you find in these books. Many of the essays originated as posts or threads on his timeline – and as a drafting board for the essays he writes on his Substack, from which these books are predominantly compiled.
And of course he also earns my usual wildcard tenth place for the best entry from the current or previous year – in this case his second book of essays in 2023, although hopefully we’ll see a third…
The only thing I can’t quite get a fix on is his formal academic discipline, given that subtitle of essays in dissident anthropology (and that mostly seems to me as his subject matter), yet his Amazon author description is that “Stone Age Herbalist is an archaeologist and writer”. Of course the writer part is obvious, but I tend to think that he is truly cross-disciplinary between archaeology and anthropology. Or perhaps some academic Schrodinger’s cat in a quantum state between them – or an academic Renaissance man, a credit to his range and versatility as writer.
As for the contents of the books, I’ll just quote from their Amazon blurbs because they’re fun.
“How many children are ritually sacrificed in Uganda each year? Why does China have such a long history of cannibalism? Do modern soldiers still go berserk like the Vikings of old? In this essay collection, Stone Age Herbalist ranges across a number of uncomfortable topics, from Mongolian eco-fascists to contemporary child witchcraft murders in Britain, the philosophy of Aztec violence and the biological impacts of famines on populations…you will discover the prehistory of whaling, seafaring, the horror of deep time, indigenous warfare, the genius of shamanism, English melancholy, the mysteries of palaeolithic Australia and much more.”
“Stone Age Herbalist returns with over twenty new essays, covering everything from prehistoric skull cults in Anatolia to contemporary corpse brides in China…dogs which defy Darwinism, 21st century concentration camps for witches, murder victims mummified and sold as precious artefacts, forgotten genocides and modern child sacrifice. Alongside the darkness there is also wonder, the origins of metallurgy, Dionysian rewilding, lost tribes and times when farmers abandoned agriculture for hunting and much more.”
See what I mean about imagining the Herbalist writing fantasy? The “horror of deep time” just conjures up eldritch visions of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos!
RATING: 4 STARS****
X-TIER (WILD TIER)
(9) JAMES C SCOTT –
AGAINST THE GRAIN: A DEEP HISTORY OF THE EARLIEST STATES (2017)
It’s all about the grain! Or against it!
Zac Snyder’s Rebel Moon was right! Except his mistake was setting his epic about grain in the far future of space opera, where he should have set it in the deep past of prehistoric, well, grain opera – which is how Scott, anarchist political scientist and anthropologist, sees the first human states, essentially brutal granaries. Grain literally makes states.
It always seems a little odd how our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopted (grain) agriculture. Sure – not so odd looking back from our modern perspective of industrialized and mechanized agricultural abundance but much more odd looking forward as it were from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, seemingly much healthier and with richer diets for far less effort than their agricultural descendants.
It reminds me of that meme of a wolf asking itself what’s the worst that could happen from getting food at the human campfire, only to end up 10,000 years later as some ridiculous domesticated dog photo.
How could our own hunter-gather ancestors let themselves be hoodwinked into becoming peasants – stunted and malnourished, overworked and overtaxed, perpetually on the edge of famine and disease as well as serfdom or slavery by states or ‘nobility’?
I had always attributed it to something of a combination of the frog in a pot, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, and Malthusian trap. Sure, agriculture has benefits for consistency and reliability of food over time, particularly in storage, leading to population growth and the accumulation of resources – but once you realize you’re hard pressed to keep those benefits ahead of being wiped out by the pressures of more mouths to feed, it’s too late to do anything else except more agriculture. And except of course for reaping the one benefit of higher populations against less populous neighbours – superiority in war, even when agricultural populations were typically inferior as individual warriors.
However, Against the Grain suggests that the trap was a little less Malthusian and a little more Orwellian – that while they barely hovered above collapse and the defection of their subjects, states achieved their power through grain agriculture and weren’t about to let it go without a struggle, in turn using that grain agriculture as an instrument to keep ratcheting up their power, including by forced or slave labor.
This theme is evident in the chapter titles, perhaps none more so than for the first chapter – The Domestication of Fire, Plants, Animals, and…Us. Obviously that last word of the title conveys how agriculture above all domesticated humans. To paraphrase Orwell, all humans were effectively domesticated, but some humans were more domesticated than others – because they were domesticated BY others.
