A primate's memoir
The author offers a memoir of his two decades in the field studying Kenyan baboons as he describes the members of the baboon troop and their behavior and his interaction with the neighboring Masai tribe.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
13mentions
11people
2014–2023years
85% recommend15% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Fiction:
Victory City- new Salman Rushdie book. Great retelling of the history of one of the great medieval South Indian kingdoms. Not his best, but his writing is still top notch.
Sea of Tranquility- speculative fiction from Emily St. John Mandel (of Station Eleven fame). It's a series of interconnected stories spanning centuries from the near past to the near future. Beautifully written. Read when I was down with COVID earlier this year and it invaded my dreams (in a good way). Short and easy read.
Giovanni's Room- story of an American expat in Paris caught between his love for a man and his duty to his girlfriend. This is the first James Baldwin book I have read but will definitely check out more of his work in 2024.
Theory of Bastards- speculative fiction by Audrey Schulmann. Literary sci-fi similar to Station Eleven. It's about a woman researching primate behavior set in the near future where the earth is ravaged by the effects of climate change. Very well researched, beautifully written and nothing like I have ever read before. This won the 2019 Philip K Dick Award.
Invisible Cities- literary fiction by Italo Calvino. It's less than 200 pages but a very dense and tough read. It's a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan where MP is describing cities in KK's vast empire. It's a strange, strange book that I think I will return to often. If you liked the world building in Piranesi and want more, this is the book for you. Calvino describes 55 cities in under 200 pages, with each one feeling very different. Again, first Calvino book I have read and will definitely check out more of his works in 2024.
Non-fiction:
Thinking in Systems: A Primer- by Donella Meadows. Read this based on HN's recommendation. Thank you!
On Intelligence- by Jeff Hawkins. This was on my shelf for years and am glad I got to read it this year. The creator of the Palm Pilot presents his theory of intelligence and how the brain works. It's compelling. I hope to read his follow up book in 2024. Would love HN's recommendations of similar books.
A Primate's Memoir- by Robert M. Sapolsky. Enjoyable read of the author's research on Savannah baboons and his adventures in Africa. His love for primates and humans alike come through clearly.
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making- by Tony Fadell. A great business book by the co-founder of Nest. Draws on his experience both as a startup founder and leading innovative teams at large tech companies (Apple, in his case). Just as any business book, this could have been shorter and less repetitive but thankfully, there is enough good material here to be a book rather than a blog post.
- The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin.
It identified so many of the "edges" of society and how I think about and interact with the world, on a daily basis.
Without a doubt one of the best books I've ever read. Maybe even the best.
The only other book that came close this year was Robert Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir.
- If you haven't read Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir, do not walk, run to your nearest bookstore or Kindle and grab a copy.
It is without a doubt one of the best books I have ever read. Highly recommended for fans of Finnegan's Barbarian Days.
- I try to only read books that are at least a few years old, so these aren’t timely recommendations.
On the list for next year:
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Essays of Montaign
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology
The Enigma of Reason
Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind
Impro
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
Invisible Cities
Collapse of Complex Societies
--
Favorites from this year:
Death's End
One Man's Meat
Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution
A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery
Cosmicomics
Why Quark Rhymes with Pork
The Unfolding of Language
A Sand County Almanac
- Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates, the only difference is that we have the gall to think that walking erect seems to have freed us from our vicious primate past. Spend some time watching a group of primates or work with a group of them over time as I did a number of years ago, and you will start to see that humans behave in almost the exact same way, our brains lie to us about our motivations so we are obivious to the fact that we are acting from ancient primate social instincts, and worse you get stuff like this piece which pulls on the old great chain of being.
Chips may not have governments, as the author says, but I suggest that he go back an take an introductory course in political science, because our entire understanding of modern political structures is founded on the idea that in some sense all politics are family politics (in group behavior). Macaques, chimps, baboons, and many more have extremely well studied and understood family group politics.
One of the steps on the road to enlightenment is the realization that the monkey on your back is you.
- Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates, the only difference is that we have the gall to think that walking erect seems to have freed us from our vicious primate past.
I thought the difference is that by dint of our language use and our ability to modify our environment, we have the potential reproduce all the different social behaviors that the various primate species have - as well as social behaviors from even non-primate species.
Sure, it's wrong to image one is entirely outside of a social species, that things like dominance and submission don't play any part. But it seems just as wrong to make a single analogy to a single species and be done. We can be like wolves (predictors), sheep (prey), chimps (violently competitive), Bonabos (nonviolently cooperative), and so-forth but it's the complex structures of human society that are going to determine which of these sorts of animal we wind-up with.
It's important not to let the shock of realization "wow, human are just animals" stand in the way of thinking, "but we can still collectively shape which animals we will resemble".
