On his book Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Cultures
Cover Interview of June 20, 2017
A close-up
Readers will see that from the outset of the book, I try to
convey the ways in which numbers are filtered into our lives in pervasive and
often undetected ways. Everything from our perception of time to our
self-esteem is impacted by the culturally specific means we use to quantify
things.
Consider the case of time, highlighted in the first chapter:
We have minutes and seconds not because of something that exists in the
physical universe, but because we hold on to the detritus of long-dead
languages in Mesopotamia, namely unusual base-60 number systems that were used
by speakers in that region millennia ago.
In the first chapter I highlight ways in which particular
number systems impact our lives, while presaging some of the major points of
the book. I note that languages vary dramatically in the kinds of numbers they
use, and some languages have few or no numbers. I also point out that number
systems are usually based around decimal, vigesimal, and quinary patterns
because most (but not all) numbers were developed after people recognized
correspondences between the quantities of their fingers and other items in
their surroundings.
However, humans arrived at such recognitions in haphazard
ways that were only concretized and disseminated through and across cultures
via number words. This dissemination ultimately reshaped the human story. These
and other points are hinted at in the first chapter, and explored more fully
later in the book.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
A close-up
Readers will see that from the outset of the book, I try to convey the ways in which numbers are filtered into our lives in pervasive and often undetected ways. Everything from our perception of time to our self-esteem is impacted by the culturally specific means we use to quantify things.
Consider the case of time, highlighted in the first chapter: We have minutes and seconds not because of something that exists in the physical universe, but because we hold on to the detritus of long-dead languages in Mesopotamia, namely unusual base-60 number systems that were used by speakers in that region millennia ago.
In the first chapter I highlight ways in which particular number systems impact our lives, while presaging some of the major points of the book. I note that languages vary dramatically in the kinds of numbers they use, and some languages have few or no numbers. I also point out that number systems are usually based around decimal, vigesimal, and quinary patterns because most (but not all) numbers were developed after people recognized correspondences between the quantities of their fingers and other items in their surroundings.
However, humans arrived at such recognitions in haphazard ways that were only concretized and disseminated through and across cultures via number words. This dissemination ultimately reshaped the human story. These and other points are hinted at in the first chapter, and explored more fully later in the book.