Sturgeon's Law validated

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, fictional influences, science, technology

I don't recall the year that famed science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon took a friend to a conference about science fiction and science fiction writing. In the middle of yet another lecture, the friend said in an aside to Sturgeon, "This stuff is 90% junk!". Sturgeon replied, sotto voce, "90% of everything is junk!" This anecdote has been retold and reprinted numerous times, and Sturgeon's reply has attained the status of a folkloric law.

Joel Levy, author of Reality Ahead of Schedule: How Science Fiction Inspires Science Fact, wasn't setting out to do anything at all related to Sturgeon's Law, but has validated it by omission. The 18 chapters of the book present historical reviews of subjects in five areas, Military, Lifestyle, Space Transport, Medicine, and Communications; all the subjects, including lasers, 3-D printing, self-driving autos, antidepressants and the Internet, were foreshadowed in fiction between a few decades to two centuries ago. For example, there is a clear correlation between the discovery of X-rays by Roentgen in 1895 and a great increase in the use of "ray gun" weapons in fiction. The actual development of lasers in 1960 led to a further increase  and more focused speculation (the "phasers" of Star Trek, for example). Many inventors have confessed to being inspired by science fiction.

It was fascinating to read of the many prescient writers of past generations. I already knew of the prediction of synchronous satellite communications by Arthur C. Clarke, also the author of Sentinel, the story that was made into the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 also has one of many stories of computers becoming self-aware and running amok. He and Jules Verne are examples of writers who knew science and were careful to use it well, avoiding outright fantasy.

In a period of self-imposed exile, during about two years I read every science fiction volume in the city library where I lived. Thereafter, I became more selective in my reading, but I continue to read a certain amount of science fiction, half a century later. I know the field rather well. The author of Reality Ahead has unearthed quite a number of authors and stories I hadn't encountered, but also omitted a great many others, stories that have gripping tales, interesting speculative technology, and sympathetic characters, but that haven't inspired much of anything in today's science or technology. I don't fault him for such omissions.

Of course, we have to set aside all the variations of faster-than-light travel, mentalism (such as psychokinesis or telepathy), and direct use of materials such as neutronium. And while Isaac Asimov became rightly famous for setting up the Three Laws of Robotics, hardly anyone has pointed out that most of his stories about robots were actually exploring neuroses, such as people dealing with neurotic robots, or neurotic people faced with utterly stable robots. I wonder if there is a book in the works about Asimov's influence on psychiatry?

Now, what validates Sturgeon's Law? The fact that 90+% of science fiction doesn't foreshadow anything. Many, many stories shelved as science fiction are more about wish fulfillment or coming of age with only the vaguest reference to anything technical. Many others I call "psychological science fiction", exploring mental aberrations but with less expertise than Asimov had. A look at my local library reveals that a majority of modern "science fiction" is sword-and-sorcery, just set on other planets or on a purported future Earth, and the "technology" is more magical or fantastical than scientific. A few years ago the local library stopped distinguishing between science fiction and fantasy; now they shelve them together.

Once in a while I encounter some real, solid, fiction with a scientific basis that works with known physics, or that at least explains extensions of physics needed to make "new stuff" work. That is the most satisfying to me.

All that aside, I enjoyed the book. Great writers such as Verne, Wells, Gernsback and Clarke were careful to write plausibly, while stretching the limits of that plausibility. Sometimes, they hit the nail on the head. Joel Levy found a lot of those "nails".

Is anthropomor-fear finally behind us?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, zoology, animal studies, cognition

By one common definition, Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. Among zoologists, it has been considered a serious fallacy to use "anthropomorphic language" when speaking about animal behavior and the possible "internal state" of an animal. The fear of making animals "too human" has actually held back the valid study of animal thought and behavior, purposes, and feelings for more than a century.

