As geeky as this may sound, it turns out that the problems inherent in making robot fish yield some of humanity’s deepest questions: How did we get here? What (and where) is thought? How much can we trust the symbols (words, images, digital signals) that dominate our lives? Long’s new book, “Darwin’s Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology,” is part Descartes, part MacGyver and part Douglas Adams, turning from rumination on the possibility of intelligence residing in a brainless body to tips on making artificial fish vertebrae out of coffee stirrers to the dopey yet endearing jokes that seem to flourish in laboratories all over the world.

Long works in a field called biorobotics, which builds physical devices to test hypotheses about animal behavior, rather than studying either the animal itself or digital models. Sometimes an animal can’t be studied for logistical reasons: marlins, for example, die in captivity and plesiosaurs are extinct. Computer models allow scientists to simulate complex, unreproducible conditions — say, the modeling of 10,000 generations of a particular organism — but as abstractions, they are prone to certain errors.

Robots, as Long explains, have their peculiar virtues. Long himself once created an impressive computer model illustrating how the marlin’s backbone helped the fish achieve its awe-inspiring swimming and leaping speeds, only to have a revered elder scientist note, “it appears to me that you’ve created a perpetual motion machine.” Robots, as Long points out, can’t violate the laws of physics. Instead of operating in a simulation of a physics-compliant environment, robots simply exist in the real universe, and must therefore play by the rules as a matter of course. At the same time, robots can be simplified to the degree that certain characteristics can be observed in isolation.

The main thing Long uses his robots to study is evolution. His first robot-fish experiment involved creating a bunch of large, tadpole-like “Evolvabots” designed to do one thing: swim toward a light source. With his team of students and fellow scientists — Long makes a point of mentioning the names of everyone who made significant contributions to his projects, a big departure from spotlight-hogging senior-scientist tradition — he rated their success at this imitation of “food-seeking” behavior. The robots (called Tadros) were given tails of varying degrees of stiffness and length and were then “mated” (algorithmically) over several generations to see if this would lead to selection for certain kinds of tails. The hypothesis Long and his colleagues wanted to test was that primeval invertebrates evolved backbones because it improved their ability to feed.

The experiment didn’t work out as they’d hoped, mostly because, in designing the experiment, the scientists had failed to fully appreciate a factor called wobble. One of the most intriguing and important aspects of “Darwin’s Devices” is the way it places the reader in the lab, at the shoulder of people doing hands-on science, sharing in their frustrations (over disappointing data, recalcitrant grant committees and astutely critical colleagues), their successes and their failures. And Long does this so lucidly that you find yourself caught up in the process, grasping the basics and eager to learn the results. It’s the best depiction of how science really works that I’ve ever read.

“Darwin’s Devices” could also administer a chastening rebuke to the many laypeople who talk and think sloppily about evolution. Determining exactly how growing a backbone helped ancient invertebrates thrive might seem superfluous to the quick-and-dirty school of cocktail-party Darwinism. Obviously, backbones helped because otherwise vertebrate animals would never have evolved. But as “Darwin’s Devices” illustrates, we can easily mistake the reasons for the evolution of certain traits by jumping to what seem like “logical” conclusions, and natural selection is not the only evolutionary pressure applied to a species. There are times when you just have to build something to understand how it works.

For example, the next type of robot Long and his colleagues developed they named Madeleine (because it is shaped, roughly, like the little French cakes). Madeleine had four paddles at each corner of its body, much like the extinct plesiosaur, a marine reptile. This creature was a tetrapod: a sea-dwelling animal descended from land-dwelling ancestors. Living aquatic tetrapods include whales, dolphins and sea otters, but “none of the living aquatic tetrapods ever use all four appendages to swim underwater — they only use two.” With Madeleine, the researchers hoped to figure out why this is so, since “it sure seemed like using four flippers for propulsion should be better in almost any way imaginable.”

It isn’t, actually, and that launched yet another branch of inquiry about why the plesiosaur used four flippers at all. If it’s that easy for legitimate scientists to be mistaken about something as seemingly simple as four-flippered locomotion, you can see why so many of them regard popular but highly speculative pastimes like evolutionary psychology as pseudoscience.

One party who has found the activities of Long and his robotics lab keenly interesting is the U.S. government. It’s not a big leap from “robot fish” to the notion of defense applications, and Long, despite a youthful infatuation with all things military, finds this troubling. But not that troubling! After a bit of hemming and hawing about it — noting that, if over 50 nations are pursuing military robot research, then American scientists can’t afford to opt out — he plunges into rampant (and, I must say, fascinating) theorizing about what sorts of robots would work best in battle. They need to be complex enough to cope with contingencies, but simple (i.e., cheap) enough that commanders aren’t afraid to burn through them.

Long ends with these cautionary words: “The reality is that evolving robots are and will be created for academic, industrial and military purposes. This means that we should all become students of robots of any kind, whether they be evolving robots, nonevolving autonomous robots, or semiautonomous and remotely controlled military robots. We need to understand robots so we can proceed with due caution and deliberation.” Yikes! And probably true. “Darwin’s Devices” will get some of us, at least, a little closer.

The HuffPo has, they claim, a specific editorial policy against promoting “conspiracy theories.” It is selectively enforced.

But publishing the new agey holistic naturopath crystal-healing Beverly Hills quack-to-the-stars bullshit of Arianna’s good friend’s nutritionist is one (stupid, potentially dangerous) thing. Giving a platform to the anti-science creationist dingbats at The Discovery Institute is a step in a darker direction.

The Discovery Institute aims to make kids learn about “Intelligent Design,” a thing evangelical Christians invented because they were sick of getting made fun of for saying out loud that they believe that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs. “Intelligent Design” has no basis in science — indeed, it is a sick parody of science — and the motivations behind getting into classrooms are purely political.

As part of their “Religion and Science” feature (which looks to be a lot of fashionable mysticism from the usual pop-philosophy hacks — like good ol’ Deepak Chopra) the HuffPo published a post from Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Klinghoffer blaming Darwin for eugenics and the Nazis.

This is cancerous bullshit. Professional anti-science propagandists like Klinghoffer are free to write and publish it, but no one with any respect for their readers or sense of responsibility to the truth should promote it.

Scientist and science writer Eric Michael Johnson responded to Klinghoffer, on the Huffington Post.

Here’s how his last paragraph reads:

The Nazi policies enacted three-quarters of a century ago this month were certainly bad enough, we don’t need to spread the blame onto those who had no connection with them. Creationists do a poor service to the memory of Holocaust victims by using their deaths in a politically motivated attack against science. David Klinghoffer, his fellow creationists, and those who give them a platform should be ashamed of themselves for pushing and allowing a tactic rejected by a US federal court judge as “breathtaking inanity” should be strongly criticized.

Here’s how the last sentence originally read:

David Klinghoffer and his fellow creationists should be ashamed of themselves, and the decision by Huffington Post to give a platform to an organization pushing a tactic rejected by a US federal court judge as “breathtaking inanity” should be strongly criticized.

Giving a space to quacks to sell vitamin supplements to morons is insulting enough, but actually allowing a shameless asshole like Klinghoffer to use the Holocaust to promote his right-wing crusade to teach children lies is beyond the pale. Platform or no, there’s no reason for anyone rational or even anyone with a sense of shame to continue giving Huffington free content.

But if the university has a policy permitting the distribution of any “noncommercial materials,” why not just hand out straightforward religious tracts, without the risk of spreading evolutionary theory yourself? Cameron makes several false and misleading claims at the beginning of the video about how “our kids” aren’t allowed to “pray in public” or to “freely open a Bible in school.” (In fact, the first time I ever read the Old Testament was, yes, for a class at U.C. Berkeley.) Printing a tract as a foreword to “The Origin of Species” is supposed to be a clever end run around this sort of “censorship,” but then Cameron himself indicates that the censorship isn’t actually happening since it’s against university rules.

As for Comfort’s introduction, it says very little about “The Origin of Species” per se, limiting itself to familiar creationist canards about the complexity of the human eye and the absence of “transitional forms” from the fossil record. (It’s hard to lend much credence to the scientific arguments of a guy who thinks chimpanzees are monkeys.) There’s a brief biographical section on Darwin’s life, most of which has been plagiarized from a short text by Dr. Stan Guffey, as some bloggers have demonstrated. The rest has been plagiarized from Brian Regal’s introduction to the Barnes and Noble edition of “The Autobiography of Charles Darwin,” except for a timeline, which was plagiarized from an online resource. Nearly half of the introduction isn’t even about evolution at all, and consists of a hodgepodge of strained sky-diving metaphors and horror stories about pedophiliac killers.

Lastly, although Comfort claimed in advance that “not one jot or tittle” of the text of “The Origin of Species” would be missing from his edition, four entire chapters were omitted. Comfort said that this was an error limited to the first printing, but his critics have claimed that these sections were intentionally left out because they contain strong evidence for Darwin’s theory.

Perhaps, but that presupposes that Comfort actually expects students to read the books his minions distributed. Any college professor can tell you how difficult it is to get students to do the assigned reading, let alone plow through a 19th-century scientific treatise that isn’t even on the syllabus. Look just a little harder and you can tell that Origin Into Schools has nothing to do with books, reading, the intellectual formation of what Cameron calls “our future doctors, lawyers and politicians” or the free exchange of ideas.

The Living Waters Web site reveals Comfort to be obsessed with goading atheists, specifically Richard Dawkins, who is featured in almost as many of the site’s videos as Comfort is and whom Comfort has challenged to a public debate. (Dawkins has refused on the grounds that Comfort is an “ignorant fool,” but some negotiation appears to be ongoing.) Dawkins nicknamed him “Banana Man,” after Comfort used the handy snacking features of the fruit to argue for intelligent design. Comfort recently sent Dawkins an anonymous “gift basket” containing his edition of “The Origin of Species” plus a banana, and said, with regard to the proposed debate, “I think I can smell English chicken.”

Apart from the Cameron video, the main mention of Origin Into Schools on the Living Waters home page consists of an article titled “Origin of Species Campaign Enrages Atheists.” The article announces that Comfort has stopped answering questions about the project because of an “angry backlash” and quotes with obvious relish opponents (including Dawkins) who recommend ripping Comfort’s introduction out of the book, as well as a few who suggest burning it. The site invites comments, the majority of which come from critics, then cherry-picks the most inflammatory to illustrate how “filled with hatred” atheists are.

If the true intention of Origin Into Schools is to introduce college students to creationism, Living Waters seems remarkably uninterested in finding out whether this has been achieved. It dedicates itself to presenting Comfort as assaulted by mouth-frothing atheists who advocate book-burning (just like Hitler!) but who haven’t got the balls to put their ideology to the test of a public debate. Not coincidentally, another regular feature of the Living Waters site is a department called “Christian Persecution News.”

What all this drama is actually designed to produce is donations, which will “expand this give-away to many more universities.” The greater the heathen rage against Comfort and projects like Origin Into Schools, the deeper the faithful will dig into their pockets to support him. It’s also worth noting that the more Comfort grandstands for creationism, the more essential Dawkins’ combative response appears to be. (Dawkins, like Comfort, has a new book out this fall.) In a culture war that more and more comes to resemble the bouts of the World Wrestling Federation, the two have formed a relationship that could even be called symbiotic. Nature is full of bizarre survival mechanisms, as Darwin himself could surely have testified, but politics produces even stranger ones every day.

At the ribbon cutting, Ken Ham, the rugged-faced CEO and president of Answers in Genesis, the nonprofit ministry that built the museum, tells an enthusiastic crowd that the Creation Museum will undo the damage done 82 years ago when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand in the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. “It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom,” Ham says. “We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn’t prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science.”

The Book of Genesis, that famous first chapter of the Bible, which Ham’s group has interpreted to claim that the universe was created in six 24-hour days a mere 6,000 years ago, serves as the blueprint for the museum. Astronomy, geology and evolution, as they are commonly understood in mainstream science, have no place here. As Ham later tells me, the conclusions of modern science are not to be trusted, as they are biased by the fickle reasoning of man and a modern antagonism toward faith. On the other hand, he says, the Book of Genesis is true “from the first word to the last.”

With a staff of nearly 300 employees, Answers in Genesis, devoted to “Biblical apologetics,” produces a daily radio program fed to 860 stations, operates a Web site instructing visitors how to out-argue Darwinists, and organizes about 300 traveling lectures each year. It’s also a well-oiled money-raising machine and opened the $27 million museum without a penny of debt to banks or lenders.

The museum is situated in Petersburg, Ky., just 20 miles southwest of Cincinnati, an area chosen in large part because it’s within a one-day drive for two-thirds of the country or 200 million Americans. Recent polls show that 40 percent of all Americans would feel at home with the views put forth in the Creation Museum. Only about an equal percentage accept the underlying message of the country’s mainstream science museums. Only 39 percent answer yes to the question, “Do you believe that human beings as we know them developed from earlier species of animals?”

