Rational optimism book1/1/2024 "People don't like change," Michael Crichton once told me, "and the notion that technology is exciting is true for only a handful of people. What excited the readers of Jurassic Park were the novel (at least to them) technological ideas presented. This is not his best work although it may end up being his most popular book and if so, it will be due to the relative ignorance of his reading audience who will not be aware that most of it is a rehash of ideas many of which are many decades old-a formula that also served Michael Crichton as well, except he was writing fiction. I also detected a number of factual errors which tainted the rest of the book because it left me wondering how many more errors existed that I was unaware of. It is a journalist's job to collect ideas for presentation, which Ridley has always been good at, specifically, scientist's ideas, which made him a good science writer. I've noticed that the public has a propensity to mistakenly attribute the ideas collected by journalists to the journalists themselves. On the other hand, I've heard almost all of these ideas and criticisms many times and long ago (myth of the noble savage, and on, and on). I agree with many of the concepts presented in this book, a few of which were new to me. How many more books or blogs are out there with a similar paragraph in it? This looks like either a book version of parallel evolution or an example of book-to-book gene sharing. It takes the combined knowledge of several generations of humans, and tens of thousands of individuals working in concert to make a plastic shirt button.Ĭertainly, Ridley managed to make the same point with a lot fewer words and with a lot of the same words might I add: individual, thousands, petroleum, plastic, mold, alone, from scratch. How are you as an individual going to mine, smelt, mix and purify metal alloys and then use them to build drilling jigs with carbide or diamond tipped drills to extract the petroleum? How will you make the machine tools used to fabricate the mold used to make that button? How would you manage to turn the raw petroleum into plastic? Truth be told, duplicating from scratch a simple plastic button is a task that is orders of magnitude beyond anything any human being is even remotely capable of doing alone. The machine tools used to make the mold were made of several different metal alloys. The button was formed in a mold that was, in turn, machined from a metal alloy. The button is probably made out of plastic a polymer created from petroleum pumped from the bowels of the Earth. Before rushing to take up that challenge, consider the following. I challenge any human being on the face of this planet to duplicate from scratch that simple little button without any help from another person. Look at one of the buttons on your shirt. Look at how similar it is to a paragraph in an obscure book called Poison Darts-Protecting the Biodiversity of our World, written six years prior. Not one of them alone knows how to make a computer peripheral from scratch. Farmers grew the coffee that shippers transported and was consumed by oil riggers whose petroleum was used by refinery workers to make the plastic that was molded by factory workers for the mouse, which was assembled by other laborers for salespeople to sell to the retailer who sold it to me. The mouse was made by thousands-perhaps millions-of people, each of whom played a small role in realizing the whole. I was taken aback when on page two, just after the photo of a stone tool and a plastic computer mouse, I read the following: Government protection and high fecundity have helped the species recapture some lost ground, giving researchers reason for guarded optimism. Here, rangers and scientists hope to prevent the first primate extinction in recorded history. By the latest tally, there are only 22 Hainan gibbons-one family with 11 members, another with seven members, and four loners-remaining in their last refuge, Bawangling National Nature Reserve on southern China's Hainan Island. The Hainan gibbon may be the world's most endangered primate. Here's another one that just arrived in the latest issue of Science: Call me a pessimist, but had there been more pessimistic headlines warning of the imminent extinction of the Chinese river dolphin or the ivory-billed woodpecker, would they still be with us? How about the California condor or whooping crane? Oh, wait, they are still with us. He spends an inordinate amount of time complaining about the press's propensity for pessimistic headlines. I was looking forward to this book, which started out good. Just how rational are we? Had the optimists not prevailed would the Titanic have sailed? I've read most of Ridley's books and have recently read my favorite, The Red Queen-Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature for the second time.
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