Camestros Felapton

Two Time Hugo Award Finalist

Currently Reading: Analog Essays on Science (Wiley Science Editions)

I’m still exploring some cases of bad late twentieth-century science writing that was adjacent to science fiction. My quest for a specific article in a 1980s edition of Analog was looking hopeless when I discovered that Stanley Schmidt had edited a compilation of 1980s “science fact” articles into a book.

It is a very mixed bag but illuminating as a kind of time capsule of semi-popular understanding of ideas about science. By “semi-popular” I mean the understanding of scientific ideas in a given field by people who are interested in science and are scientifically literate (maybe even experts) but not experts in the field under discussion. So you get a kind of time lag of ideas where understandings from the 1960s (or earlier) smear into accounts of the current state of play in a field in the 1980s.

The worst article I’ve skimmed through so far is “Man’s Biological Future” by L. Sprague de Camp from 1980. You don’t want to read it but here’s the final (and not the worst) paragraph:

“So, about man’s biological future, we can be sure that it will be crowded. It looks as if, for the near future, the numbers are increasing rapidly, while the quality is slowly declining. Let us hope that both trends can be halted and perhaps even reversed while there is still time to do so.”

Eeek.

camestrosfelapton

35 responses to “Currently Reading: Analog Essays on Science (Wiley Science Editions)”

  1. Wow. Despite my appalling taste in SF, I’ve not only not read that, this is the first i have heard of it. Not listed on isfdb that I can see.

    I will pay you a bright shiny nothing to read JEP’s A Step Farther Out.

    Liked by 1 person

    • The Kindle version is “not currently available for purchase” in Australia but Amazon helpfully suggested I search instead for books entitled “A Step Father Out”…which had some curious results

      Like

      • INTRODUCTION. Stanley Schmidt 1

        PART ONE. NEW VIEWS OF THE PAST 5
        BASE EIGHT ARITHMETIC, METEORS AND MAN. John Gribbin 7
        SCIENCE AND CREATION. Poul Anderson 15
        THE LONG STERN CHASE: A SPECULATIVE EXERCISE. Rick Cook 24
        ADVANCED MACHINING IN ANCIENT EGYPT?, Christopher P.Dunn 34
        A LITTLE MORE POLLUTION, PLEASEI, George W. Harper 49

        PART TWO. THE UNIVERSE WE LIVE IN 59
        DEMYTHOLOGIZING THE BLACK HOLE. Richard Matzner. Tsvi Piran. and Tony Rothman 61
        DEATH RISK. Milton A. Rothman 84 “‘
        HOT ROCKS AND WATER. Richard Patrik Term 97

        PART THREE. WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED MAN? 109
        MEMETICS AND THE MODULAR MIND, H Keith Henson 111
        MAN’S BIOLOGICAL FUTURE, L. Sprague de Camp 124

        PART FOUR. THE SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAI. INTELLIGENCE 137
        XENOLOGY: THE NEW SCIENCE OF ASKING “WHO’S OUT THERE?” David Brin, Ph.D. I39
        ALIEN SEX. Dr. Robert A. Freitas. Jr. 159
        PART FIVE. COMING SOON . . . 167
        NEW COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES AND THE DEVELOPING WORLD, Arthur C. Clarke 169
        HUNTINGTON‘S HANDLE. Mark E. Peeples. Ph.D. I79
        SPACE TOURISM—THE DOOR INTO THE SPACE AGE. Patrick Collins 193
        EXPLORING THE AS’I’EROIDS, Joel A. Davis 205
        THE POSTDILUVIAN WORLD. Stephen L. Gillan, Ph.D. 222
        NANOTECHNOLOGY. Chris Peterson and K. Eric Drexler 236
        PART SIX BEYOND TOMORROW:
        THE FAR FUTURE 249
        24TH CENTURY MEDICINE. Thomas Donaldson 25]
        TO THE STARS!. Gordon R. Woodcock 268

        It’s one internet archive to borrow

        Like

  3. Oh dear. And I thought his membership of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal made him one of the ‘good guys’ (naive of me, I know). But then, he also wrote a biography of Lovecraft, so y’know …

    Like

  5. Was de Camp thinking that, thanks to modern medicine, lots of people with genetic diseases live to have children, meaning that those diseases tend to become more prevalent? Heck, in ancient civilization, if you had bad eyesight, that probably shortened your life, on average. Even Asimov wrote once that he worried that things like diabetes might become much more common now that it wasn’t fatal anymore.

