Media Recs

This is one of my all-time favorite books, encompassing the life work of an evolutionary biologist and refreshing Charles Darwin’s lesser-known endeavors for a modern audience. Prum speaks on matters which have always sparked my interest but remained unearthed until reading this book: The existence of a current evolutionary ideology backbone that still supports racism and eugenics as unspoken solutions to problems, taught by my U.S. public school education growing up. The current way we are taught about Darwin’s work and about evolution as a science is only one logic-step away from supporting eugenics, in my opinion, and this book shows that Darwin didn’t support such things (and if we believe science and not racists, we can move past such flawed evolutionary science too).

This might seem like an odd choice to have on an urban engineering blog’s recommendations page, but my goal here is to lay out all my beliefs about what a better world would be and then work with that data later to finalize my functional (career-ready) beliefs one day, so I have included it. Thank you.

This is a world history book, different than the rest in the author’s scientific approach to his work, with Diamond even coining the term ‘historical science’ and calling his field to change their methods to this. It is one of the most popular world history books, and represents to me through its popularity much of the mainstream view of world history in historical fields. It encompasses Diamond’s life’s work, and puts forth comprehensive new theories of the time of human world history. To me, it is decidedly anti-racist, or at least scientific and realistic in its theories. Like a true scientist, Diamond sticks to the truth he has seen and nothing more. It also includes the theories of humans as mass-extinction agents (via hunting), not just now, but since antiquity. It has been crucial to my worldview, and in my deeper understanding of human nature.

This publication reviews the world’s first-ever successful, massive, indoor urban communal hub. OTH is essentially an indoor city park and city hall and shopping mall combined, plus library and other such charge-free public amenities. You can look up OTH elsewhere, but this article does a pretty great job covering all the bases. It is a structure located in Tampines, Singapore, and is nothing but fascinating to me.

Built Environment (1978-) 46, no. 1 (2020): 76–98. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45281089.