PZ Myers. 2005 Apr 26. Remembrances on request. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/remembrances_on_request/>. Accessed 2008 Nov 20.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Remembrances on request
I feel like answering questions, and since Miriam Jones asked a bunch, here you go.
1. Do you compose on the computer? Why or why not?
Yes, always. Paper and pen are so slow and clumsy, and then at some point if I'm going to do something with it I have to transcribe it back into a computer, anyway.
2. Does carbon paper make you nostalgic?
No. It was a pain in the butt.
3. Do you have a stationary and/or a pen fetish?
No. I have a text editor fetish.
4. Do you remember the first “grown-up” book that you ever read?
Yes. It was painful, but the memory is vivid.
I lived down the street from the library, and I hung out there all the time, back in the late 60s. It was a segregated library; if you were young, and wandered over to the adult books, a librarian would scurry out and shoo you away. I had to ask special permission to go into that side of the library, and then I was always escorted. When I first worked up the courage to ask to browse the adult section, they asked what I was looking for…and I said that I wanted to look in the biology section. The librarian's eyebrows shot up: you could tell she was suspicious.
She led me to the section, and hovered over me while I looked around. Finally, she reached up, handed me a book, and told me I was done.
It was this one: The Great Chain of Being, by Lovejoy. An antique in the philosophy of biology. I was 12 years old. I actually struggled through the whole thing, despite not understanding nine tenths of it, under the fearful impression that if I didn't, they'd never let me back in the adult section. I remember being vaguely dazzled with all the big words (I had a scary vocabulary even back then, so I was able to follow most of it) and deep concepts (which soared right over my head), and thinking this must be important stuff. I did get to go back into the adult section, and from then on I picked out my own books, which were always more applied and much more comprehensible.
Years later I took another look at Lovejoy. What a godawful load of crap. I'm lucky I wasn't scarred for life.
Also, the library lightened up by the mid-70s. Just in time for mid-adolescence, they started putting Playboy out on the magazine racks for general browsing.
5. What embarrassing book from the distant past brings back a flood of recognition?
The Great Chain of Being, obviously. I cringe to think that I once thought it was what I could look forward to in biology.
6. Are you a scholar, or a critic? Or neither?
Neither. I'm a biologist.
7. When did you decide to become a scholar/critic/neither? Did you decide?
I don't know if I decided. One of my earliest memories is of my mother showing me how to use a toy microscope. My grandmother had a collection of my childhood drawings, and I'd doodle animals all the time—and they'd all have a cloud of scribbles over their heads. Apparently, I explained to her that they were their brains. And then, of course, I loved to go fishing with my dad, and my favorite part was the cleaning afterwards, when we'd poke around and identify all the guts. I used to abscond to the basement with kitchen scraps—I recall getting a chicken heart to twitch with a battery, but that livers were sadly unresponsive. And I thought my grandma was the coolest person ever when she visited the slaughterhouse and came back with a bucket of organ meats, and we got to wash and chop and cook them together, and then eat them.
It's nothing to compare with Dr Evil's childhood, but I was warped early.
8. Has blog writing affected the way you write in other venues? The way you read?
Definitely. I use it to organize my thoughts a bit, and I find myself reading papers and considering how to extract some of the material in less technical form for the weblog. And that also leads into more readily tying it into my classes.
9. Do you still read blogs or other webpages even if the design/print is unappealing or difficult to read?
Yes, sort of…really hideous sites are read through my newsreader, and I don't go to them directly. If the site is ugly and doesn't offer full rss access, though, I will abandon it. It's not as if there is a shortage of weblogs out there.
10. Have you ever bought a book because of the cover/design? Which book(s)?
No, but I've avoided books because of their covers. Anything with those oiled, bronzed, extravagantly nubile fantasy figures by Boris Vallejo, or those dead-eyed hokey-posed over-painted photographs by the Brothers Hildebrandt, I steer away from. It's like a bold announcement that "Here Be Cliches", something bad fantasy writing has in excess.
11. Do you think these questions are irrelevant?
Relevance can only be assessed with respect to something else. You'll need to specify your referents before I can answer this.
Another traumatic library tale. When I was a wee young thing, one of my favorite books was a cheap little field guide titled Mammals, by Herbert S. Zim, who had a series of these little books that were thin on details but full of pictures. They were the right size to fit in a pocket, too. I checked it out repeatedly, and would carry it around as I tromped about in the woods and fields and swamps of the Green River Valley, figuring out how to tell a vole from a mouse and looking up the range of rabbits.
One day I lost it. This was a major disaster, because with our financial situation at that time we couldn't afford to replace it. The library notices came pouring in, fines piling on fines, and one time I remember the fines hit something like $50…on top of the cost of replacing the book. My father was furious. I was tearing up the house looking for it. I was in terror of the library, which at that time and with my devotion to it was like being afraid of sex. Those were among the most anxious months of my childhood. Seriously. I was all guilt and tremors and cringing before my cruel, cruel taskmistress, the library.
Finally, my dad gave up and negotiated with the library and paid up something, and freed me from the shackles of my fears. Some months later the book turned up somewhere when we were packing up to move, and it was all mine free and clear. Except for one problem.
I can't stand Herbert S. Zim.
Even now the sight of one of his books (which are old and grossly outdated, and thus rarely seen anymore, fortunately), tetanizes my costals and makes my vision all blurry and sends me reeling back. I definitely can't actually open one up and read it. It's like a crucifix to a vampire.
Herbert S. Zim. My nemesis.
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Ah, PZ, you do truly possess the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.
#: Posted by The Oil Drum (profgoose) on 04/26 at 01:15 PM -
Re: Text Editor fetish --
I'm pretty sure you use a Mac, right? What do you prefer out of these, which are my rotating stable of favorites?
* TextWrangler
* SubEthaEdit
* vim
* HyperEdit
* wordfreak -
I too am curious about text editor critiques. TextWrangler is a new one we are about to supply our students, but I have no personal experience with it.
#: Posted by on 04/26 at 02:13 PM
- I use SubEthaEdit, most of the time. I also use BBEdit sometimes, but it feels a bit klunky -- I like 'em spare and clean -- and maybe I should try TextWrangler.
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I am a TeX/LaTeX guy myself. Pain in the ass to learn, but once you do, it's absolutely wonderful, esp. re: formulae and other typesetting issues.
#: Posted by The Oil Drum (profgoose) on 04/26 at 02:48 PM
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I still remeber the first "adult" book I read. I was in fourth grade, and had just moved to a new school district where the fourth grade curriculum was identical to the third grade curriculum of my old district. The teacher let me do pretty much whatever I wanted to alleviate my boredom, so I brought in a copy of Great Expectations that I found in one of our moving boxes and spent most of the year getting through it. I did end up finishing it, though how much I could comprehend is a matter for debate. I do recall, even at that young age, finding Mrs. Haversham a bit crazy, however.
#: Posted by Matt Ficke on 04/26 at 03:08 PM
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Ahh, library trauma.
When I was in third grade, I repeatedly checked out a book called The White Panther. As I recall, it was written from the point of view of an albino jaguar and was full of nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw. One evening I entered my bedroom to find the dog industriously shredding the book. I'm not sure what was worse: having to tell the librarian or knowing I couldn't read the book again.
A swift search of amazon.com suggests that the book is now relatively rare and quite expensive.#: Posted by on 04/26 at 03:09 PM -
Re: #4, We are putting in TextWrangler because we have a faculty member who was using BBEdit for instruction in some web design lessons and he recommended to upgrade to TW. He said more or less the same thing you did.
We will run both until a consensus is reached to retire BBEdit.#: Posted by on 04/26 at 03:33 PM -
I cringe to think a biologist believes Lovejoy was a philosopher of biology. The book was groundbreaking for historiography of ideas, and it traces--not promotes--the influences of neo-Platonism through Western thought. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with it, though--and I'm extremely grateful for your writing this valuable blog.
#: Posted by on 04/26 at 04:49 PM
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Interesting. Like Jeff, I look at Lovejoy not as a work in the philosophy of science but as a work in the history of philosophy. It still has a place on my shelf, in fact.
That said, I'm glad that you persevered in your science interests despite that rough beginning. So often you hear of bad starts cutting off someone's interest in a field. Your story seems quite atypical! -
You're dissing the Great Chain of Being just to piss me off, aren't you?
Despite your librarian's lack of awareness, this book is not crap, it is a classic text that made obvious to all what was hidden before - that most people's view of evolution is, in fact, a temporal version of the medieval scale of nature. One of the things that I insist on teaching to students in philosophy of biology is a little bit of awareness of that fact. Whenever someone mentions a "missing link", they are talking about the Great Chain, which under the principle of plenitude (all possible states are completely filled) insists there should be no gaps. The Latin for this, by the way, is natura non facit saltum - nature makes no leaps. Some Darwin feller mentioned it.
I'm sorry that you had a bad experience as a kid dealing with history - it's a tough subject. But my experience is that scientists too often ignore it, and repeat the bad aspects of it.#: Posted by John Wilkins on 04/26 at 05:18 PM -
It might be just wonderful, but how would I know? It's like Herbert S. Zim: The Great Chain of Being triggers an instant aversive reaction in me now.
I suspect ol' Herbert was probably a sweet guy with nice books, too, but now? Enemy. -
Aha. A superstimulus problem. No worries, we'll just hook you up to this device and soon you'll be fine:
<http://www.americanphoto.co.jp/pages/eiga/TO/Previews/Plans-32540.jpg>#: Posted by John Wilkins on 04/26 at 05:30 PM -
What they said about Lovejoy. Required reading in the history of ideas for us English majors.
But, as us evolutionists so often say about Genesis not being a science text, neither was 'Great Chain.'
If you could force yourself to read it now, knowing what you know now, I suspect you would find it not only interesting (in itself) and useful (for a controversialist such as yourself).#: Posted by on 04/26 at 06:18 PM -
Interesting to see these questions out here, alone. I originally asked them in the context of some ongoing discussions at The Valve (there really is a referent to no. 11).
I love the story about the suspicious librarian escorting you to the biology section. -
Harry, Harry ... "Us English majors?" "Us evolutionists?" You're setting a bad example for the science nerds here.
#: Posted by on 04/26 at 07:15 PM
- Zim wrote great children's books, given the limitations of his time.
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That's right. We evolutionists is pedantic like that.
#: Posted by John Wilkins on 04/26 at 08:21 PM
- Strange. For me the library was the place I used to go to to ESCAPE trauma.
- A kid wanting biology books in the adult section? Clearly, to that librarian's mind, you were looking for naked people. ;)
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Herbert S. Zim. My nemesis.
Is that the same Nemesis that killed the dinosaurs?#: Posted by on 04/26 at 10:08 PM -
I too was attached to the Herbert Zim books as a child, although even then I thought they were badly written. I didn't remember the name correctly as a young adult though --looking at A People's History of the United States, I was like, boy, this guy's style has improved!
#: Posted by on 04/26 at 10:37 PM
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Am I the only one having a mental picture of Creationists and neo-Creationists brandishing a copy of one of Zim's books to keep PZ at bay?
#: Posted by on 04/27 at 06:04 AM
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It certainly wasn't the first adult book I ever read (I was a very precocious reader as a child), but the first I can remember reading was some huge non-fiction Isaac Asimov book, a general introduction to modern discoveries inscience (well, cosmology and physics anyway). I was about 11 or 12 at the time. Funnily enough, it had an effect Asimov can't have intended, since it led me to the conclusion that sub-atomic physics worked solely on the principle that when an experiment produced unexpected results (ie went wrong, in my juvenile opinion), scientists just made up a particle with mass x and spin y to explain the error. This, combined with the science education system of teaching a model, only to explain a year later that actually it's really another model, and so on, made me lose faith in physics for about five years. At age 10 I was convinced I would be a physicist like my grandfather. By age 14 I was a committed humanities student. I've since regained my faith in science with a passion, but I don't think any other book I've read has had such an impact on my life.
#: Posted by on 04/27 at 07:50 AM
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Well, I can see how Zim could have a major effect on the psyche. That pocket-sized Golden Guide series certainly played a major role in my becoming a nature lover. I still have a dozen on my shelf which I refer to occasionally, outdated as they are, and I gave my nephew a block of 15-20 of them for Christmas a few years ago.
Incidentally, for anyone looking for a good guide to the stars: Run, don't walk, to the bookstore and get Find the Constellations, by H A Rey, author of Curious George. (He also has one called The Stars, which is more detailed but much less good for kids learning constellations.) That brilliant book gave me a comfortable familiarity with the night sky that I still enjoy every time I look up. -
PZ, have you googled Herbert Zim. He's all over the place.
#: Posted by on 04/27 at 08:50 AM
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I don't remember the first adult book I've read... I was probably about 10 at the time. I read Asimov's Robots and Empire about that time because my mother insisted that it was the first book in the Robot series even though it really is the last. If encyclopedias count as adult books then I got my first at 6, though.
Jeff, while Harry's use of "us evolutionists" is ungrammatical, his use of "us English majors" isn't. The word "evolutionists" is the subject of the sentence it appears in, so the correct word is in fact "we," but the compound "English majors" is an object, so "us English majors" is correct. -
The first adult book I read was Watership Down, when I was seven. My uncle, very cleverly, used to read me the "El-Ahrairah" stories from the book - which were essentially creation myths as conceived by rabbits - as stand-alone stories, and I was so captivated by them I read the whole book as a child, and loved it. I haven't read the book in many years because I've been afraid that I would not like it any more, but if the creation stories hold up, I will definitely read them to my daughter when she gets a bit older.
I understand PZ's story about the library fines. My father was quite a dick when I was a child, and I was an absent-minded and bookish kid. I recall many of the conflicts between him and me as a kid revolving around my returning library books late and incurring fines. Oddly, I've gotten worse about overdue books as time has gone on - something in me still compels me to rebel against the library/father coalition!#: Posted by on 04/27 at 10:12 AM -
Were I writing formally, I'd recast sentences to avoid 'for we' on stylistic grounds, whether grammatical or not.
#: Posted by on 04/27 at 12:30 PM
- No, you only need "we" before "evolutionists," so you only get "as we evolutionists..."
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I always kinda wondered why you got into biology but I guess you just explained it "I loved to go fishing with my dad, and my favorite part was the cleaning afterwards, when we'd poke around and identify all the guts. I used to abscond to the basement with kitchen scraps—I recall getting a chicken heart to twitch with a battery, but that livers were sadly unresponsive." I wish I could tell a more interesting story about getting into econ other than how the simplistic explanations of Sowell and the other neoclassicals clicked in my head. but I suppose with all the Fox news and cspan I watched my interest in politics in general was kinda inevitable.
#: Posted by on 04/27 at 02:02 PM
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Were I writing formally, I'd recast sentences to avoid 'for we' on stylistic grounds, whether grammatical or not.
Hmmm, Shakespeare might not concur:
FALSTAFF
Indeed, you come near me now, Hal; for we that take
purses go by the moon and the seven stars, and not
by Phoebus, he,'that wandering knight so fair.'
Henry IV, part I, Act I scene 2
But do you mean as in "for us"?#: Posted by John Wilkins on 04/27 at 07:51 PM -
I mean I can argue either way what is the object of 'for' -- 'us' or 'English majors,' but if a reader is likely to read it as a preposition (in this meaning of 'for') followed by a nominative, I'd avoid it.
I did not mean 'inasmuch as we English majors' or 'because we English majors.'
In Pennock's 'Tower of Babel,' he rightly makes much of the shifting meaning of words used by creationist controversialists. These amusing exchanges are a very minor example of how plausibly you can do that in English.#: Posted by on 04/27 at 10:38 PM -
And we few, we happy few, can enjoy the whole battle.
#: Posted by John Wilkins on 04/27 at 10:44 PM
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John, the 'for' in the Shakespear passage is not a preposition but a conjunction (roughly 'because', 'since') - 'we' is the subject of that clause. When 'for' is used as a preposition (as in "He died for us") it takes 'us'. Alon Levy has it exactly right.
#: Posted by on 04/28 at 03:19 AM
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Yeah, I know. I'm just yanking chains...
#: Posted by John Wilkins on 04/28 at 07:01 AM