"Happiness" nips "Lonesome George"
Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness had been predicted as the favorite to win the prestigious £10,000 annual British Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
"Happiness" beat five other titles including Henry Nicholl's Lonesome George, an account of the last known individual of a subspecies of Galapagos tortoise, immortalized in Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle.
George is believed to be 70-80 years old. No one knows the life span of giant tortoises, but they may be the longest-lived animals on the planet. One captured in 1766 lived for another 152 years, and it’s believed that some reach the age of 200.
For those of you missed the Tierney Lab Blog in the New York Times Science Section last week, the blog has held a naming contest for Lonesome George's newly adopted and long awaited spouse.
By Times writer, John Tierney's tab, Gracie seems to be the popular choice as of today. As Tierney writes: "But by the time George and his mate are old, how many humans will remember who the original Gracie was? Another famous spouse’s name that was nominated, Martha, would age better — George Washington’s fame should outlive George Burns’. But the Ecuadorans in charge of the Galapagos might well object that the name would be a vestige of Yankee imperialism."
Perhaps the safest name, Tierney suggests, is the one proposed by Adalgisa Caccone. She and her colleague at Yale University, Jeffrey R. Powell, have led an international team of biologists investigating the genetics of tortoises and iguanas in the Galapagos, have propsed taht new mate be named Esperanza, the Spanish word for hope.
Gilbert is a psychology professor at Harvard and a pioneer in the research of affective forecasting. In both the brilliant memorable talk (link below) and in his book, Gilbert discusses the evolution of the human brain and the pre-frontal cortex and our ability to simulate the future, illuminating a startling and fundamental mistake that both men and women make: we overestimate how future successes and failures will affect our happiness, for the better or worse.
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