Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, October 2025

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on historical genetics and the transmission of inequality. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a preschooler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

(Left almost-finished in 2025, because I got interrupted, and posted in 2026, because I wanted to procrastinate about half-a-dozen research projects.)

Martha Wells, Queen Demon

Excellent fantasy mind-candy, continuing the story from Witch King. As in that book from my back-log, the story is told both in the the "past" time-line, in which Our Heroes rebel against Mysterious Evil Overlords, and the "present" time-line, in which Our Much Aged Heroes Have to Deal with Idiots Trying to Undo Everything They Built with Such Sacrifice in Their Youth, and hints of returning Evil Overlords. (Analogy to the current situation of the once-and-future free world is probably intended by the author, and anyway irresistible). I do not think this book could really be enjoyed without the previous book, but with it, it's lots of skillfully-written fun, and leaves me eager for more. §

Carles Lalueza Fox, Inequality: A Genetic History [doi:10.7551/mitpress/14145.001.0001]

There is a basic point here which is correct and important, and can be made much more simply and starkly than Lalueza Fox puts it. Throughout most of the life of our species, a large fraction children born died very young, far before they had any chance to have children themselves. (In many times and places, most children.) But this death was not entirely randomly distributed: having richer and/or more powerful parents increased a child's odds of surviving and reproducing, through means like "not starving to death", "not being so malnourished as to be picked off by disease", and "not being killed in a fight with the next valley over". (This is true even though what passed for medicine was useless.) This implies that social inequality mattered for whose genes got passed down. (It was not the only factor that mattered, but it was one of them.) Social inequality thus left traces in our gene pool. Getting information about past inequalities from the shape of the present gene pool, and from ancient genomes we recover, means solving a tricky inverse problem, but that's something we're getting increasingly good at doing.

I think a great book could be written on all this. (Among other things, it should be catnip to anyone who wants to call themselves a historical materialist.) This book, however, is merely OK. It combines accessible accounts of scientific work, by Lalueza Fox and others, in historical genetics with uninspired book reports about recent semi-popular social science on inequality, in about a 2:1 mixture. There's nothing actively wrong with the reportage, not that I could tell, but it's neither sure-footed nor illuminating. (You'd think, to read this, that social science on inequality began with Piketty.) I will probably end up adding this to the reading list for the statistics of inequality class, if I ever get to teach it again, but with a bit of a sigh. Someone should write that great book; in the meanwhile, this will have to do. §

(Over the last two hundred years or so, as societies have gone through the singularity demographic transition, infant and childhood mortality has gone way down, and fertility has fallen dramatically. This all contributes to mute the impact of social inequality on the gene pool. If 1/3 of all children born die before age 20, which children are in that third can carry a lot of information about social position; matters are very different if the mortality by age 20 is instead below 1%.)

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica; The Natural Science of the Human Species; Writing for Antiquity; Commit a Social Science; Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination