Customer Reviews

Paradigms Lost

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Without a doubt, this is one of the most insightful books I have ever come across in my life. In it a mathematician takes a critical and penetrating look at the most baffling problems facing humanity and science. These are; The Origin of Life, Language Acquisition, Sociobiology and Genetic Determinism, Artificial Intelligence, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the Mysteries of Quantum Physics. In narrating these topics Casti adopts a unique courtroom style in which he presents the arguments in favor of and against the dominant hypothesis in each of the fields, and then steps in to act as jury and provide his own opinion.

But the book is more than only a deep exposition of these topics. Casti weaves an extremely lively and entertaining tale about a host of characters and discoveries involved in these exciting areas of thought and research. One of the things I noticed in this book is the marvelous sense of humour that Casti has. Nowhere else in serious science writing or even in popular accounts have I seen such intelligent dashes of humor expressed in such fine language. In fact that's one of the outstanding triumphs of this book. The language in the book is sophisticated, yet very accessible. The bibiliography at the end is almost as lavishly detailed as the book itself.

In my opinion, Casti has emerged as one of the finest science writers in the world because of this book. I strongly suspect that it is because of his unique experiences; he combines the artistic and culturally sophisticated style which he developed in Europe with the informal, witty and pragmatic cheek found among Americans writers which he must have picked up during his time in the United States. All in all, it is remarkable how one man can collect and coherently discuss such a prodigious amount of information, especially about topics not directly related to his field of study. This will be a book I am definitely going to remember all my life.I will recommend it strongly to anyone even remotely interested in science, research and the future of humanity. An example of scientific writing at its best.

Casti poses the question, "What does current science, in particular, important unanswered questions in current science, tell us about humanity's place in the universe?" Thankfully, Casti is an amazingly knowledgeable and fair guide, with the emphasis always firmly on clear explication of that science, not any particular interpretation of its pertinence to the human condition. Casti is a scientist, not a dogmatist.

The breadth and depth of this book are exceptional. Casti injects a little of himself here and there, as well, and comes across as a jovial fellow... his erudition speaks for itself.

One of my favorites!

Casti is one of the best science writers out there considering he isn't nearly as well known as some of them, but he deserves to be. Also, his books are consistently at a respectable level of technical detail and sophistication which is rare in science writing intended for the layman. In this book, although the discussions range from current cosmological theory to evolutionary biology to quantum physics, I was most interested in his discussion of Chomsky and current linguistic theory, which is my interest, so I will confine myself to that.

In this chapter, Casti gives the best introduction for the general reader that I've seen on Chomsky's ideas on innate language acquisition and transformational grammar. In the process, he also compares them with competing views such as Sampson's and Piaget's, and he even discusses E.O. Wilson's sociobiological views a bit, which Chomsky himself commented on. After reading this chapter, you would probably be able to read the chapter on generative and transformational grammar in a good introductory theoretical linguistics text, such as John Lyons's classic Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, or Donna Jo Napoli's recent book, entitled simply Linguistics, which is also excellent. So overall, another great book from Casti that stands head and shoulders above the competition and with a great introduction to modern linguistic theory.

This book is splendidly written. It surveys some of the big scientific controversies of our day. He tackels evolution, genetics, language, artificial intelligence, and the search for extraterestrial intelligence and two philiosophical questions that impenge on science. What is good is that he provides lots of footnotes to other works that those who, if they are really interested, can consult. The footnotes helped me locate lots of other good books for my library.

John Casti is one of the great writers of modern popular science non-fiction.

A mathematician waxing philosophic? What's the world coming to?

An excellent book by a very intelligent man. Style is a bit wordy, but an excellent storyteller with a great sense of humor. I bought this book years ago, but for the most part the observations and questions remain relevant, engaging and powerful.