The recent book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Franz de Waal, is a kind of manifesto that explores and validates studies of the ability of many species of animal to plan, use tools, make tools and even toolkits, deceive one another (and experimenters), and think in all sorts of ways that we, in our hubris, have long denied they can do.

Consider the opening story, of a female chimpanzee who takes straw bedding outside her sleeping enclosure, where we must surmise she expects to encounter chilly conditions. Dr. de Waal expresses the surprise he felt when she first did this. It was entirely unexpected. Later in the book we find that creatures as small as some spiders can also anticipate future conditions and make plans to deal with them. They are not just acting by "instinct," a term for which I have not encountered a satisfactory definition or explanation.

As a college student taking the occasional course in biology (I was a chemistry major at first, later a geology major), I heard the typical series of canards, that "animals will never do" something or other. When Jane Goodall reported tool creation and use by chimpanzees, Louis Leakey wrote, "…scientists are faced with three choices: They must accept chimpanzees as man, they must redefine man, or they must redefine tool." That was in 1967. Have we learned anything in the past half-century? Some have, but I fear most haven't. The author writes, "We routinely deny [animals] capacities that we take for granted in ourselves." (p. 7) He calls this attitude anthropodenial. (p. 30)

Some may be willing to "move the goalposts" a little, saying that chimps and perhaps other apes might do these things, but zoologists and naturalists continue to report more and more species that make and use tools, including crows, elephants, sea otters, and octopuses. Would Louis Leakey advocate accepting octopuses as humans? The brain of an octopus is only partly localized; most of it is spread through the body, such that a severed arm can move about on its own for quite a while. How can a human and an octopus "get into each other's heads", when those heads are so different? But scientists are trying.

Rather than belabor examples, let me come to his most useful conclusion: "There is no single form of cognition, and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex. A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival." So, whether the cognition of a snail, for example, is "simpler" than ours, all we can say for certain is that it is different. Snails aren't as social as we are, for example, but they do prefer the company of their kind, unlike most felines, which prefer solitude and only meet to mate or fight. Whatever amount of brains they need, however, snails are certainly a successful group of species: by the latest count there are about 70,000 species of them, and half of those are terrestrial, the land snails and tree snails. There is only one species of human.

I wonder how our best athletes would fare in a track meet proctored by cheetahs or antelopes, both of which can run faster than 50 mph? How about a rock-climbing meet, competing with bighorn sheep? Could we compete in color discrimination with snapping shrimp, which have ten kinds of color receptors in their eyes, whereas we have four (one works in low light, the other three by daylight)? We have a hard time seeing in murky water. Bullfrogs can see infrared light, which cuts through the murk better. Many creatures also see ultraviolet light that we can't see. Different senses (there are many more!) mean that animals sense a world we don't sense, and so to cope with it they must think thoughts we don't think, and cannot think.

What about feelings? Ask any pet owner. We all know dogs are very loving. Cats? usually not so much, but some are and some aren't (kind of like many people). And take a look at these three animals, rescues, who turn to one another for companionship and comfort.

When we lived in Oklahoma, one of the farmers that lived a few miles north of town plowed with draft horses. He said, "Their feed costs less than gasoline for a tractor, they start right up on a cold morning, and they greet me enthusiastically every day." I've seen his horses rubbing against him with great affection. There's no other way to describe it. I've also seen a very resentful look on our cat's face when we must delay giving her a meal or a treat, if the delay goes on too long. Yes, I know cats don't have so mobile a face as humans, but they can show feelings, and we soon learn to "read" them. Dr. de Waals reports lab studies that also show now emotional animals are.

This points up a contention I have long had, which the book notes in its own way, that it is quite logical to attribute thinking and feeling to animals that is similar to ours, because we came from them. Our feelings didn't arise by magic when our brains grew to a size of 3 pounds. Great apes, with their one-pound brains have the same feelings, and probably with nearly equal intensity. But they also can show remarkable self-restraint. When we say someone is "behaving like an animal", we are condemning lack of self-control. Actually, many animals are better at that than most people!