As a quick note, I was particularly intrigued by the domestication of fire as the first world-shaping human technology – and one that humans used that way even as hunter-gatherers.
The theme of domestication of humans continues in the second chapter, Landscaping the World: The Domus Complex, to which is added agriculture as the perfect environment for disease in the third chapter, Zoonoses: A Perfect Epidemiological Storm.
The chapter titles continue in a similar vein – Agro-Ecology of the Early State, Population Control: Bondage and War, Fragility of the Early State: Collapse as Disassembly – although my favorite remains the final chapter title, The Golden Age of the Barbarians. Scott posits this age – when the majority of the world’s population had never seen a tax collector or at least the majority of the world’s territory was one of “barbarian zones” (tracts of land where states found it either impossible or prohibitively difficult to extend their rule) – persisted up until 400 or so years ago.
“Not only did this place a great many people out of the reach of the state, but it also made them significant military threats to the state’s power” – not least because on an individual level, barbarians tended to be better warriors than the subjects of agricultural states, even as they also tended to have a symbiotic relationship with those states.
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
Instead of my usual feature image of the book’s cover, I couldn’t resist this clip from the opening sequence of the Inside Job animated TV series, which seems to me a nod to the Stoned Ape theory
(8) TERENCE MCKENNA –
FOOD OF THE GODS: THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINAL TREE OF KNOWLEDGE – A RADICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS, DRUGS & HUMAN EVOLUTION (1992)
“I think it’s time to discuss your, uh, philosophy of drug use as it relates to artistic endeavour.” – William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch.
Stoned Ape theory, anyone?
Terence McKenna may be a trip and a hoot, perhaps the trippiest and, ah, hootiest, entry in this top ten, although there are a few rival claimants.
But seriously, my philosophical taste leans towards aphorism, the memorable or striking phrase (and idea) – quip and koan, each (and both) of which might be regarded as synonymous with trip and hoot. After, a good koan resembles both a hoot and a trip, the latter ideally the purpose of the koan leading to enlightenment.
Terence McKenna certainly had the gift for memorable or striking phrase and idea, lodging deep in your psyche even if you don’t accept or agree with them, but even more so was one of the leading ‘philosophers’ of the literal drug trip.
And perhaps never more so than in this book, arguably his magnum opus – nothing less than the radical history of humanity and drugs, and even more so the prehistory of humanity and drugs. Enter the Stoned Ape theory, which in a nutshell puts a spin on Genesis where God made man – but in which God was a mushroom.
No, seriously, McKenna proposed that the cognitive transformation from our hominid ancestors to our present human species mainly involved the addition of psychoactive mushrooms (growing in dung!) to our diet, based on the alleged effects of such mushrooms on cognitive capacity.
The intellectual or observational gems don’t stop there – one thing that has always stuck in my head ever since reading it in the book is how much the European empires originated as or were drug plantation empires, particularly if you count sugar as a drug – as McKenna persuasively argues we should.
It gets trippier from there, as indeed did McKenna in general – “an American ethnobotanist and mystic who…spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, ethnomycology, environmentalism and the theoretical origins of human consciousness…one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism and the intellectual voice of rave culture”.
Not to mention machine elves.
This of course saw him come under criticism from those who didn’t see him as the fun he was.
Judy Corman wrote “surely the fact that Terence McKenna says that the psilocybin mushroom is the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to communicate with mankind is enough for us to wonder if taking LSD has done something to his mental faculties.”
While Peter Conrad wrote “I suffered hallucinatory agonies of my own while reading his shrilly ecstatic prose”. You fool, Conrad – that shrilly ecstatic prose is the best part!
I prefer the views of Tom Hodgkinson and Mark Jacobson. The former stated that to write McKenna off “as a crazy hippie is a rather lazy approach to a man not only full of fascinating ideas but also blessed with a sense of humor and self-parody”, while the latter wrote “it would be hard to find a drug narrative more compellingly perched on a baroquely romantic limb than this passionate Tom-and-Huck-ride-great-mother-river-saga of brotherly bonding,” adding “put simply, Terence is a hoot!”
‘Nuff said. McKenna is a hoot – and a trip!
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(7) ROBERT ANTON WILSON –
PROMETHEUS RISING (1983)
Rivalling Terence McKenna as the most trippy entry in my top ten – indeed, Robert Anton Wilson might well be summed up by his own fictional creation “Operation Mindf**k” in the Illuminatus Trilogy.
