So if I read a book that talks about super-germs and then feel sick two days later, am I sick or is my imagination overactive? Medical students’ disease or the fact that I share a house with someone who was sick last week? Not that Unnatural Selection by Emily Monossson has anything in it to tell me how hypochondrial I am being. But it does have enough bits and pieces in it to make me feel nervous. And, unlike my last “scientific” book I read, there are references — almost a quarter of the book in my copy. And no holier-than-thou attitude either.
Yay science!
Except boo people, since, as Unnatural Selection points out, people are doing a lot of stuff that may have unintended long term consequences as weeds, bugs, and germs develop new resistance to our attempts to squash them out, or, in a more intriguing aspect I hadn’t know about before, re-activating genes that maybe haven’t been used for centuries. So yay evolution, except for the fact that such evolution in our tiny plant and microbe friends will likely screw us over big time in the coming years. At the end of The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, when they go see the locusts and talk about how all they’ve ever tried to do, and here the locusts still are, thriving, unsquashable, unstoppable, yep. Like that. We’re screwed.
So what to do, what to do? That isn’t really Unnatural Selection‘s scope, since it isn’t a fix-it-up book, but rather a watch-out-your-house-is-caving-in book. It stays scientific; there’s no fear-mongering. But I still get sleepy reading books like this, like the problem is so overwhelming that my brain actually starts turning itself off rather than want to keep reading. At the same time, as the book points out, a huge problem is agri-business, which I can affect only a little (buying antibiotic free meat, writing letters to parliament, etc.). But I can’t really stop Monsanto from tinkering around to get more herbicide-resistant crops that end up cross-breeding with weeds until the weeds are endemic and resistant to all known herbicides. So then I start to freak out, and the book talks about influenza, and I convince myself I have influenza, and I get even sleepier. I perked up at the third and final chapter on epigenetics, but then the book ends, without even so much as a conclusion, and I was left feeling adrift in a sea of antibiotic, herbicide and pesticide resistant super plants and microbes ready to destroy me. Maybe I’ll stay in my house for awhile.
Believable science. No assholery.
Unnatural Selection by Emily Monossson went on sale October 28, 2014.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.