Deep past explains diet and machines
The deep past explains the plate
There is no argument about food that has not been screamed at high volume. Paleo, vegan, Mediterranean, low-carb, high-carb, intermittent fasting, and plain old moderation all claim to be the answer. The paradox is that they cannot all be right, and yet each camp seems to be holding a piece of the truth. SENTENCE: A few decades of clinical trials are a single blink in the history of a digestive system shaped over millions of years.
CORRECTION: A few decades of clinical trials are a single blink in the history of a digestive system shaped over millions of years. SENTENCE: Li traces the origins of what we now call natural language processing. [4]
CORRECTION: Li traces the origins of what is now called natural language processing. The real question is which foods the human body was built to meet.
Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard University, has written a book for exactly this confusion. [1] SENTENCE: Life Story, by Jonathan Loh, is a panoramic history of life, according to its publisher.
CORRECTION: Lieberman does not announce a single miracle diet. He does something harder. He gives readers a framework for judging every diet that comes their way. That framework begins in the deep past and runs all the way to the present.
To build that framework, Lieberman draws on evolutionary biology, anthropology, and physiology. These disciplines let him see where the modern diet went wrong. He moves from what humans evolved to eat through the changes introduced by fire, farming, and industrialization. Then he brings the whole sequence into contact with rigorous medical science. What emerges is not a prehistoric meal plan but a map of how the human animal ended up in a food environment it never met before.
Another new book takes the same long view but pulls back even further. Life Story, by Jonathan Loh, is a panoramic history of life, according to its publisher. Loh is an independent scholar and a biologist who has worked as a consultant for organizations such as the United Nations Environment Programme and WWF on the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. [2] He carries readers from the rise of Homo sapiens through foraging, farming, the Bronze Age, and the industrial revolution. He also looks for hidden patterns linking genetics and language, organisms and states, ecosystems and economies, and mass extinctions with civilisational collapse. His big idea is that culture itself is a form of life. Humans may dominate the planet, but as machine intelligence gathers pace, Loh leaves open whether that supremacy is only a phase.
Machines learned to stop understanding
Talking to machines has been a human fantasy long enough to deserve its own history, and now it has one. Xiaochang Li, an assistant professor in the department of communication at Stanford University in California, has written Divination Engines. [4] Her history shows how the fantasy of conversation with machines fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI. Kate Crawford, the author of Atlas of AI, calls the result a landmark in the critical history of artificial intelligence. This is not a comfortable book to read; the technical details are dense. But the discomfort is part of the point.
Li traces the origins of what we now call natural language processing. She also reconstructs the 20th-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. The crucial turn was a retreat from meaning. Computer speech recognition advanced by de-emphasizing what words actually meant. It succeeded because researchers gradually abandoned systems that tried to understand human language and replaced them with systems that predicted patterns in speech and text. Earlier proposals in the field therefore look different now. They were not defective versions of today’s systems. They were alternative ideas about what a thinking machine would have to do. Search engines, spam filters, and content managers are all children of that decision. So is the constant hunger for more data, because a predictor never has enough examples.
Lani Watson, a philosopher and honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh and a former research fellow at the University of Oxford, has a related concern. [5] Her book Q is about the art and science of asking questions. Humans are the only creatures on Earth that ask questions in any formal sense, Watson argues. [5] Yet people are trained to find answers, not to ask better questions. The result is an answer-rich, question-poor world. Watson shows how the ability to ask questions shapes what happens in doctors’ surgeries, courtrooms, and dating. Her narrative runs from the death of Socrates to the age of AI.
AI also sits at the center of Catherine Heymans’s new book, How to Design a Universe. Heymans, an astrophysicist and the astronomer royal for Scotland, asks whether humanity could be living in a computer simulation and how it would ever know. Her subtitle calls it the science of real and virtual worlds. The journey takes in subatomic particles, dark matter, and the secrets of the human senses. Heymans wants to know whether humanity could create a virtual universe as rich and diverse as our own. If the answer is yes, the consequences reach into the sense of self, free will, and consciousness.
Pain crosses the species line
Some of the most vivid animal lives in this season’s books are hidden ones. Kulbhushansingh (Kullu) Suryawanshi, a scientist, conservationist, and mountaineer, has spent the past 20 years studying snow leopards in the wild. These silvery-grey, elusive beasts live in the rugged mountains of Central Asia, camouflaged against rocks and cliffs. Suryawanshi has explored every aspect of their lives, from habitat and prey to population, sometimes living for months in some of the world’s toughest, most remote environments. He has pioneered new research that shows how the fate of these vulnerable animals is entangled with the local people. Their survival, he argues, is central to preserving an austere, delicate ecosystem.
Meanwhile, an on-the-ground investigation is following a different animal into a different kind of danger. Richard Schweid, a journalist, has written Life on the Octopus Farm for the University of North Carolina Press. With octopus blooms suddenly appearing in many places, the book arrives at a provocative moment. It is billed as a gripping investigation of the global race to farm octopuses and the ethical firestorm the race has ignited. International demand for octopus meat continues to grow even as wild octopus populations decline. In the south-west of the UK, fishers are already dealing with an unusual flood of octopuses that eat their most valuable catch: adult lobsters, brown edible crabs, scallops, and the like. The proposed answer to one problem is to eat the animals causing the other problem, and recipes are proliferating. That is a dilemma, not a solution.
The moral stakes of that dilemma were made formal in 2021, when the London School of Economics recognized that invertebrates such as cephalopods—octopus, cuttlefish, and squid—and decapods—crayfish, crabs, and lobsters—are capable of experiencing pain, distress, and happiness. [7] The same analysis concluded that high-welfare farming of these animals would be impossible. Science had given the octopus a biography. Economics and appetite had already given it a price tag. The contradiction could not be clearer.
Pain is also at the center of A Bloody Scandal, but this time the patient is human. Evelyn Scott’s book is an exposé of medical misogyny and a forthright account of endometriosis. Its subtitle is blunt: How medicine fails women in pain. The disease is not obscure, and the pain it causes is not imaginary, yet the failure it documents has persisted. Read the octopus story and Scott’s book side by side, and the question writes itself: if a crab is now officially capable of distress, why is a woman’s report of pain still treated as unreliable? That question sits exactly where animal ethics, clinical medicine, and the politics of evidence cross. It is the one the two books leave wide open.
Sources
2. United Nations Environment Programme
3. WWF