I also understand why so many people are unwilling to allow that any animals have a self-concept, or thinking ability. Some still claim they don't feel pain the way we do. Why is this? It is so our conscience won't feel bad when we abuse them. That explains nearly everything about poor treatment of animals. Maybe this book and others sure to follow will begin to break the logjam of scientific opinion and, even more, the thick-headed attitude that we can treat other thinking and feeling creatures just any way we like.

Truth be told, there are at least a few billion political views

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, political science, textbooks

In addition to The Politics Book, which I reviewed about two weeks ago, I got Political Science for Dummies, by Marcus A. Stadelmann, PhD. The former book is mainly on the practical side, presenting history and practice. This book is more theoretical, plus broader in scope, because it deals more with international politics, and it is not until the fourth section (Chapters 14-17) that we find an explanation of the development of modern political camps across the spectrum. It is also more "textbook-y", and thus less pleasant to read, but I got through it.

When I took a Civics course in Seventh Grade, we learned this political spectrum, from Left to Right:

Radical – Liberal – Moderate – Conservative – Reactionary

However, other terms, that perhaps belong on different spectra, have showed up and are being bandied about as though people understood them. I suspect most do not. I see terms such as Progressive, Fascist, Authoritarian, and Totalitarian. We also hear much lately about Socialism, a little about Communism, and even less about Capitalism.

From my reading in recent months, and particularly from Chapters 16 and 17, I learned that modern Conservatism (I'll skip the fancy font from here on), in the U.S. at least, is derived from Classical Liberalism; that Pre-FDR Conservatism was a kind of Fascism in disguise; that Progressivism in the time of Teddy Roosevelt was a Moderate-and-rightward stance, which Wilson moved leftward, and FDR moved even further leftward, almost into Radicalism. That shift was carried out primarily in the Democratic Party, which in the early 1800's was so pro-Slavery that the Civil War resulted, and which created Jim Crow America for about 80 years, but then morphed into a super-Liberal party by embracing the Civil Rights Movement (mainly after the murder of Dr. King), jumping in front of that parade as though they'd created it. This movement to the Left had the result that the Republican Party, which was originally Liberal in the Classical Liberal sense, was labeled Conservative. Republicans eventually embraced the label. But from about 1940 to 1970, it was hard to tell who was a Liberal and who was a Conservative, even with a scorecard.

(Side note: A Conservative conserves, keeping what works already, and making change slowly. Environmentalism is at its core a Conservative value, for example. Liberalism is more about freedom than about change, but Liberals are more willing to embrace change, particularly in the direction of more freedom for a greater number. Progressivism as now practiced is for changing everything, discarding the old regardless of its possible value.)

The left-shift of the D party, while the R party largely stayed put, has been called "switching places", but that's only if you accept that the midpoint between the political stance of the R's and the D's has been a straight line through time axis. It was anything but.

Where do Socialism and Capitalism come in? They are not political entities, but economic. When Marx and Engels published their theory of Communism in The Communist Manifesto, more than 170 years ago, they thought a changeover to Communism would be almost automatic. As it turned out, Socialism is so against the grain of human nature that it has to be enforced, and Communism as they envisioned it was rendered moot by welfare programs that modified Capitalism without eliminating it. So Communism changed, primarily under the iron thumb of Joseph Stalin, leading to the modern understanding that Socialism has to be enforced by a strong central government, and such enforcement is Communism. I am reminded of this statement:

If people were perfect, Socialism would work; but if people were perfect, Socialism wouldn't be needed. (No source found)

I do know who said this:

If a man under age thirty is not a Socialist, he has no heart. If a man over forty is still a Socialist, he has no head. —Winston Churchill

Politics and Economics overlap, and feed on one another. Why? I summarize them thus:

• Politics is about the use of power (I like to say, it is about forcing people to do what most people will do anyway)
• Economics is about the allocation of money (more broadly, resources)

Money by itself is useless, unless you have the power to make use of it. Power by itself is useless, if you can't afford to engage it. They need each other.