John Casti is an American mathematician transplanted in the old world, namely in martial and musical Vienna. And it shows. His prose is as witty and cultured as any European master would like it, and as concise and right to the point as any new world's scientist is taught to produce. Even though my personal opinions about the subject matters covered by Casti in this book more often than not radically depart from his conclusions, this is by all means a must for any skeptic's library. And it will figure nicely in most other collections as well. Paradigms lost is about six major unsolved mysteries in modern science (some would say in modern philosophy). In order of appearance, we have: the origin of life, the genetic basis of human behavior, the existence of a unique "language-organ" in the human brain, the question of thinking machines, the possibility to uncover extraterrestrial intelligences afoot in our galaxy, and the very existence of a real world independent of external observers. Wow! It's hard to imagine a more compelling intellectual tour de force... The structure of Casti's book provides a "claim" at the beginning of each chapter, such as "there exist intelligent beings in our galaxy with whom we can communicate". The author then provides a minimal background necessary to assess the arguments, and proceeds to lead the way to a parade of "witnesses" for the "prosecution" (in favor of the claim) and the "defense" (against the claim). In so doing, we are treated to the reasoning of Einstein and Bohr, Dawkins and Gould, Miller and Crick (if you don't recognize these names, shame on you, skip the rest of the review and pick up the book itself...). Each chapter then ends with a summary of the opposing statements (and a very useful table recapitulating viewpoints and authors), as well as with a final judgment delivered by Casti himself. This last component could be interpreted as somewhat pretentious (especially given the impressive array of witnesses that precede it). But every person is entitled to her/his opinion and to put it in writing (as long as the manuscript is signed)... Besides, Casti makes very clear at the beginning of the book (don't skip the introduction!) that the conclusions are only his, and more often than not are the result of a simple matter of taste. The first claim is that "life arose out of natural physical processes taking place here on Earth", apparently hardly a controversial statement, until your initial confidence is at least questioned by an array of detailed arguments concerning the difficulties that modern physics, chemistry, and biology are still experiencing in order to answer the question of the ultimate origin of ourselves. Did nucleic acids come first, and then somehow gave origin to proteins? Or did it go the other way around? Or maybe they both appeared simultaneously? Or, perhaps neither of them came first, but they supplanted a much more primitive and ancient mechanism for the propagation of life? Casti even entertains - mostly for the sake of completeness - Nobel laureate Francis Crick's theory of panspermia, the idea that life has been "imported" on Earth from outer space; astronomer Fred Hoyle's hypothesis about a "silicon creator" responsible for disseminating life throughout the universe; and last and certainly list, creationist Duane Gish's idea that the christian god did it all first-hand. The author's conclusion is that it is likely that life indeed originated on Earth by natural means, but that we still have few clues to how exactly this came about. His personal preference goes for Cavalier-Smith's relatively recent suggestion that the original organisms were actually clay crystals, later supplanted by nucleic acids and proteins (see my article in Science & Society at http://fp.bio.utk.edu/sands/... <<< check address >>> for a discussion of why Cavalier-Smith's hypothesis doesn't make much biological sense). The second claim is "human behavior patterns are dictated primarily by the genes". This is the old yet always very current nature-vs-nurture debate that has been waged for centuries. Casti does a very good job at presenting the modern versions of the arguments, including biologist E.O. Wilson's "sociobiology" and its somewhat politically motivated rebuttal by the "Boston group", spearheaded by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and geneticist Richard Lewontin. Casti makes very clear that we are interested in the intellectual side of the question, not in its moral and political consequences. This is not to say, of course, that scientists should not care about the social implications of their research; it simply means that they are especially qualified to carry out the research, while they have no particular claim at understanding or discussing the moral corollaries of the research itself. I think this is a particularly lucid treatment of a very thorny subject, and definitely makes for a sobering reading on both sides. When all the smoke clears, the author casts his vote for the very reasonable middle-ground conclusion that it's really a bit of both. We are the result of a complex series of interactions between our genes and our environments, to the point that independent contributions of either factor are distinguishable only in extreme cases. Related to the nature-nurture debate is the third claim, "human language capacity stems from a unique, innate property of the brain". This is Noam Chomsky's revolutionary suggestion in the field of human cognitive psychology, which is indeed the current virtually undisputed paradigm. Casti sees no reason to question it, and neither do I. Even though some of the many opponents of Chomsky do raise interesting questions, they seem to succeed only at refining the details of the central claim, not at invalidating it. The basic idea is that humans all over the world learn any language they are exposed to during infancy much too fast for this being the result of environmental influences only. It seems much more fitting to hypothesize that parts of our brain are specifically genetically hard-wired to facilitate such task. Admittedly, we still know very little of the actual physical, neurobiological bases of the language organ. On the other hand, the opposite claim - mostly by the Swiss Jean Piaget - that the brain is such a powerful general problem-solving machine that the cultural environment is all we need to explain the acquisition of languages, clearly contradicts some elementary empirical observations. For example, why is it that we have increasing problems learning new languages with age, while our brain doesn't find it difficult to learn how to solve other puzzles, including algebra and trigonometry problems? It seems that the human brain (and by extension other animal's as well) is a compound machine; parts of this machine are devoted to a general ability to learn and to solve problems, while other parts are hard-wired to solve recurrent and vital problems that occurred during the species evolution. I submit that the proportion of the two parts, as well as the particular list of hard-wired capacities, can be thought of as both the historical legacy of a given species and a description of the limits which that species encounters in using brain-power to maintain a longer presence on the evolutionary stage. The forth question asked by Casti regards the veracity of the claim "digital computers can, in principle, literally think". To me this was truly a no-brainer. While the if, how, and when this will happen in practice is a matter of interesting debate, the theoretical possibility is demonstrated by the very fact that we - humans - do think. And it has been pretty obvious since Descartes, but especially Darwin, that we indeed are nothing but machines, albeit among the most of sophisticated in the known universe. Casti does also conclude that the evidence against the claim is weak at best (perhaps not by chance, it is based mostly of studies by philosophers, not computer

This is a book that has stuck with me for the past 10 years since I read it. It is still a source of inspiration for me, and most books that I read are automatically compared to it in my mind.

