ACCIDENTALLY HUMAN

Henry Gee. The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Popular media usually portray evolution, particularly human evolution as a sort of ladder of continuous sequence, starting with amoeba and ending with someone like Carl Sagan. Human being want to believe that they are the chosen species, the aim of evolution and that everything and everyone else are just steps on the way or rungs on the ladder. Gee calls this world view “human exceptionalism”

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MEETING THE RELATIONS

Dean Falk. The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution. University of California Press, 2011.

The interest in this book for Magonia readers will be in the discussion of how science deals with dramatic anomalies, in this case in the field of human evolution. The examples given are the discovery of Australopithecus africanus by Raymond Dart in 1924, and the discovery of Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "The Hobbit" in 2004.
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PAST IMPERFECT

Rupert Sheldrake. The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, 2nd edition. Icon Books, 2011.

My review of the first edition of this book in Magonia 32 (March 1989) was less than enthusiastic to say the least. In the second edition Sheldrake does seem to have made an effort to incorporate more recent scientific findings and ideas and to back-peddle on some of the political and metaphysical speculation, but I doubt that this will make his central thesis any more attractive to the scientific community.
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FOUR SHORTS

         

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini. What Darwin Got Wrong. Profile Books, 2011.

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Rosemany Pilkington (Ed.) Esprit: Men and Women of Parapsychology; Personal Reflections. Volume 1. Anomalist Books, 2010.

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Barbara Ehrenreich. Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled American and the World. Granta, 2010

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James Shapiro. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare. Faber and Faber, 2011.
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SWINGING BOTH WAYS

Antony Latham, The Naked Emperor: Darwinism Exposed, Janus Publishing, London, 2005.

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Stephen Horne and Richard Robertson, Faith is Not Enough: A Rationalist Perspective on Religion and Other Irrational Beliefs, Janus Publishing, London, 2010.

The Janus Publishing Company of Gloucester Place, near Baker Street (not to be confused with Janus of Old Compton Street, Soho, who specialise in magazines full of photographs of young women being caned) is named after the Roman God who has two faces looking in opposite directions. This is appropriate, given the antipathetic nature of these two books that they have sent to Magonia for review.  🔻