Madrid, March 2020. The situation we find ourselves in is absolutely extraordinary. And it seems most likely that I have never used those words with such utter conviction.
In “Snow” Orhan Pamuk paints a city, Kars, where climate phenomena disrupt normality, setting the scene for dramatic events that engulf all characters in the novel. Whilst the Turkish city’s roads were closed due to heavy snowfall, in real life the coronavirus has sent the entire country into ever more strict home confinement. There is an ocean of fear here too, but of a very different kind. At least for us it feels as if time will be on our side to put an end to this horror.
Last month Iris.ai was declared a Top Ten contestant in the highly coveted international AI XPrize competition, and Civio released its Verba Volant news subtitle project after months of great work. But it all seems like a distant illusion now. Time has blurred the recent past and forces us –and specially those like me particularly vulnerable in a pandemic scenario– to fight against a very natural angst, longing for someone, anyone, to slightly press the fast forward button.
In the meantime, and as all priorities get completely reevaluated in the face of death, we can nonetheless read. For example on topics that sharpen the contrast between advances developed over millions of years, and the current, vertiginous events that send shockwaves across the entire world in the span of a few weeks.
Juan Luis Arsuaga, a prestigious Spanish paleoanthropologist, has written an interesting book titled “Life, the great story”. The non-fiction work is written in a style totally different from that used by other authors that approach the subject matter, like Yuval Noah Harari. The pluses? It is tremendously modest and honest providing the reader with a multiplicity of conflicting views held by various top international scientists on key evolutionary debates. The minuses? The book’s structure is complex –mostly intra chapter–, resulting at times hard to follow, and it isn’t always clear what are the author’s main thesis are. At times it feels more like an encyclopedia than an essay.
Whilst I have a preference for more thesis-anchored works, I am really thankful to Arsuaga for the opportunity to get a much more than decent overview of the latest research findings on the subjects of both general life and human life specifically. The differentiation of Neanderthals’ from our species based on them being eminently practical, an analysis of the positions separating ‘neodarwinists’ from ‘ultradarwinists’, and concepts like Hamilton’s inclusive fitness theory, reciprocal altruism, mutualism or stable evolutionary strategies are a fascinating read for a non-expert.