I can't understand why this book is out of print - I assume that it is as I had to order a used copy. It is a beautifully-written tour of how science has found our place in the world. By turns witty and erudite, Casti has an uncommon grasp of the whole range of scientific endeavour and the issues that make up the transition between science and philosophy.

It will save time if I start with the list of things I didn't like about this book, as it turned out to be a short list. It's basically one item, in fact: Casti presents the whole thing as a series of court cases, with the "prosecution" presenting the case that science has seized some aspect of our place in the Universe and the "defence" claiming like a bunch of besuited reprobates that the mystery remains. Harmless enough, perhaps, but there is a lamentable tendency in today's on-line discourse to confuse science with adversarial debate and claim that "both sides" should be heard. How one can assign two "sides" to the value of the fine-structure constant or the role of feedbacks in climate is beyond me, but the trend in debate is undeniable. Casti wrote before the world of blogs and chat groups had really come into being and can't be held responsible for not foreseeing the rise of science-denial, but to those of us who are sensitised it looks a bit irresponsible in retrospect to reinforce this confusion.

Otherwise, the book is a tour de force. Not taking instruction well and already being familiar with the broad sweep of the philosophy of science, I ignored Casti's advice and read the entire book from beginning to end in one, long session. That said, the book is actually arranged so that any particular chapter can be read independently of the others and the early section on what science "is" could be left out altogether. This is what Casti suggests. A single chapter would serve you well for a longish train journey.

It all comes down to why are we here and what is our place? There are chapters on abiogenesis, genetic determinism, language acquisition, artificial intelligence, the presence or otherwise of alien civilisation and observer-based reality. There are very extensive appendices to each chapter, gathered at the end of the book, with copious suggestions for further reading. My backlog just got even bigger...

One surprise for me was in the section on language acquisition, where I found for the first time just how influential Chomsky's ideas have been. I am familiar with his political rhetoric but had only passingly heard of his ideas of an innate grammar until now. It appears to be a more weighty and scientifically resonant idea than I ever understood, and Chomsky has in effect shaped an entire field. Odd that I would find this out just as the grip of his influence in linguistics seems finally to be weakening.

The entire book is a joy to read. Demand that it be printed anew, and do so loudly.

Having read the other reviews of Casti's work, I'll skip the general critique and jump right in to why I felt his treatment of the creationist position was less than fair. I wish that he had written the section on How We Can Know What We Know before his discussion about The Origin Of Life On Earth, because it is from the clear-minded verdict he rendered about the current state of our inability to say, "we know", that the equally clear contradiction in the verdict he rendered against the creationists is found. By pointing out the fact that science is, first and foremost, a method for acquiring knowledge, he reveals that this method is useful only in answering certain kinds of questions (i.e. questions that assume only a natural explanation for phenomena should be considered). In describing the format of a court room as his method of presenting the various cases, he reminds us of the fact that the difference between 'evidence', and 'proof' is that evidence can be open to interpretation, where as proof cannot. He then clarifies that none of the subjects he will be discussing fall into the catagory of 'proof'. But when it comes time to give his verdict on creationism, he contradicts himself by speaking emphatically about the "fact of evolution", and the creationist's "murdering of the facts" of evolution. Creationism is a completely different interpretation of the physical evidence to be found in the study of origins, and therefore cannot be accused of any such "foul play" as the author suggests. To validate this point even further, Mr. Casti did an excellent job of pointing out the fact that there is definitely an epistimological difference in the approach of 'origins science' as opposed to 'operations science', and he even goes so far as to rightly claim that origins science isn't really science in the true, classical sense of the term. Thus, the only proper verdict that should have been rendered in the case of the creationists is that their brand of investigation hypothesizes a supernatural origin, and a historical interaction with world-changing events (such as the Flood of Noah) as recorded in Scripture, and interprets the physical evidence accordingly, which is completely legitimate, as no one can yet say that such interpretation defies reason (it goes beyond it, but not against it), or that the origin of life had to of occured through natural processes, which must be proven first if evolution is to be categorized as "fact". The book is a great read nonetheless, and I found no argument with any other aspect, or conclusion of the author.