By taking a step back, we can identify the core tenets of true Liberalism, now called Conservatism in the U.S.:

• Liberty for persons, independent of one's citizenship.
• Minimal government interference in the private affairs of persons.
• Each person is responsible for his or her own decisions and actions. Corollaries:
• If such actions result in damage to another, the government may sanction the offender.
• Persons may request legal remedies for damages against an offender.
• Taxation is kept to the minimum required to carry out governmental functions.

Those last few items indicate that some amount of government is necessary, to prevent anarchy, or the rule (at least locally) by the strongest. How the powers of government are defined and shared with the people are the subject of most political writings. The usual framework is that laid out by Aristotle nearly 2,400 years ago. Without getting into the details here, the usual, and growing, preferred form of government is the Constitutional Republic, in which the Constitution defines the power-sharing arrangement. Long ago I learned this proverb about the difference between Republicanism (representative Democracy) and Communism:

In a Democratic Republic, whatever is not forbidden is allowed. In a Communist Dictatorship, whatever is not mandatory is forbidden.

Look at the four items listed above, ignoring for the moment the two sub-points. More could be added, but these are sufficient to show that modern American Conservatism has taken the mantle of Classical Liberalism, and still holds it.

A conclusion the book's author reaches echoes that of a number of philosophers of politics: while many nations carry on republicanism within their borders, the world as a whole is anarchical, in which the nations, thought of as persons with a great variation in power and control, act selfishly. Although wars for territorial acquisition are now outlawed by (mostly) general agreement (AKA treaties held by the United Nations), other kinds of wars happen. These days war is more likely to occur along ideological lines. Thus, we've been in a slow-burning World War III since the first set of attacks by Muslim extremists against America in the late 1990's. The attacks of 9/11/2001 were their main successful "battle". Don't think Radical Islam has given up. They've been beaten back temporarily. If nothing else works, Islam in general has a program of outbreeding the rest of the world until it can become the new superpower.

Looking inward, I find that, while I have thought of myself as Conservative for decades, I find I am actually a Liberal, in the classical sense. In the U.S. I pass for Conservative, but I suspect my political and economic views are considered Liberal and Capitalist in the rest of the world.

Those being called "Liberal" by the "Conservative" talk show hosts aren't Liberals, not really. They are Totalitarians. Consider the four points above again, with their contrasts:

• Individual Liberty versus Nanny Statism that "protects" people from themselves.
• Minimal governmental interference versus Total government control.
• Personal responsibility versus Universal guilt.
• Minimal taxation versus Income redistribution.

The items on the right are the fundamental tenets of the leaders of today's Democratic Party. That is about as far from Liberalism as you can get. Politically, it is Fascism. Economically, it is Communism.

I have done more ranting than reviewing here. I'm not ashamed of that. The current state of affairs is worth a good rant. This book just gave me the tools to rant more accurately.

An anchor of my life has been removed

kw: memorials, photo essays, photographs

Those of us lucky enough to grow up with an active, extended have wonderful "home-grown friends," our cousins and their parents. The boy cousin on my father's side, whom I called Gordon, was the only son of my father's sister Martha and her husband Jim Noyes. They were a stalwart Christian family, and I learned I could rely on "Uncle Jim and Aunt Martha" for counsel and valuable advice, which I sorely needed a few times.

Martha was born October 17, 1919. She passed away earlier today, November 13, 2020, age 101. After my father died 2½ years ago, preceded by my mother in 2004, Martha was my last connection to her generation.

This kind of infant photo was very popular at the time, and for a generation or two earlier. I have a photo like this of her mother, my grandmother.

In this photo Martha and her brother Buddy or Bud, my father Jim, are about six and four years old, respectively. They were close all their lives. Cute kids!

About fifteen years later she had grown into a beauty. She and a Navy man, Jim Noyes, were married October 22, 1940. They were married 58 years.

Here, Martha and Jim's son Gordon is the small boy on the lap of our great-grandfather J.G. Nye. His daughter Inez, our grandmother, is at the far right and her husband Earl, our grandfather, is in back, near center, next to Jim Noyes. 

My mother and father are at far left, and I am in my father's arms. Martha is next to her father, peeking between my dad's cousin Paul and his wife.

This picture was taken about 1950 in Alhambra, California.

This is how I remember Jim and Martha, once their son and I were young adults, and I was still living in California and could see them frequently. Later when I was there on a business trip I would see them.

I remember going to church with them a couple of times, years earlier, when I would stay over for a visit. My family was Methodist, and in that near-Episcopal tradition, "God's frozen chosen", church services were quiet, and sermons were more like lectures.

The Noyes family went to a Baptist church, the congregation was more vocal, and the preacher could do Fire-n-Brimstone with the best of them. I was impressed, and perhaps a little apprehensive.

I don't know when it was; a few years earlier when I was still in high school, the family spent a year in India. Although it was business-related for Jim, they took advantage of the opportunity to work with missionaries on Gospel work. Later they also spent a few months in Israel using Christian films to proclaim the Gospel.

These two pictures, taken in 1990 and 1996, show Martha and Jim and my parents together, first as new retirees, and then at my parents' Fiftieth Anniversary party. The other couple at their table are my mom's sister and her husband.

After my father passed away early in 2018 my brothers and I and other relatives went to Fremont, California, where Martha lived after her husband died in 1998.

This picture was taken in her assisted living facility in Fremont, where we held a memorial for my father. Here she is talking to my wife and a few others, wearing an expression I like, her "I'm messing with your mind" look. I don't recall what she had just said.

We promised to return the following year for her birthday.

Many of us went to Fremont the following year for her hundredth birthday. A party for her was held in the recreation hall of the church she attended.

Here she is, wearing a little crown. She has two grandsons. One is at the second "0" in "100", and the other at the far left, behind a family friend holding a guinea pig. The others are some of the 100 or more people who came to the party. Martha was a kind of mother hen and spiritual adviser to many, many people.

Finally, back at her living facility, we got this photo of Martha with my brothers and I, plus her grandsons and other relatives and friends including our son (in purple).

Monday this week she called me to tell me "Happy Birthday". One of her grandsons had been keeping us up to date on her failing condition. She sounded a little weak, but still quite clear. I am so glad for that phone call.

May God richly reward her for something like ninety years of faithful and loving service to Him.

Politics in a nutshell

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, textbooks

As the 2020 general election approached, I found myself reading about political science, and getting confused. As one proverb has it, the two major American political parties "switched sides" a half-century ago. I found this isn't strictly true. I knew already that the Republican Party was originally liberal, with "liberal" referring to personal liberty for individuals, and that from that stance, slaves were individuals who deserved liberty. The Democratic Party of the time was considered conservative, focusing on "conserve" what is and don't change it.

Then I learned that classical liberals stood for several critical matters, principally:

• Individual Liberty
• Personal Responsibility
• Small Government
• Low Taxes

Furthermore, classical liberalism was most prevalent in England in the 1600's, and came to America where it became American conservatism over the next century or so. The four matters listed above are considered "conservative" by modern commentators.

So did the R's and the D's really switch sides? No, in the post-WW2 period, when the civil rights movement began to prevail, leading Democrats were against integration of society and defended the Jim Crow legislation that subjugated the Blacks. But after about 1970, the D's changed. The earlier tension during anti-war (anti-Vietnam war) demonstrations, between "America, love it or leave it!" and "America, change it or lose it!", led to the "change it" folks going to law school and running for office. These neoliberals—they avoid the term "radicals"—have since taken over the Democratic Party and embraced the label "liberal", seeing that the Republican Party had settled into being called "conservatives". Classically, the R's have actually remained liberal, as the term is properly defined, while the D's jumped two spaces to the left to become radicals. As I write this we are awaiting the outcome of the election, with little clear direction as to what will emerge.

