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California Literary Review

Science

The Best American Science Writing 2007

by John R. Guthrie

April 30th, 2008

Jonathon Keats’s article from Popular Science recounts the work of the guru of artificial intelligence, John Koza, an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He developed a system of linked computers that he calls an “invention machine.” The machine has been awarded a United States Patent (!), the “first intellectual property protections ever granted to a nonhuman designer.”

What is intelligence? by James R. Flynn

by Garan Holcombe

November 1st, 2007

‘The Flynn Effect’ was the phrase Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray coined in their book The Bell Curve, to describe the enormous gains in IQ scores in the 20th century from one generation to the next, which James R Flynn, Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago, did so much to measure and document.

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf

by Vikram Johri

September 26th, 2007

Reminding the reader that the likes of Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein were dyslexics, Wolf ponders whether we can explain the “preponderance of creativity and ‘thinking outside the box’ in many people with dyslexia?” Wolf’s rhetorical questions are tackled with grace and one always feels richer for having spent time with her.

Michael Behe on The Edge of Evolution

by Paul Comstock

September 24th, 2007

“I conclude that Darwinian processes account for little of the machinery of life, and that most positive evolution must be nonrandom — guided somehow — and I argue that result fits well with the fine-tuning of the universe discovered by physics.”

Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere by Peter Douglas Ward

by David Loftus

July 23rd, 2007

In an age when ad agencies regularly apply “revolutionary” to new car models and digital toys, it is wise for the rest of us to avoid the word, but Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air comes as close to meriting the label as anything I’ve seen of late. Paleontology does involve a lot of detail work, from tiny picks and toothbrushes to radioactive dating; however, some details may not only inform but overturn and reinvent the much bigger picture.

Empire of the Stars by Arthur I. Miller

by David Loftus

June 10th, 2007

So why did Eddington savage his young colleague nine years later? Jealousy? Racism? A threat to his own work? The answer seems to have been a little of all these and more, but not one clearly more than the rest.

The Electric Life of Michael Faraday by Alan Hirshfeld

by Nandan Datta

June 10th, 2007

He was a discoverer and an inventor, a physicist and a chemist, intensely focused on his own research and equally involved in disseminating rational awareness among the laity, a champion of scientific outlook and devoutly attached to organized religion.

Gen·e·sis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin by Robert M. Hazen

by David Loftus

May 27th, 2007

In all the recent noise over the higher steps of evolution and the proper way to teach them in American schools, it’s easy to forget that science hasn’t established the first big step: how the basic building blocks of life—the nucleotides that make up Watson and Crick’s celebrated reverse spiral staircase—organized into life proper.

Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes – by Alex Vilenkin

by Pedro Blas Gonzalez

April 22nd, 2007

As childhood gave way to adulthood, I came to the realization that my greatest attraction to astronomy was cosmology. However, our sense and intuition for the sublime does not have to end with our trek through the years.

The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness – by Jack El-Hai

by Sam Stowe

April 22nd, 2007

Walter Jackson Freeman was a man gifted with energy, optimism and an ice pick.

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