Iliad, the women in the war

Helen once had about 45 suitors including Odysseus, the later hero. She married Menelaus by random choice, and eloped with Paris to Troy, which led to the Trojan war. So had the saying Helen caused the Trojan war. But the seduction of Helen by Paris was incited by Venus, who bribed Paris to get him Helen in exchange of naming herself miss universe before Zeus among the candidates of three: Hera, Athena, and Venus.

The war was between Greeks and Trojans. In the later stage of the war, Chryses, the daughter of Chryseis who was the Trojan priest of Apollo, was taken by Agamemnon of Greeks as captive. Refused an offer from Trojans at first, then gave in due to the plague given by Apollo, Agamemnon accepted the offer in the condition that Achilles gave him his captive Briseis. The lost of Briseis made Achilles angry and leave the Greek army. In the meantime, Achilles asked his mother Thetis to get help from Zeus to teach Agamemnon a lesson, by letting Trojans win.

In the duel of Paris and Menelaus for Helen, Paris was beaten by Menelaus but rescued by Venus, which made Hera angry, and persuade Zeus to interfere. Zeus arranged Pandoras injure Menelaus, which broke the truce.

In the battlefield, Greek Diomedes defeated Trojan Aeneas, the son of Venus. Venus was then injured by Diomedes when she tried to save his son. Athena gave Diomedes strengths to defeat Areas, her opponent of war.

The other women involved include Cassandra, the daughter of Priam, Andromache, Hector's wife, Hercuba, Priam's wife, Eris, sister of Ares, Iris, a divine messenger, Leto, mother of Apollo. Although Iliad is an epic for Achilles, all the events seems wage around women — the war captive, the goddess, the mothers, daughters, and wives, the beauty, the jealousy, the love, the hatred...

The Trojan war was initiated and controlled by the gods and goddess. From the comparison of goddess, you may predict the winner in the competition of Venus with Hera and Athena for miss universe. Hera is a strong goddess for war, for she has the talent of boosting morales. "there Hera stood still and raised a shout like that of high-hearted brazen voiced stentor, whose cry was as loud as that of fifty men together. 'Argives, shame on cowardly creatures, brave in semblance only..." Venus on the other hand is a weaker for the war, as his father Zeus said: "my child, it has not been given you to be a warrior. Attend henceforth to your own delightful matrimonial duties, and leave all this fightings to sudden Ares and to Athena." 

Three body

Three body by Liu Cixin tells an epic of human's Odyssey to the universe, spanning 20000 Earth years. It's a great science fiction in many ways,  full of dazzling imaginations and thrilling plots. It integrates the traditional Sci-fi, Chinese Wuxia, game theory, fairy tales, moral dilemma, history, and humanistic concern.

Scientifically, he invents the concepts like universe sociology, universal axioms, dark forest, interstellar deterrence, photon attack, dimension attack, light-speed spaceship, wall-face plan, and staging plan. It presents a grand picture of the human future with significant progress in science, yet still a dust in the universe. it describes the endless cycling of war and peace, as well as human ambition and desperation. He cleverly avoids the detail images of three-body,  leaving a "white" for the readers to fill. 

Philosophically, he projects the conflicts of human ideas to the aliens, and creates a dread scene of natural selection.  In the last-day war, we can see the familiar ethical dilemma of killing for survival in the lifeboat case of 1884. Interestingly, we can see the book is affected by Philip Dick from the plots in "The shadow of the man in the high castle" (the invasion of three-body) and "Mr. Spaceship" (sending brain to the space). However with all the dreadful fates, he leaves us the hope of better survival with exploration and love.

I don't like the first book of the trilogy because of its superficial dialogues and plain characters, but I do like the second the third book of the trilogy with much better plots, thoughts, and structure.

The epic of Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh was a king of Uruk, who was strong and handsome but oppressed his people. He had a habit of bedding the virgin brides, until one day he met his comrade Enkidu, a wild man made by the Goddess to be his rival pair. They fought together in the cedar forest and killed the forest watcher Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. The Goddess punished them by killing Enkidu, and Gilgamesh lamented his comrade's sacrifice, then set out for a journey to look for immortality.

Since the beginning of humankind, we are looking for the meaning of life, which is the theme of most epic poems: kings fighting wars for sex or honor to leave their names on family trees or stones because immortality is impossible for human. This earliest epic poem from 4000 years ago caries many hints of human history: the contents of the Bible, the vanish of Neanderthals, the homosexuality, the polytheism, the instructions to the future kings...

"I will set up my name where the names of famous men are written; and where no man's name is written I will raise a monument to the gods." Isn't this familiar to us modern human? To be famous as celebrities, to be Nobel laureates, billionaires, champions, stars, Presidents, and the first to grow potato on Mars...

"He is shorter, he is bigger of bone, he is the one who was raised on the milk of wild beasts. His is the greatest strength. Now Gilgamesh ass met his match." After having sex with a prostitute for 6 days and 7 nights, "his body was bound as though with a cord, his knees gave way when he started to run, his swiftness was gone. Enkidu was grown weak." This may indicates the meeting of Neanderthals and homo sapients 50000 years ago in the middle East. And the death of Enkidu hinted the vanish of Neanderthals 30000 years ago.

"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari

What do you believe, fairy tales, God, creationism, evolutionism, liberalism, Buddhism, Islamism, Christianism, capitalism, communism, science, or singularity? In <Sapiens: A Brief History ofHumankind>, Yuval Noah Harari drew a big picture of human history from 2 million years ago till now. His main argument is that fictional ideas make human stand out from other organisms on the Earth. We continually pursue the basic question of who we are, and what we survive for; we conjure up enormous ideas, stories, and isms to survive and outperform other species, but to nowhere.

