So.

So this is a rather ballsy work.  In varying depth, Ryan & Jethá aggressively attack several scientific consensuses, all orbiting within the broad ambit of human sexuality.  A light-hearted writing style makes this a highly accessible work.  Below, I focus on some of the key assertions and arguments of interest.

Primary amongst the traditional views attacked, and the books main target, is the idea that humans evolved from a monogamist prehistory – a period the authors peg as the 200,000 years immediately prior to agriculture and writing. (It is interesting to note how this disparate pair of technologies is often conjoined by use of this sense of the term).  In strong contrast to todays western nuclear family, the authors posit that “the ‘natural’ family structure of our species” is one that enjoys “easy acceptance between adults and unrelated children, the diffuse nurturing found [...] where children refer to all men as father and all women as mother, [...] small and isolated enough to safely assume the kindness of strangers, where overlapping sexual relationships leave genetic paternity unknowable and of little consequence …”.  The modern pair-bond is painted as a distortion brought about by recent transition to sedentary agriculture. » Continue reading “Sex at Dawn”

Content. Draws heavily on the thought of Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr. America faces impediments on (i) cultural (profligacy leads to deficits and resource dependence); (ii) political; and (iii) military fronts. Much-needed focus is brought to bear on the notion that military commitment can bring about economic growth, à la Nitze’s  (1950) NSC-68. The major novel hypothesis is that the quality of senior U.S. military leadership has sharply declined since WWII, and that this is responsible for failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sins of our fathers. It has been many moons since I felt so ashamed of the white blood in my veins. I will write more of this soon – now, my heart is too sad. Those that come here and have not read this book, do so if you would call yourself my friend.

Ambitiously, this book promises to offer a cohesive model for technological progression. Instead, we find a repetitive miss-mash of ill-defined concepts, knotted together through liberal usage of clichéd analogies – “technology is like language”, “technology is like Darwinian evolution”, etc., etc.  Highly disappointing.

“What experience and history teach us is this – that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” – Georg Wilhelm Hegel

Thorsten Veblen

Thomas Pakenham

A comprehensive treatment of the European colonization of Africa.

Leon Trotsky

A depressing account of the social, political and economic evolution of the post-Lenin Soviet Union.  A convincing case is made that true Communism was never achieved in the U.S.S.R., and judgement of its’ validity as a political and economic system should be sought elsewhere.

Edward Said

A classic and humbling dissection of European attitudes towards the
Middle East.