The Diversity of Life

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1. ozfiveAug 2023
   Edward O. Wilson's book called "The Diversity Of Life" touches on the invasive species of the Hawaiian islands. I highly recommend it.
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2. planet-and-haloMar 2021
   The best thing I ever read on this topic came from biology. In "The Diversity of Life," E.O. Wilson describes how specialist species thrive in stable environments. The stability allows them to evolve "deeply" into a niche and outcompete any species less specialized for that same niche. So if I'm really great at plucking fruit from tall trees, and you suck at it, I win. In unstable environments, however—say all of those trees burn down in a forest fire—it's the generalists that triumph, because they have more options and are therefore more resilient. Of course specialization and generalization are abstract terms. Reality can operate on a spectrum, often a discontinuous one at that. So maybe I'm a finch that's best at poking my long beak into a particular kind of tree, but in a pinch I can also hoover up ants off the ground better than most of the other creatures in my ecosystem. So it goes for humans competing in an economy too.
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3. Snail_CommandoDec 2013
   There are already suggestions in this thread that are better than mine, but I'll still throw my hat in the ring.

   That's great that she's interested in biology. I'd like to gently suggest that if she "isn't very enthusiastic about computers or technology", you should instead try to nurture her demonstrated interest in art, biology, and other science.

   I know absolutely nothing about art, except that I apparently have no taste. So I'll refrain from making any suggestions on art books.

   TL;DR: Skip down to the third section for the "technical book" suggestion.

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   (1)

   Here are some suggestions of books on general science, biology, and chemistry (in no particular order, these are some of the first ones that come to my mind):

   "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" By Thomas S. Kuhn

   "The Diversity of Life" By Edward O. Wilson

   "The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time" by Jonathan Weiner

   "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History" by Stephen Jay Gould

   "Life on a Young Planet" By Andrew H. Knoll

   "Galápagos" By Kurt Vonnegut (Fiction, but related) (I loved this book, but it's not for everyone I suppose. A couple of my friends didn't like it.)

   "Napoleon's Buttons" By Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson

   "The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher" By Lewis Thomas

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   (2)

   If she's interested in learning a lot about cellular biology in beautifully exhaustive detail, buy her this textbook:

   "Molecular Biology of the Cell" By Bruce Alberts, Paul Walter, Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts

   This book is huge. And it is wonderful.

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   ---Read this suggestion if my other suggestions aren't good---

   (3)

   So you want a technical book? And she's interested in biology?

   Buy her a copy of:

   "The Principles of Biomedical Informatics" By Ira J. Kalet

   This textbook is incredible. It teaches you some fundamentals of many different flavors of bioinformatics. (Different flavors, because, as the author acknowledges, bioinformatics can mean many things.) You can learn how to work with amino acid sequences, protein modeling, medical imaging, probabilistic biomedical models, and more!

   Since you have SICP and LoL on your bookshelf already, you might love the next part. The entire textbook is a cleverly accessible primer on how to build applications with Common Lisp. Whether you're a greybeard Lisp hacker or a repl-noob, you'll like this book if you are interested in learning about bioinformatics.

   I've had the first edition for quite some time. Recently, I think in the past few months, a second edition was released. Someone gifted me the 2nd ed, :) but I haven't really compared the two.

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   I was going to suggest Gödel, Escher, Bach when you mentioned she was interested in art, and were hoping to find a technical book for her. Then I saw that you already had tried that one. I'm going to leave the suggestion anyway because these types of threads are wonderful for finding great books.

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4. atulatulMay 2020
   Currently reading The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson. Wanted to read his book about ants but it was not available/deliverable/ebook. So purchased this on kindle. Have read only about 30%. But some of the things are new. I expected it to be a refresher course after a few of David Attenborough documentaries. But some of the things are new. Like how do we define species. A lot of these things are available on wikipedia. But I think it helps if you take time to read books and then explore further on the web.

   Also liked and would recommend very highly Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees (so many new things to know).

   Leaving this comment here just in case someone is interested.

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5. atulatulMay 2020
   From The Diversity Of Life by Edward O. Wilson (These numbers are for recognized species.) This does not answer the "only 10% known" part. However, the part where the author says 13000 new species recognized every year should give an idea. Also this is about species not members under those species. And from the same book "Bacteria continue to be the “black hole” of biodiversity, their depths unplumbed."

   "How many species? The estimates I made in 1986 and cited in The Diversity of Life (1992) put the number of recognized living species in the world— in other words, those formally described and bearing two-part scientific names— at approximately 1.4 million.

   About 13,000 additional “new” species are recognized each year. Thus in the decade since 1986 more than 100,000 species have been added, bringing the total as I counted it to 1.5 million. Meanwhile, the numbers in some important groups have been revised upward— in particular in the insects, the largest of all groups, from 751,000 in the 1980s to 865,000 in 1998. A similar elevation has been made for the fungi, from 47,000 to 69,000 species. A commonly cited total world figure in the late 1990s, suggested for example in the Global Biodiversity Assessment of the United Nations Environment Programme (1995), is 1.75 million species. But this does not take into account the number of formal species names that have been erroneously applied to species named by earlier investigators, requiring an eventual reduction of the global number by 10 or even 20 percent...

   “Working figures” for all groups, including insects, have tended to fall close to 10 million; the Global Biodiversity Assessment number, which constitutes no more than an educated guess and leans to conservative sentiment, is 13,620,000."

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6. atulatulApr 2020
   In addition to deep cleaning the home, of course. :)

   Things from your bucket list which do/did not have immediate relevance. For example, I plan to read a treatise which explains method behind the Indian classical music (Author Bhatkhande), Design of Everyday Things, and A History of Roman Britain (Oxford History of England) or The making of Europe. Currently reading Diversity of Life(Wilson). And learning German.

   Asking this in this forum just out of curiosity to know what kind of pending things others have, how they are spending their time, etc.

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