The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century is a book by Stephen Pinker in which he explains to everyone else why they are such bad writers.

Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing—and why should we care? From the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and the forthcoming Enlightenment Now

In this entertaining and eminently practical book, the cognitive scientist, dictionary consultant, and New York Times–bestselling author Steven Pinker rethinks the usage guide for the twenty-first century. Using examples of great and gruesome modern prose while avoiding the scolding tone and Spartan tastes of the classic manuals, he shows how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right. The Sense of Style is for writers of all kinds, and for readers who are interested in letters and literature and are curious about the ways in which the sciences of mind can illuminate how language works at its best.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fermenting Foods (Idiot’s Guides) by Wardeh Harmon is science applied to making stuff you can eat.

The art of fermenting foods is an ages-old craft that is enjoying a resurgence as people are discovering not only the benefits of live-culture foods, but the true pleasure of creating their own fermentations at home. Research is proving that live-culture foods can help reduce high cholesterol, strengthen and support digestive and immune systems, and help fight and prevent chronic diseases. The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Fermenting Foods will cover the amazing health benefits of fermented or “living” foods and the techniques for safely fermenting food at home. It will contain over 100 unique and delicious recipes for ferments of all types, from beer to tempeh to yogurt, with detailed recipes to guide the way.

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott is one of those rare books that exposes the engagement in the ultimate form of men’s work — warfare and such — but here focusing on female spies during the American Civil War. I’m reminded of this book, which is a novel based somewhat on reality of a woman who becomes a foot soldier during the same war.

Karen Abbott, the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City and “pioneer of sizzle history” (USA Today), tells the spellbinding true story of four women who risked everything to become spies during the Civil War.

Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little known aspects of the Civil War: the stories of four courageous women—a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow—who were spies.

After shooting a Union soldier in her front hall with a pocket pistol, Belle Boyd became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. The beautiful widow, Rose O’Neale Greenhow, engaged in affairs with powerful Northern politicians to gather intelligence for the Confederacy, and used her young daughter to send information to Southern generals. Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy Richmond abolitionist, hid behind her proper Southern manners as she orchestrated a far-reaching espionage ring, right under the noses of suspicious rebel detectives.

Using a wealth of primary source material and interviews with the spies’ descendants, Abbott seamlessly weaves the adventures of these four heroines throughout the tumultuous years of the war. With a cast of real-life characters including Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, General Stonewall Jackson, detective Allan Pinkerton, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, and Emperor Napoleon III, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy draws you into the war as these daring women lived it.

Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape by Jenna Miscavige Hill and Lisa Pulitzer is an autobiographical account of leaving, or should I say, escaping …. oh what the heck the title says it all.

Jenna Miscavige Hill, niece of Church of Scientology leader David Miscavige, was raised as a Scientologist but left the controversial religion in 2005. In Beyond Belief, she shares her true story of life inside the upper ranks of the sect, details her experiences as a member Sea Org—the church’s highest ministry, speaks of her “disconnection” from family outside of the organization, and tells the story of her ultimate escape.

In this tell-all memoir, complete with family photographs from her time in the Church, Jenna Miscavige Hill, a prominent critic of Scientology who now helps others leave the organization, offers an insider’s profile of the beliefs, rituals, and secrets of the religion that has captured the fascination of millions, including some of Hollywood’s brightest stars such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

Terrence Deacon’s “<The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain”

and

Stephen Pinker’s “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)”

Neither book is exceptionally new, and in fact, Pinker has cranked out a number of books since The Language Instinct. However, I think The Language Instinct is the best of Pinker’s volumes for this discussion. In it, he lays out the basic evolutionary psychology argument in a way that is most directly contrasted with the ideas in Deacon’s. Also, The Language Instinct has a great chapter called (if memory serves) “The Language Mavens” which is worth reading whether or not you agree with or even like the rest of Pinker’s book.