    The simple answer to this is that we’re getting very close to the point where genetic engineering will be able to guarantee that people don’t pass on traits like that if they don’t want to. Pace “Gattaca,” I think that’ll mostly be a good thing. But it’ll happen long before there’s any big “degradation” in the human genome due to improved medical care.

    Like

    • //Was de Camp thinking that, thanks to modern medicine, lots of people with genetic diseases live to have children, meaning that those diseases tend to become more prevalent?//

      Yes, that was basically his point

      Like

      • Huh.

        I interpreted the quoted paragraph as meaning “the population is getting too big for this planet” and “there are more fools and assholes around”.

        The first is self-evident and… waves at everything political I can’t disagree with what I thought the second was.

        But genetic diseases increasing, naaah. We’ve got better treatments and pre-natal testing and stuff. Not really any more of a problem than it was back then.

        So the entire thesis is… eugenics, anyone? Bleh!

        Like

        • Absent genetic diseases, there’s also variations out there of other theories about how evolution today selects for the wrong traits – humanity will become dumber and unhealthier because the world is too “soft” and fails too reward the Really Good Genes.

          Some of it is closer to Lamarckism than evolution, as in “we spend so much time sitting on a couch so our bodies will adapt to that”. Some is silly because sure, changes to our environment may mean that specific skills that used to be important no longer are, but hey, it’s not like it’s a big problem if genes that code for skills nobody needs in the 21th century becomes less common. And some, like when people worry that differences in birth rates following education levels, rests on a exaggeration of the connection between genes and e.g. education, and morphs into classism and racism.

          Like

          • Yes, much of this is based on a serious misunderstanding of how evolution works. It’s surprising how many people have a hard time getting their heads around it.

            Like

          • A book I read a while back pointed out that in the 1950s the “marching morons” theory was specifically focused on female education — college educated women don’t have enough babies, so keep them ignorant.
            The root of the Soft And Weak theory sounds less scientific than the cultural fear that living nice lives with enough food, some leisure and no need to fight of wolves or raise our own food makes us inferior to the manly men and womanly women who civilized the frontier. Like William Bennett waxing nostalgic over the deaths of the Light Brigade and the Donner Party, never stopping to consider it’s better if we don’t need that kind of stoicism.

            Liked by 1 person

            • Exactly. We don’t know what the next big challenge to humankind’s survival as a species will involve. It is less likely to be the kind of toughness and grit that characterised the frontier (supposedly – I am sure ingenuity and cooperation were also equally valuable) and more the problem-solving and cooperation skills that enabled us to recently smash a satellite into an asteroid (or find a vaccine for a global pandemic within a few weeks).

              Liked by 2 people

              • “ingenuity and cooperation were also equally valuable”

                There was long ago a fellow on USENET who considered social skills a dastardly trick invented by Jews. His proposed solution was to develop aneutronic fusion rockets and flee to space.

                Liked by 2 people

                • Some professor went on a rant a few years ago that having women in college was bad because with their social skills they’ll land grants and other openings that geniuses — male and socially unpleasant — won’t. Therefore educating women cuts off genius before it can flourish.
                  The dude did not seem to think men with good social skills would be a problem. Go figure.

                  Liked by 2 people

                • Presumably each anti-Semitic misanthrope would have his own rocket, since their lack of social skills would have been fatal if they were all jammed into one confined space for a long time.

                  Like

      • I have been myopic all my life (or at least since age 4-5). Now that I am Of A Certain Age, I am also long-sighted.

        I spent decades hoping I’d eventually even out, but alas I’m now just blind at all ranges save about 6 inches from my nose (not 5, not 7).

        Like

  6. He’s not wrong. Pretty much any environmental or resource crisis you care to mention — deforestation, fisheries collapse, climate change — is directly caused by too many people chasing too many resources, not always because they’re greedy but mostly because it’s the only way to survive.

    Liked by 1 person

Blog at WordPress.com.

%d bloggers like this: