Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie

Jamie writes in a spare uncompromising style in this set of essays about landscape and her travels through some of the most remote parts of it. She shows us things most of us will not see, icebergs, the aurora from the Arctic circle, killer whales off the remote abandoned islands of St Kilda and Rona, cave drawings, and the estuary like view of human cells down a microscope in a pathology lab. What links the essays is a search for wilderness but Jamie is never cliched, never glorifying 'the wild' as something pure that we should attain to, but taking each experience as and of itself, never fearing to be crude or uncomplimentary. There are so many books about our experiences with nature that anything new to the canon needs to say something new, and Jamie does.

What I found curious was her urge to search for wildness, people do seem drawn to try and find the most remote 'untouched' landscapes, but that's to mistake what is before you.  I was at the Coop yesterday, just beside it the Dighty Burn flows out from a culvert, it's come from the Panbride Estate and past our house before getting there.  Beside the burn a tree leans over with grasses and bulbs at it's feet.  It's picturesque and a glimpse of wilderness in its own way, the small, as well as the epic, can be wild.

Wired for Culture: the natural history of human cooperation by Mark Pagel

Not an easy book to read, but ultimately rewarding and informative. Pagel draws on anthropology, evolutionary biology, neurology and philosophy to demonstrate how culture has evolved via natural selection of ideas and memes in exactly the same way as genes have evolved. Pagel takes us back to paleo-archaeology, presenting the evidence for physical changes in human physiognomy since hominids left Africa in parallel with the cultural changes. He examines the current scientific evidence with regard to issues such as changes in brain size and physiology, the emergence of cooking, language, agriculture and cities. He reveals our extraordinary evolutionary leap from beings who like most great apes would have loyalty only to people related to them, to the complex networks of altruism, mistrust and self regulation that are necessary for our complex cultures to exist. Densely written requiring concentration and time, but Pagel does repeat information in different chapters in a slightly different framework meaning that complex concepts do become clearer. Worth the effort!