To quote his bio from Wikipedia, “Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson; January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic…not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything”.
He was also recognized within Discordianism – that Western zen – “as an Episkopos, pope and saint”, something which permeates both his philosophical and fictional writings, the latter of course including the Illuminatus Trilogy which went a long way towards earning him this entry (as well as earning its own place in my Top 10 SF Books).
Not to mention he was an editor for Playboy magazine, something which earns my respect and indeed reverence alone – which only increases from the book he wrote while editor, Ishtar Rising or at it was originally titled, The Book of the Breast, apparently originating from a bet that he could write a whole book on, well, breasts. In fairness, it’s a little deeper than just a book about breasts – and almost earned this spot.
Although it was a close call with Ishtar Rising or Book of the Breast, I ultimately had to go with his Prometheus Rising for this entry. I’m a fan of icebergs – as in the meme representing ever deeper and wilder layers to something – and this book might well be styled as an iceberg of the human mind or consciousness, taking the reader on a progressively deeper and wilder trip through Timothy Leary’s “eight-circuit model of consciousness”.
Indeed, the whole of Wilson’s writings might be regarded as one iceberg or another, or perhaps one big iceberg – a hoot as you go tripping through ever deeper levels.
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(6) ERIC HOFFER –
THE TRUE BELIEVER: THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF MASS MOVEMENTS (1951)
First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.
That’s paraphrasing Scarface of course. While it’s close, it’s not quite what American social philosopher Eric Hoffer proposed for his tripartite classification for the development of mass movements – first you get the “men of words or fault-finding intellectuals”, then you get the fanatics, and then you get the “practical men of action”. (Still not sure when you get the women though).
Those categories are not mutually exclusive – they may overlap in the same person or persons – but when the “practical men of action” take over leadership from the fanatics, it marks the end of the movement’s “dynamic phase” (with the movement more establishing itself as a social institution) and “steering the mass movement away from the fanatic’s self-destructiveness”.
And “in the absence of a practical man of action, the mass movement often withers and dies with the fanatic (Nazism died as a viable mass movement with Hitler’s death).”
The book is exactly what it says on tin – thoughts on the nature of mass movements that “arise to challenge the status quo”, including their success or failure, and rise or fall.
One of the book’s interesting (and famous) propositions is that mass movements are interchangeable, whether radical or reactionary – and whether religious, political or something else – they are similar in terms of the psychology of their adherents. The movements attract the same sort of people, some of whom flip from one to another – such as St Paul as religious hitman turned evangelist, or fanatical opponent of Christianity turned fanatical proponent of Christianity.
Hoffer’s prose style was characteristically aphoristic – pithy aphorisms or turns of phrase that stick in the mind and resonate afterwards. Perhaps the most famous is “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil”.
They’re not all bad either – Hoffer “gives examples of how the same forces that give rise to true believer mass movements can be channelled in more positive ways”.
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(5) JOHN GRAY –
STRAW DOGS: THOUGHTS ON HUMANS & OTHER ANIMALS (2002)
“I’ve got a Nietzsche trigger finger!”
No, seriously – this brag (by another entry in this top ten) might well sum up the philosophical pessimism and thoroughgoing misanthropy of John Gray.
That or how I learned to stop worrying and love that humanity sucks.
Indeed, one might quip that Gray out-Nietzsches Nietzsche. For Gray, Nietzsche was a pansy who didn’t go far enough in proclaiming God as dead, since he substituted his own myth of the superman for God. (He literally writes that in this book. Well, except the pansy bit).
And yes, Gray’s oeuvre might be summed up as humans suck – a philosophy of posthumanism or anti-humanism.
Hence the subtitle of this book, which encapsulates the book’s thesis that humans have yet to reconcile themselves with evolutionary theory that they’re just another type of dumb animal.
What are we but fish that couldn’t swim and had to crawl or apes that couldn’t climb and had to think? That’s my quip but it might as well be Gray’s. Indeed for Gray, that thinking part is overblown – “Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life.”
One might well wonder what was the point of writing the book then, if all this thinking business is just an illusion – but I do love me some grumpy philosophical pessimism, which this book has in spades.
“Gray attacks humanism as a worldview in conflict with the view of humanity as part of the evolution of life on the planet…a secular version of the Christian view of humans as differentiated from the natural world. Gray blames humanism, and its central view of humanity, for much of the destruction of the natural world, and sees technology as just a tool by which humans will continue destroying the planet and each other”.