The story starts at the prehistory Sapiens migration out of Africa and expansion to every corner of the Earth, then goes through the cognitive revolution, agricultural revolution, and scientific and industrial revolution until the intelligence designs of today. One of the significant views of the author is that the agriculture revolution is a fraud that makes individual human suffers rather than enjoys. And he thinks farmers lived a miserable life compared to hunter-gathers; we moderns still have the physics of 2 millions years ago, yet we mainly live on carbohydrate foods (corn, rice, wheat), which get us the modern diseases—diabetes, obesities, dental caries, and atherosclerosis, a recent popular view that makes some people want to go back to the living style of hunter-gathers.

The author tried to tell his story with objectivity, and argue from different angles with underlying humors, which make the book an interesting pitch. In the meantime, you can feel the pessimistic tone that shadows the individual fate although the author tried to make the balance. Most times, we live in illusions and delusions, which make our life happy and meaningful, and humankind with astounding achievements. On the other hand, we feel empty and uneasy for our fate. This perplexity hangs over us all the time, and it is hard to believe the human society organized by fabricated ideas and isms has gone so far.

Book reading in 2015

I have no resolution for 2015, but I finished reading 16 books in total. Specifically, 1 novel and 15 non-novel. More specifically, 4 on psychology, 4 on skills, 3 on evolution, 2 on literature, and each on history, education, and cuisine. I gave 5 stars for 5 books, 4 stars for 9 books, and 3 stars for 2 books. The best book of 2015 reading is <2066> for fiction, and <Neanderthal Man: In search of Lost Genomes> for non-fiction.  My goal for 2016 is 50 books, or 1 book every week.

“Neanderthal Man: In search of the lost genome" by Svante Pabbo

When I was a child, I was enchanted by the mysterious atmosphere of graveyards, hoping to see some skeletons, and know their lost stories. It seems I am not alone. Svante Pabbo, the Swedish molecular anthropologist is one of the most famous people to build a career on his childhood’s dream.

In a new memoir “Neanderthal Man: In search of the lostgenome", Svante Pabbo tells us a vivid story of how a curious and sentimental boy’s dream turns true. When he was a child, Svante Pabbo was attracted to Egyptian mummies and fascinated by their mysteries, hoping to solve the puzzles around the mummies one day. It was not until he was a graduate student that Svante Pabbo got the spark to analyze the genome of Egyptian mummies, when molecular biology started to boom in 1980s. Followed by a series of questions in 25 years, this initial maneuver led to his final success on sequencing the genome of Neanderthal man.

In the first chapter, Svante Pabbo described an eureka in 1996, when his student Matthias Krings decoded a fragment of the mitochondria DNA sequence from the DNA sample extracted from a 40000 years old Neanderthal Man that was excavated from the Neander Valley in Germany. He was so excited and cautious too that he did not open the champagne until he was confident with the results after several repeats. This breakthrough gave him confidence on decoding genes in ancient humans.

In the following chapters, Svante Pabbo tells his story in a chronological order, with logical questions step by step leading to the final answer. He first asked whether DNA could survive after tissue death. Answering this question, he heated the calf liver in the lab oven at 50 C for days, and got a few hundred nucleotides. Next, he asked how long the DNA could survive after tissue death. He obtained the samples of Egyptian mummies from East Germany through an anthropologist friend, and used nuclear dye to stain the cartilage and skin cells of the samples. After he found positive nuclear staining in these samples, he was sure the DNA is still there, he then extracted the DNA from these samples, and cloned the extraction into bacteria for sequencing. This experiment proved the preservation of DNA to as old as about 4000 years.

Contamination of modern DNA is the main concern of the whole business. Therefore, how to get rid of the contamination during the DNA extraction is the next question. Svante Pabbo and his students tried many ways to reduce the contamination to almost none, such as making a clean room with everything inside clean of DNA. They also developed some internal controls to solve this problem. Now the ancient DNA is cleared of contamination, they can continue to ask the next question: could 40000 years old Neanderthal man DNA be sequenced?

They first tried with a frozen Siberian mammoth about 50000 years old. If this works, the Neanderthal man will also work. They succeeded to get the mitochondrial DNA of this mammoth in 1994. Then they went on to extract DNA from Neanderthals. Now back to the scene in chapter one, they got lucky again and did get mitochondrial DNA of Neanderthals. Mitochondrial DNA has only a few hundreds nucleotides, whereas the nuclear genome has 6.4 billion nucleotides; thus, to see the big map of Neanderthal genome, they need to sequence the nuclear genome.

Most ancient DNA is degraded; therefore, it is not easy to get enough DNA to sequence nuclear DNA. Svante Pabbo examined Neandersal samples from several digging sites where the Neandersals were excavated. He could get very small amount of nuclear DNA from a few well-preserved Neandersal samples. Luckily, the DNA sequencing technology now makes it possible to use little DNA to sequence the whole genome. In 2010, Svante Pabbo and his group finally sequence the first Neandersal genome.

At last, the question comes to the human origin. Did Neandersals contribute DNA to modern human? Did modern human inbreed each other, and have gene flow to each other? By comparing the genomes of Neandersals with those of modern human of European, East Asian, African, American, and South Asian, Svente Pabbo found Neandersals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Europe than with present-day humans in Africa, and drew the conclusion that non-African modern human have 1-4% of their DNA originated from Neandersals 30000 years ago, when they met and inbred with each other in Middle East. After that short convention, Neandersals disappeared and modern human continued to migrate to the other part of the world and replaced the aboriginal ancient human.

Svante Pabbo’s writing is concise and logical; there is no jargon for laymen, and it is very easy to read.