catching up: reading
Jul. 18th, 2018 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoeleveni've done surprisingly little book-length reading for pleasure, having managed to get sucked into too many other entertainments of late. i should really change that. but i have read three books lately:
* why?, by mario livio: a book on curiosity. why we're curious and what we know about it. we know some things, but not many, and the book seemed padded out. perhaps he couldn't sell anything shorter; dunno.
* tanks: a century of warfare, by oscar gilbert and romain cansiere. i picked this up to use up the last little bit of a gift card, but found it surprisingly interesting. it's not about the machinery of tanks, famous tank designs, famous tank battles, or the men who fought in tanks, but instead the history of tank doctrine. that is, how people thought of using tanks on the battlefield and how they were used. i've only read bits and pieces of that, and i was struck by the extent to which there were many visionaries who figured out what to do with tanks long before the tanks could do it. which, in at least a few cases, directly drove improving tanks until they could. recommended.
* animal weapons: the evolution of warfare, by douglas emlen. this one got a good review in science, but has to be the most frustrating the book i've read in a long time. it's about natural weapons and how they compare to man-made ones. the biology part is great: emlen studies massive weapons that develop as a result of sexual selection, like deer antlers.
the military history part... needs work. i skipped to the end, and was rather disappointed to read in the acknowledgments, "military history turned out to be a vast and overwhelming literature...".¹ emlen's unfamiliarity with the subject shows: he makes any numbers of errors of fact, some significant. unfortunately, these errors undermine the analogies he's trying to make, and he could draw much stronger parallels if he knew what he was talking about.
for example, he mentions that all-above-ground fortifications went away after the development of exploding artillery shells. the american soldiers who landed on omaha beach probably remember the subject a bit differently.²
we're even still building fortifications in afghanistan, and even fortified entire cities in iraq.³ why? because against the opponents we face there, forts still work fine. and lo! this is a normal evolutionary process: emlen earlier discusses the appearance and disappearance of armor and spines on sticklebacks (a fish) in environments with and without predators. defenses co-evolve with weapons. fix the error in fact, and he could have made this point himself.
if he writes a second edition of the book -- and i really hope he does, because i really loved the first part, having mostly studied living things at a molecular level -- i hope he has more discussions with people who really understand the subject (he talked to one) so the book can be great all the way through.
so, alas, i can't recommend it, unless you have a high tolerance for nonsense, or are willing to entirely ignore most of what he says about human weapons.
---
1: i know a bunch of my readers are scientists or are in allied fields, so imagine you'd picked up a similar book written by an eminent soldier who wrote, "evolutionary biology turned out to be a vast and overwhelming literature..." what's your reaction? heart sinks? quietly put the book down and never look at it again? throw it against the wall? i can't imagine anybody who knows anything about the field would react well to that statement. i'm only an amateurwar nut military historian, but it's still grating.
2: emlen is completely correct that the nazi pillboxes would have been utterly destroyed by battleship shells or aerial bombs, and some in fact were. but actually hitting one from a rolling ship in the english channel or a plane passing high overhead at hundreds of miles an hour was hard. by and large, the allies missed them. (the pillboxes also shot back, and several feet of concrete armor is better protection than several inches of steel armor, so the battleships kept a respectful distance.)
3: our fortified cities in iraq were primitive things, going back all the way to the first fortifications: we dug ditches around them and piled all the dirt inside the ditches, making berms. the only modern touch was filling the ditches with razor wire. worthless defenses against a contemporary "conventional" army, but excellent for preventing guerrilla infiltration, suicide bombings, and car bombings, by forcing everybody entering through checkpoints.
* why?, by mario livio: a book on curiosity. why we're curious and what we know about it. we know some things, but not many, and the book seemed padded out. perhaps he couldn't sell anything shorter; dunno.