My favorite philosophy is aphoristic, which this book also has in spades, meandering between pithy quips and “short essays on different topics”.
Straw Dogs was praised by none other than English author J.G. Ballard, himself of a somewhat pessimistic philosophical bent and “who wrote that the book “challenges most of our assumptions about what it means to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions”.
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(4) CAMILLE PAGLIA:
SEXUAL PERSONAE: ART & DECADENCE FROM NEFERTITI TO EMILY DICKINSON (1990)
Men are from Apollo and women are from Dionysus – or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Pag!
Camille Paglia that is – neo-Dionysian and prose-poet provocateur par excellence.
Her mythic milkshake of Frazer and Freud brings all the boys – and girls – to the yard!
She out-Nietzsches Nietzsche with uberman AND uberwoman, even if the latter is a bit of a bitch-goddess, to borrow from William James. Mind you, her uberman is also a creature of extremes – “there is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper”.
But no one speaks better about herself – and most things really – than the consummate prose-stylist who is Camille Paglia.
“That symbolized everything I would do with my life and work. Excess and extravagance and explosiveness….”
Or of her book that is her magnum opus and my top ten entry accordingly, Sexual Personae – a book rejected by at least seven different publishers as too hot to handle before it was published by Yale University Press – “it was intended to please no one and offend everyone”. In other words, my kind of book.
“In the book, Paglia argues that human nature has an inherently Dionysian or chthonic aspect, especially in regard to sexuality…Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Paglia argues that the primary conflict in Western culture is between the binary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo being associated with order, symmetry, culture, rationality, and sky, and Dionysus with disorder, chaos, nature, emotion, and earth.”
Or in other words, Apollo is boring but practical and Dionysus is damn good fun or hot slice of crazy.
“The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them”. Mmm…palpate. Hail to the p0rnocracy!
Apart from her Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, Paglia also celebrates the Christian-pagan dichotomy – with the latter flourishing in art, eroticism and popular culture.
She believes that the “amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art have been ignored or glossed over by most academic critics” and that sex and nature are “brutal pagan forces.”
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(3) BOB BLACK –
THE ABOLITION OF WORK (1985)
Anarchism as political zen.
Or how I learned to stop working and love the slack.
I’m joking and serious – a personal mantra or zen koan I picked up from this very writer (in this very book), somewhat like the other (para)phrase I picked up from him, I make my own rules and break them anyway. (“I’m a law unto myself but break it anyway!”)
I sometimes note that I have a soft spot for anarchism. Bob Black is the reason why.
Which I guess would mean it is more accurate for me to note I have a soft spot for an anarchist (albeit there are one or two others) because Bob Black is an anarchist like no other – an idiosyncratic ideology indeed.
So of course most other anarchists hate him – and he hates them right back. He evokes something of the spirit of Camille Paglia as my preceding entry in that way, except with anarchists in his case as opposed to feminists in hers. Although mind you Black wrote an essay – including in this book as per its full title, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays – skewering feminism as much as he skewered anarchism elsewhere. There’s not much he won’t skewer – it’s one barbed shish kebab after another for Bob.
Black also shares Paglia’s virtuosity as a prose-poet provocateur par excellence and aficionado of aphorism – an enduring influence on my own aphoristic quest for quips and koans. As the man himself said – “If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it’s unequal to the task of accounting for actuality”
Bob Black is why I see anarchism as a form of political zen. Unworkable in practice, except perhaps for rare masters and remote monasteries which achieve enlightenment, but good for questioning the basic assumptions by which we live and maybe – just maybe – learning to live better, or at least clearer.
And the most basic assumption Black sets out to despise and destroy – his bête noire, his idée fixe, and his raison d’être all rolled up into one magnum opus – is work.
“No one should ever work”.
Finally a political manifesto I can get behind! And certainly one that seared itself deep in my psyche when I read it – although it helped that I read it in the depths of the most bullsh*t job I had, and that it spoke to me in a way that no one else did.
Even my brainwashed co-workers, who looked at me baffled when I said I was bored – “Don’t you have anything to do?” “Yes, I have lots of things to do” I would retort, “they’re all boring – that’s why I’m bored”.
But I digress. Back to Black – “Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.”