Pinker’s argument, first laid out in a paper with Bloom in Cosmides, Toobey and Barkow’s volume “The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture,” is that there is strong evidence that language is an adaptation (i.e., it is costly, complex, etc.) and thus, as an adaptation, is something subject to natural selection. Since language is mainly a cerebral brain function, we can assume that there are brain structures (mainly in the cerebrum) that facilitate language, and that these structures (language “modules,” in the parlance of evolutionary psychologists) are the actual traits under selection. Furthermore, we can assume that these traits are just like any other traits shaped by evolutionary forces, in that there are sets of genes that code for them. In essence, it is these genes that are actually under selection.

Pinker strengthens his argument by citing interesting aspects of language. Most compelling is probably Pinker’s discussion of pidgins and creoles, which he uses to argue that young children seem to be linguistic geniuses.

A pidgin is a partially formed derivative semi-language made of two or more languages brought together n one community by historical events such as slavery. The children who are exposed to the pidgin, as they grow up, turn the pidgin into a full blown language (a “creole”) with all the usual linguistic bells and whistles, including a reasonably extensive lexicon. This is an argument for the “built in” nature of language function because how could this happen were it not deeply encoded by genetic programs?

Deacon presents a very different argument. The main problem that Deacon has with Pinker is that Pinker’s model (and this applies broadly to evolutionary psychology in general) is biologically impossible. Neural systems, especially in the cerebrum, are not coded for at any important level of detail by sets of genes. Rather, they develop as the brain develops in response to the context in which they are growing. There is abundant evidence to support this view of neurological development. In fact, this view of neural development is pretty much the established central dogma for neurobiology. Deacon was speaking of this sort of thing before this had become so well established, and in areas such as anthropology and evolutionary psychology, where there appears to be a decade or so time lag between thinking about how brains have evolved and knowing about how brains actually develop and function. The point is, Pinker’s model can’t be true, as great as it sounds, because it relies on biological systems that don’t exist.

The fact that brains don’t work the way Pinker requires them to work is a sufficiently powerfully killer fact to derail the Pinker/Bloom/Cosmides/Toobey/Barkow paradigm that we need look no further. However, Deacon’s work offers more. It turns out that there are Darwinian processes working at the neurological level, in that the development of the brain systems that we see in adults involves overproduction followed by culling, which is precisely a Darwinian process. Even more interesting (but not, I think, as clear or well established) is Deacon’s assertion that languages themselves, due to the process of Darwinian selection in the symbolic realm, are adapted to be learned by children. Deacon asserts that a language ideal for use by adults may be very different than the language system we actually end up with.

So, children are not really linguistic geniuses. Rather, languages are shaped to be learned by children who are in some ways incredible learning machines, but with roughly the same limitations as adults.

An excellent discussion of Deacon and Pinker can be found on John Hawks’ blog: http://www.johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/minds/deacon.html John mentions that Chomsky’s view of language requires no intermediate forms, which seems implausible yet “is supported by some prominent evolutionists, such as Stephen Jay Gould, who views it as likely that other brain functions requiring symbolic logic were the targets of selection, and that language later arose as an artifact of culture.” Maybe, but I would like to add that in my view, the “fully blown or nothing” view of language is politically motivated and not necessarily well founded by evolutionary biology. Why political? John explains: “[the possibility of intermediate languages] makes it possible that today’s people still vary in their biological capabilities with respect to language, and that selection may still be happening.”

My interpretation of Deacon vs. Pinker leads me to support Deacon’s view over Pinkers in most respects, while John is more equivocal. This may be in part because I have had hours of conversation with Deacon about this, and I share his view of the symbolic/semiotic side of the argument.

However, John Hawks also points out differences between Deacon’s model and current paleo-neurobiology, based on research done more recently than the publication of The Symbolic Species, with which he (Hawks) is very familiar. So I strongly recommend that the reader visit his site and put some of that stuff in your brain as well.