Book: Who's afraid of Charles Darwin? Debating feminism and evolutionary theory by Griet Vandermassen

Just finished reading this fascinating book about how evolutionary theory can provide a robust framework for understanding how women have and are being considered and treated, and how a robust framework (something any other theoretical background have failed to prived, according to the author) is necessary if we are to tackle these issue in an efficient manner.

It was really interesting at many level, as the author reviews the tortured relationships feminists have had with science (something many of them have seen exclusively as a male biased enterprise - but ignoring science's ability to progress and self correct, an element that is at its foundation), the way scientific production on evolution have been delt with by feminism, and finally, demonstrating how well evolution fits everything we're observing in human societies.

I have to admit I struggled at time as the writing was very philosophical - in it's argumentation and its writing, but it was interesting all along, and I'd definitely recommend it. It really overturned my vision (not very researched, admittedly) and gave me lots of food for thought.

Plagues and Peoples - William McNeill

Just finished reading Plagues and People. It's out of print... but if you have any interest in history or in infectious diseases or even ecology and you can get your hands on a copy, it's really worth reading.

McNeill reviews human history throughout the world, but allocates to infectious diseases the place that apparently should be theirs in how our societies were shaped. It's fascinating. One of the main ideas is in it is that humanity has been submitted to micro- and macroparasitism, with microparasitism being the diseases, and macroparasitism is people, well, not eating people, but dwelling on resources produces by other people...

It puts stories we've all heard of such as cholera pandemics in the 18th century, Black plague in the Middle Age and more into this socio-ecological-historical context giving them new depth and elaborating extremely interesting broader insight.

The book is from 1979 (although I believe there have been more recent editions - found my copy in an Oxfam bookshop!) and probably we now know a bit more about history and phylogeny of diseases than we did then, but I'm not really competent to comment on that. Reading the last chapter I also thought "Ah yeah but this is before extra resistant TB and HIV-AIDS and stuff!" but getting to the last few pages, I realised that he really got it and most probably was in no way surprised to hear about theses new diseases that humanity is now facing. And yet, as he points out, we have no idea of the disease burden our ancestors were dealing with...

Highly recommanded.

Anybody using R?

I would like to find a good book to learn how to use R. So far I have been using SAS, mostly using codes, so I'm not too scared by learning lines and commands, but I'd like a good reference for it.

Any suggestions?

The medical detective -Sandra Hempel

This very nicely written biography takes us straight into the streets of victorian London, at the time when one of humanity’s scourge was about to set on its first worldwide travel. About 1840, cholera leaves its home in the Indian subcontinent and conquers the world. It’s the first cholera pandemic. This one and those that followed made thousands of deaths in the world, including in England. At that time, before Koch’s and Pasteur’s discoveries, the debate is raging between contagionists and miasmatists. But John Snow quickly comes to the hypothesis that water, or something in the water is responsible for cholera. He starts surveying cholera cases, their socio-economic background, and the source of their drinking water. His study is now mentioned in many textbooks as a foundation of epidemiology. His work is also cited as a very early example of spatial analysis.

It is his story that is related with great detail in Hempel’s book, but also lots of fascinating stuff on the medicine and life in London in victorian times. Really fascinating and highly recommended.