As an anarcho-primitivist, Black is playing the long game. Taking a leaf from Marshall Sahlins and not unlike that other anarchist in my top ten, James C. Scott, Black sees the Industrial Revolution as just the tip of the work iceberg that goes all the way down to the Neolithic Revolution.
And when I say Black is playing the long game, I mean literally – “That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution”.
By the way, that directly leads into that koan I’ve taken for my own – “You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn’t have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn’t triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I’d like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.”
And if nothing else, you have to love how he puts the Groucho into Marx, out-manifesting the manifesto – “Workers of the world. . . relax!”
Viva la revolution!
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(2) DESMOND MORRIS –
THE HUMAN ANIMAL: A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE HUMAN SPECIES (1994)
“You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals”
The book of the BBC TV series also written (and presented) by Desmond Morris – English zoologist (and surrealist painter!) – that is the New Testament to the Old Testament in my first-place entry, also the book of a BBC TV series written by its presenter.
I know, I know – it’s my running gag to call my god-tier top place entries, usually my top two or top three entries, my Old Testament and New Testament of the subject of the top ten. However, in this case the gag comes closest being true as books to live by and that shape my worldview – we are but animals, apes to be precise.
As such, this book (and the TV series) replays the grand theme of Morris’ magnum opus with its evocative title, The Naked Ape – as can be seen in that book’s subtitle, A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal.
As Morris stated, “I’ve sometimes been accused of degrading mankind, of insulting human dignity, of making man beastly. This surprised me because I like animals, and I feel proud to call myself one. I’ve never looked down upon them, so to call human beings animals is not, to me, degrading. It’s simply being honest: putting us in our place as part of the scheme of nature on the planet Earth.”
I wholeheartedly agree. Indeed, these days, it’s not uncommon to see the reverse – people elevating animals or the natural world over humans, disparaging the latter or even regarding placing humans among animals as degrading to animals. I wouldn’t go quite that far but I for one welcome animals as our brothers and sisters.
Morris “covers a fascinating variety of subjects – our hunting instincts have been channelled into an extraordinary range of sporting activities; how the modern world can trace its roots back to an early primate picking up a stone that resembles a face…how territorial fights erupt when the tribal systems within our overcrowded cities break down”.
There are six chapters, each corresponding to an episode of the series.
1 – The Language of the Body
“A world tour of cultural body language differences” but which demonstrates biological similarities that are virtually universal, not just with other humans but chimpanzees.
2 – The Hunting Ape
Morris adds another epithet to ape in describing humanity, albeit not quite as iconic as the naked ape.
“Morris traces back our ancestry from arboreal gatherers to bipedal hunters” – and how we are still hunters at heart.
3 – The Human Zoo
Homesick for the savannah – “the evolutionary and psychological implications of modern city living, a kind of natural environment to which our genes have not yet time to adapt”.
4 – The Biology of Love
“So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”
Needless to say, the most controversial episode of the TV series, albeit not quite so much in the book. Let’s just say they go in for an extreme close-up of the female orgasm.
5 – The Immortal Genes
The natural sequel to the previous chapter – children!
“Looking for reasons why we devote more time than any other species to raising our offspring”. Spoiler – we’re born too soon, even with heads (and brains) so big they push the limits of childbearing hips.
6 – Beyond Survival
Evocative of the playfulness of Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work in my previous entry, we are indeed more homo ludens than homo sapiens.
It’s amusing to think that when you boil them down, “things like art, music, literature and philosophy” are ultimately play.
“What we do become once have our basic needs for food, warmth and shelter, as well as various concepts like creativity, artistic progression and symbolic thinking to demonstrate how aesthetic decisions are being made every day by people across the world”.
Ultimately, we are what we are through our “insatiable playfulness”.
As Morris concludes, “of all the millions of species that have ever lived, we the human animal, are by far the most extraordinary. We’re the magic combination, the threshold leaper, the risk-taker, the venerable child for all occasions.”
RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT HUMANITY-TIER?)
(1) DAVID ATTENBOROUGH –
LIFE ON EARTH (1979)
What are we but fish that couldn’t swim and had to crawl?
Or apes that couldn’t climb and had to think?
That’s from me rather than Sir David Attenborough, “British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and writer…best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, the nine nature documentary series forming the Life collection, a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth”.
And this is the book of the first of the Life collection, that with Desmond Morris’ The Human Animal are my Old Testament and New Testament of, well, life on earth and the human animal. In particular, Life on Earth was my Book of Genesis, the unfolding story of evolution that thrilled me far more than its Biblical counterpart of creation from episode to episode when I watched it (and chapter to chapter when I read it) as a child. Indeed, so much so that when I see the account of creation in the Book of Genesis, I reconstruct it as Life on Earth – and hear it in Attenborough’s voice.
In short, Attenborough is nothing short of a hero of mine – you might call me an…Atten-bro. Yes – I groaned too.
But seriously, I have been an avid fan of his Life collection, which I have consistently both watched as TV series and read as books – although I will always hold Life on Earth in my heart as my favorite.
“Beginning with Life on Earth in 1979, Attenborough set about creating a body of work which became a benchmark of quality in wildlife film-making, and influenced a generation of documentary film-makers. The series established many of the hallmarks of the BBC’s natural history output. By treating his subject seriously and researching the latest discoveries, Attenborough and his production team gained the trust of scientists, who responded by allowing him to feature their subjects in his programmes.”
Of course, the quality of film-making is not as evident in the book, given that it is a book rather than a TV series – although it is still a gloriously beautiful book, with photographs drawn from the series or its production. The globe-trotting that was such a delight in the TV series – cutting from one continent to another – is still evident to a degree in the juxtaposition of subjects. Just don’t be surprised if you also see it pop up in my Top 10 TV list.
There are thirteen chapters, each corresponding to an episode of the series – with subjects reasonably self-evident from the titles.
1 – The Infinite Variety
This is where it all began – from single cell organisms to sponges, jellyfish and coral.
Although it is odd to think that although this was a single chapter or episode, it’s over half the timespan involved in the evolution of life. In other words, if the evolution of life was compressed into a single year, it’s not until July that we move past this first chapter.
2 – Building Bodies
Aquatic invertebrates, culminating in crustaceans on land leading to…
3 – The First Forests
Terrestrial vegetation and invertebrates.
An intriguing aspect is this was when sexual reproduction began to involve actual bodily contact (rather than letting water do the work) – and the evolution of courtship rituals for the male to avoid being eaten by the female. Sometimes. Hmm – I wonder how my ex-wife is these days…
4 – The Swarming Hordes
Following on from the previous chapter – insects and the flowers they pollinate, one of my favorite episodes or chapters
5 – Conquest of the Waters
Behold the backbone!
Go, fish!
6 – Invasion of the Land
Yeah – this is when we get to the fish that couldn’t swim and had to crawl part. In other words, amphibians.
7 – Victors of the Dry Land
The former rulers of the earth – reptiles!
8 – Lords of the Air
The former and present rulers of the air – birds! And a few odd ones that can’t fly
9 – The Rise of the Mammals
10 – Theme & Variations
11 – Hunter & Hunted
Yeah – it’s mammals all the way down from here
Again, odd to think of five chapters of thirteen – more than a third – devoted to mammals, tiny part of all life on earth in species or span. But what can I say – I’m a fan of my fellow mammals so I’m not complaining about the mammal-heavy focus.
12 – Life in the Trees
Primates! The best of mammals!
13 – The Compulsive Communicators
And here we are, at the apes that couldn’t climb and had to think part.
The original hardback book had a cover image of a Panamanian red-eyed tree frog, photographed by Attenborough himself and which “became an instantly recognizable emblem of the series”.
RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT LIFE TIER?)
PHILOSOPHY & SCIENCE: TOP 10 BOOKS
(TIER LIST)
S-TIER (GOD TIER)
(1) SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH – LIFE ON EARTH
(2) DESMOND MORRIS – THE HUMAN ANIMAL
If Life on Earth is my Old Testament of my books of philosophy and science, then The Human Animal is my New Testament
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(3) BOB BLACK – THE ABOLITION OF WORK
(4) CAMILLE PAGLIA – SEXUAL PERSONAE
(5) JOHN GRAY – STRAW DOGS
(6) ERIC HOFFER – THE TRUE BELIEVER
(7) ROBERT ANTON WILSON – PROMETHEUS RISING
(8) TERRENCE MCKENNA – FOOD OF THE GODS
(9) JAMES C. SCOTT – AGAINST THE GRAIN
X-TIER (WILD TIER)
(10) STONE AGE HERBALIST –
BERSERKERS, CANNIBALS & SHAMANS / SKULL-CULTS & CORPSE BRIDES