Nonfiction
Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, by Seth Shostak, $27
As senior astronomer of the SETI Institute in California, Seth Shostak has been at the center of the sometimes admired, sometimes dismissed effort to pick up extraterrestrial radio communication. Shostak joined SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in 1990 and has struggled with two overriding issues: trying to detect those alien communications with increasingly more sophisticated methods and explaining to the public why the almost 50-year effort has so far found nothing.
He takes on both issues in “Confessions of an Alien Hunter,” explaining with inside knowledge the rocky history of the scientific enterprise and then making the case for why the effort to date has been dwarfed by the vastness of the universe. So far, he writes, SETI has focused seriously on only 0.0000005 percent of one galaxy (our Milky Way), which is comparable to testing one glass of water out of the entirety of the Earth’s oceans. The pace will pick up as the Allen Telescope Array in California — a privately funded collection of as many as 350 radio receivers — comes on line. Even so, the challenge is enormous.
Shostak is at his best when he writes about practical questions: Would alien societies communicate via radio or something more advanced? If they were more advanced, how could we understand what they’re saying? Would it be safe and proper to reply, and who would decide what to say back? Might aliens have evolved into something akin to computerized machines?
All this, of course, presupposes that intelligent beings are out there, and Shostak makes a strong case that they are. He writes that with SETI’s new technology, we should make contact within 20 years.
The word “Confessions” in the title promises damaging revelations, rather than the almost uniformly supportive report Shostak presents. But as an insight into what is either one of the world’s great scientific endeavors or one of its big follies, this book is compelling and thought-provoking.
By Melvin Konner
Washington Post Writers Group
Nonfiction
Sex and War How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, by Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, $24.95
Malcolm Potts, an obstetrician-scientist, is a hero of the international movement to improve women’s health. Here, with journalist Thomas Hayden, he offers a lively and highly readable account of the evolution of war and terrorism.
Potts’ interest in this subject stemmed from his own experience treating women who had suffered unspeakably. Rape, he learned, is war’s fellow traveler, and the perspectives of anthropology and Darwinian theory suggest why.
For Potts, “team aggression” in chimpanzees is a touchstone: Several males find a solitary male or female from a neighboring group and punch, bite, kick and stomp that victim to death. This occurs too often to be an anomaly and has analogies to ambush raids by male humans.
Another touchstone is a simple fact of genetics: One in 12 men in Central Asia today descends from a single man of Genghis Khan’s era who, according to the chroniclers, was a serial rapist. Similar findings in Ireland suggest the descent of 2 million or 3 million from the warrior-king Niall.
With fossil and archaeological evidence, these facts describe a pattern of killing men and raping women that has been with us for so long that the inclination is built into our genes and brains. The authors condemn the pattern but believe we will be in a better position to control and prevent it if we grasp its evolutionary foundations.
“Sex and War” is an important effort to raise our species’ consciousness of its ugliest behaviors. Yet there are problems with its argument. The authors know that bonobos, as near to us genetically as chimps, have no such aggressive pattern, but they don’t explain why they focused on chimps instead. They assume that hunter-gatherer cultures were as violent as later ones; most anthropologists demur.