To help myself think through these things I got a couple of books about politics and political science. The first is The Politics Book, published by DK, a Random House imprint, with a host of contributors and editors. As with other The X Book volumes by DK, the subtitle is "Big ideas simply explained."

I included the book cover, something I seldom do, to show the style of the illustrations within. I call this "brutal chic", and it reminds me of Soviet poster art of the 1950's. Inside, each major era is prefaced by a two-page spread of gigantic black text on stunning red. I wonder if the editors know that a red/black banner symbolizes Anarcho-Syndicalism?

According to the book's glossary, Syndicalism is a relatively new ideology, less than 100 years, described thus:

"An early 20th-century ideology that emerged as an alternative to capitalism and socialism. …it advocated the seizure of a nation's means of production—and the overthrow of its government—in a general strike by workers' unions, and the organization of production through federation of local syndicates."

Based on that description, the more recent prefix "Anarcho-" is redundant. The ideology is popular in Europe. May it stay there!

The book has articles between one and six pages in length based on the writings and ideas of 102 major political figures and philosophers, from Confucius to Robert Pape, plus short items (~100 words) on another 37 persons.

Based just on the quantity of coverage, the compilers are most sympathetic to liberal and neoliberal and socialist ideologies. I was hoping for better explanation of conservatism, but the handful of items are sloppy and uninformative. Of course, I understand that the English conservatism of the 1600's and 1700's didn't migrate to America, or rather, Toryism died away after 1776. But the shift from classical liberalism to American conservatism is unmentioned in this book.

I read the book carefully, realizing its bias, as an exercise in "know your enemy." I retain my orientation to classical liberalism, while adding that I strongly support conservative foreign policy and a strong defense. Both R's and D's have allowed the Federal government to get too big and too intrusive. I call it creeping totalitarianism. If it can be rolled back without bloodshed, that's good. I fear it cannot.

You want to bring WHAT back to life?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, genetics, de-extinction

I find that it has been longer than usual since my last review. I shot myself in the foot by reading two books at the same time. It just stretched out the time for both, but it means that in another couple of days I'll have finished the second one also.

As I was reading Life Changing by Helen Pilcher I saw a footnote about an earlier book she had written, so I got that one also. This book, published in 2016, is Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-Extinction. The author worked as a cell biologist, and as a stand-up comic, so her science writing is delightfully upbeat and equally informative.

If you could choose just one extinct creature to bring back to life, which would it be? Would it be a dinosaur, à la Jurassic Park, perhaps even Tyrannosaurus rex? Or the most abundant bird of the recent past, the Passenger Pigeon? How about a Woolly Mammoth, or even a Neanderthal? These and a few others are discussed in Bring Back, with an emphasis on two questions: "Can it be done?" and "Should we do it?"

Several years ago an extinct species of goat was cloned from cells taken from the last living Bucardo while it lived. In hundreds of attempts, seven embryos were produced, and one was born but died within a minute. So the Bucardo was de-extincted for this brief moment. Animals for which living cells, or recently frozen ones, can be obtained may one day be restored by cloning.

Extensive searches for ancient DNA have been going on since before Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park in 1990 (the film was released in 1993; as good as it is, the book is even better). Recently, a mosquito was found in amber, with an abdomen apparently filled with its last blood meal. Of course, the delicate work of extracting some of the blood was undertaken. Nothing remotely resembling DNA or any of its constituent bases and sugars could be derived. However long the insect had been entombed, it was too long for DNA to survive.