* tanks: a century of warfare, by oscar gilbert and romain cansiere. i picked this up to use up the last little bit of a gift card, but found it surprisingly interesting. it's not about the machinery of tanks, famous tank designs, famous tank battles, or the men who fought in tanks, but instead the history of tank doctrine. that is, how people thought of using tanks on the battlefield and how they were used. i've only read bits and pieces of that, and i was struck by the extent to which there were many visionaries who figured out what to do with tanks long before the tanks could do it. which, in at least a few cases, directly drove improving tanks until they could. recommended.
* animal weapons: the evolution of warfare, by douglas emlen. this one got a good review in science, but has to be the most frustrating the book i've read in a long time. it's about natural weapons and how they compare to man-made ones. the biology part is great: emlen studies massive weapons that develop as a result of sexual selection, like deer antlers.
the military history part... needs work. i skipped to the end, and was rather disappointed to read in the acknowledgments, "military history turned out to be a vast and overwhelming literature...".¹ emlen's unfamiliarity with the subject shows: he makes any numbers of errors of fact, some significant. unfortunately, these errors undermine the analogies he's trying to make, and he could draw much stronger parallels if he knew what he was talking about.
for example, he mentions that all-above-ground fortifications went away after the development of exploding artillery shells. the american soldiers who landed on omaha beach probably remember the subject a bit differently.²
we're even still building fortifications in afghanistan, and even fortified entire cities in iraq.³ why? because against the opponents we face there, forts still work fine. and lo! this is a normal evolutionary process: emlen earlier discusses the appearance and disappearance of armor and spines on sticklebacks (a fish) in environments with and without predators. defenses co-evolve with weapons. fix the error in fact, and he could have made this point himself.
if he writes a second edition of the book -- and i really hope he does, because i really loved the first part, having mostly studied living things at a molecular level -- i hope he has more discussions with people who really understand the subject (he talked to one) so the book can be great all the way through.
so, alas, i can't recommend it, unless you have a high tolerance for nonsense, or are willing to entirely ignore most of what he says about human weapons.
---
1: i know a bunch of my readers are scientists or are in allied fields, so imagine you'd picked up a similar book written by an eminent soldier who wrote, "evolutionary biology turned out to be a vast and overwhelming literature..." what's your reaction? heart sinks? quietly put the book down and never look at it again? throw it against the wall? i can't imagine anybody who knows anything about the field would react well to that statement. i'm only an amateur
2: emlen is completely correct that the nazi pillboxes would have been utterly destroyed by battleship shells or aerial bombs, and some in fact were. but actually hitting one from a rolling ship in the english channel or a plane passing high overhead at hundreds of miles an hour was hard. by and large, the allies missed them. (the pillboxes also shot back, and several feet of concrete armor is better protection than several inches of steel armor, so the battleships kept a respectful distance.)
3: our fortified cities in iraq were primitive things, going back all the way to the first fortifications: we dug ditches around them and piled all the dirt inside the ditches, making berms. the only modern touch was filling the ditches with razor wire. worthless defenses against a contemporary "conventional" army, but excellent for preventing guerrilla infiltration, suicide bombings, and car bombings, by forcing everybody entering through checkpoints.
no subject
Date: Jul. 19th, 2018 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Jul. 19th, 2018 02:14 am (UTC)it's also not just a question of reading: even the military history stuff is encrusted with citations. it's a question of building up the right mental schema to approach the problem, and that's the tricky part.
like biology, military history has a few general rules in principle and lots of exceptions in practice. while that's a fine statement by itself, the other half of what i'd like him to understand is that he doesn't yet know enough to realize what he doesn't know. phrasing that nicely is hard.
no subject
Date: Jul. 19th, 2018 04:29 pm (UTC)...that doesn't necessarily mean one must throw out the baby with the bathwater, but perhaps your critique of his shoddy attempt to understand military history might give you pause when reading his assertions about evolutionary processes, too.
no subject
Date: Jul. 20th, 2018 12:04 am (UTC)i'm not sure what to make of it. i suppose i could check the scientific claims against The Literature, but that sounds like work. or i could just move on to the next book. :P