Immoderate Greatness. Why civilisations fail by William Ophuls.

This is a great short book that explains why and how civilisations collapse. Apparently, the problem is in their very nature. In their magnitude, in their Greatness. A comment by Thomas Homer-Dixon in the back of the book says, "Ophuls superbly synthesises a huge amount of literature and presents the synthesis in an easy accessible format with beautiful clear prose." It's true. The book is charged with a lot of analysis, but it is not a difficult read. You just need to be interested in the topic. Homer-Dixon continues, "There is no false optimism here. The patient (modern human civilisation) is critically and perhaps terminally ill," yeah, from Ophuls explanation, it seems that's the case. The book is divided in two big sections Biophysical limits (including ecological exhaustion, exponential growth, expedited entropy and excessive complexity) and Human Error (moral decay and practical failure). Each issue is explained in a separate chapter. But the book is not only about problems. Ophuls shares more of his wisdom at the end, and alternative to a solution in the very last paragraph.

The Beak of the Finch: a story of evolution in our time by Jonathan Weiner.

This is about empirical studies proving some of Darwin’s most important concepts. Weiner tells the story of Rosemary and Peter Grant, evolutionary biologists, who spent years in the Galápagos islands observing Finches. Their objective was to observe, witness evolution in real time. And they did. The book explains what and how they did their observations and most importantly how they came to their conclusions. One aspect I liked about the book is that the author takes its time going back to Darwin’s original ideas providing historical and scientific context. I particularly liked some segments where Weiner explains Darwin’s conflicting ideas, having been a religious person, and following Milton’s ideas and then realising about the reality of evolution. The Grant’s studied the shape, and sizes of the finches' beaks in all their varieties. Compared their eating and mating habits with their beaks and were able to draw connections. They found out that the islands have so many finch varieties so every variety could have different food sources, usually seeds. The kinds of seeds a finch can eat depends on the shape, size and strength of their beaks. The Grant’s noted that during the wet seasons all finches feasted on all kinds of seeds (the ones they could eat), but during dry seasons each variety would focus on their speciality. Finches would die when their special seeds were scarce. Just a tiny variation in the length of a beak would make a bird unable to open a seed and eat it. In hard times (draughts) hundreds of birds would die and the ones who survive would reproduce more. You can call this natural selection. This way finches would adapt to the kind of foods which are available at some point in time. This and sexual selection, females selecting males with particular characteristics (e.g. with long or deep beaks) would determine how variations happen. So variations -> natural selection + sexual selection.