Under the best of conditions (amber is too reactive), DNA is stated to have a half-life of about 700 years. It isn't clear what this means. Do half of the DNA strands remain pristine for 700 years, or is only half the material still recognizably derived from DNA after 700 years, or something different? Let's just consider a charitable interpretation: that half the bonds between pairs of ACGT "letters" in a strand remain unbroken after 700 years, and applying a Poisson distribution to the sizes of fragments remaining, in only a few thousand years the longest fragments would be no longer than three or four "letters", and most of the "letters", which consist of a deoxyribose sugar bonded to a base, would have broken to pieces themselves. So dinosaurs are apparently out of the question. So are Archaeopteryx, the first known bird and even Woolly Mammoths. Or so we thought. The above doesn't account for freezing.

It seems that frozen in the tundra, DNA does retain its integrity quite a bit longer, and the author reports that the entire Woolly Mammoth genome has been sequenced. Constructing the sequence had to be done by comparing snippets with the genome of an Asian elephant, to which Mammoths were closely related. 

Personally, I'd like to see Woolly Mammoths brought back somehow. So would George Church, who has determined that there are about 3 million changes in the DNA between elephant and Mammoth. Which ones are most important? Will he be able to make a set of Mammoth chromosomes and put them in the ovum of an elephant to make a Mammoth fetus and, one hopes, a baby Mammoth?

His aspiration is presently more modest: to use a subset of Mammoth DNA to make a hairy, cold-resistant elephant, what our author calls an "elemoth" (or "mammophant"). A bit of Siberian prairie called "Pleistocene Park" is waiting for the outcome. Its Russian curators have been using tanks to blunder around pushing over vegetation and small trees to simulate Mammoth activity. The other cold-adapted animals they have gathered, plus their tank-tread work, is having a salutary effect on the Park, so having real Mammoths, or mammophants, could restore a Pleistocene ecology and, they hope, reduce the effects of warming and save the permafrost.

Other candidates for restoration are more problematic. If a single passenger pigeon is produced, the species hasn't been restored. Their social life depended on living among millions of their fellows. They were prone to pretty much demolishing all the plant and insect life in an acre or two of ground, leaving behind a few hundred tons of guano, and moving on. Do we want that again? I suspect it wasn't just tasty meat and pretty feathers that doomed the passenger pigeon!

Striking closer to home, if some historical person could be cloned and raised to adulthood, could we get that person back? Consider Socrates. Getting his DNA could be problematic, because his burial place, if there is one, is unknown. More recently, who's your favorite? Washington, Lincoln, M.L. King, or even "The King", Elvis? Here the nature-nurture rubber hits the road. To get someone who is not just genetically Abraham Lincoln (plenty of his DNA is found in numerous souvenirs), but who thinks like him, is not just tricky, but onerously difficult. Would he have to grow up in a tiny cabin (I've been to his boyhood cabin in Kentucky)? Would his surrogate parents have to know and use the disciplinary methods used by Thomas and Nancy? Would there be anyone to teach him how to make a split rail fence? Would he have to study by candlelight and fireplace illumination? Do we even know all the books he read as a young person, or as an adult? How to arrange for "Nancy" to die when he is 9, so he can help construct her coffin? And on and on… And we haven't come to ethical questions; I agree with the author that these are insurmountable. We ought not try to clone Lincoln or Elvis or anyone. Not now, not ever.

In later chapters, the techniques of de-extinction are brought closer to home in another way. A few of them are already being used to increase the "birth" rate of some nearly extinct species. I call that "de-extinction before the fact". The black-footed ferret is a success story, but only in part. A disease that almost wiped out the last few colonies of ferrets is still prevalent in their home range, and so nearly all living black-footed ferrets are in captivity. Some genetic editing may be necessary to make them disease resistant. These kinds of efforts are things that should be done, yes, indeed.

Reading Bring Back the King is very enjoyable, and not just because of the frequent humor. Ms Pilcher writes delightfully, and the reading was like sitting with an old friend, listening to stories.