The museum’s 49 acres of carefully landscaped grounds are encircled by a tall metal fence. Visitors tempted to enter without paying will be discouraged by armed guards in black state-trooper-like uniforms and attack dogs. On Monday, just outside the fence, a group of 50 die-hard atheists and skeptics are gathered in the light rain under a “Rally for Reason” banner. Overhead, a small airplane pulls a sign that says, “Thou Shalt Not Lie.” Edwin Kagin, national legal director for American Atheists, explains that as far as he’s concerned, AIG “can teach that things fall up if they want. But we want to make it clear that this nonsense is not accepted by those who do not share its fundamentalist religious views. They are trying to drag us back to the Dark Ages.”

Among the damp roadside protesters is Lawrence Krauss, author and physics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and a member of the advisory board of Defcon: Campaign to Defend the Constitution, the group that paid for the airplane tugging around the Seventh Commandment. Krauss calls the museum “anti-science” and says it reflects an erosion of American science education, posing “a threat to American kids already struggling just to get the basic concept of what science is and how it works.”

Inside, the museum is organized according to the “Six C’s of History”: creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, Christ, and the final C, consummation, which isn’t given much time or space in the exhibits because there still isn’t consensus on just how the apocalypse will come down or who goes to heaven and when. At the Creation exhibit, two young T. rexes peacefully watch fish swim in a placid pond. Two curly-haired robotic kids play nearby. In any other place, this would be the setup for a massacre. But this pre-Noah’s-flood Jurassic Park is benign. The animals are vegetarians and plants don’t have thorns. The fossil record, says the museum, confirms all of this.

Mark Looy, co-founder of Answers in Genesis, is walking me through the museum. He explains that the great flood is responsible for the fossil record. Plants and animals are distributed in different strata based not on the time of their formation, but on where the flood waters moved them before receding. Those areas where no thorns or other defensive or hostile plants are found, he explains, are pre-flood forms.

Later Ham tells me that his skeptics, who cling to the “millions of years” theory, are wrong about when dinosaurs stalked the Earth. He cites a recent discovery of intact blood vessels in some T. rex tissue, suggesting that the finds are only thousands of years old, not 65 million, as paleontologists say. “They will try to come up with an explanation to keep the fossils old,” says Ham, “but we don’t need to. The explanation of their age is already right there in the Bible.”

For generations, paleontologists have shown that dinosaurs and humans never trod the Earth at the same time, that in fact with the exception of birds (modern-day dinosaurs), they never got within 60 million years of each other on the timeline of natural history. Not so, says Looy. “They all had to exist at the same time because they were all made on the same day. There may not be any fossil evidence showing dinosaurs and people in the same place at the same time. But it is clearly written that they were alive at the same time.”

In the Garden of Eden in Genesis, says Ham, when everything was still perfect, animals weren’t predators or prey, so the museum’s designer, Patrick Marsh, is able to crowd grizzly bears, wildcats, zebras, kangaroos, an iguanodon and several other dinosaurs into the same little chunk of primeval Eden. After the fall, such a scene would result in a bloody mess.

Buddy Davis, a technician and artist who has also made dinosaurs for use in secular exhibits, tells me he’s much happier seeing his dinosaurs at the Creation Museum, promoting faith in the Bible. “I want to see God get credit for his creation,” he says. “I look around and see so much beauty — even if it is marred by sin — and to think that it all just came from an explosion billions of years ago is just wrong. To me it’s obvious the hand of God is behind it. As scripture says, ‘They are without excuse’ who do not believe.”

The Garden of Eden presents a series of scenes down a “trail of life.” In the first, a bearded, dark-haired Adam beckons to a mountain lion with one outstretched arm, while the other is wrapped around a little lamb. Smaller animals appear drawn to Adam, who is perhaps naming them, God’s first assignment for him. A bit farther along we’re introduced to Eve, looking like a great big brown Barbie and staring intently into Adam’s eyes. Adam and Eve are naked, and Maggie and Tom Thorne, a pair of Christians visiting from Michigan, are smiling at the scene. They agree it seems a little unfair for God to expect two such well-designed specimens not to get around to sinning pretty quickly. A few yards further we see Adam and Eve again, this time standing in a pool of water, their genitals coyly obscured by lily pads. Now they definitely appear to be grappling with the chemistry that will get them in big trouble.

An oversize cobra-like snake makes an appearance, and before you know it, Eve is holding grape-size, blood-colored fruits in her outstretched hand, offering knowledge of good and evil to a flummoxed-looking Adam. “We’re not sure what kind of fruit it was, but we do know it wasn’t an apple,” says Looy, perhaps to demonstrate the kind of questions the several Ph.D. researchers at the museum are now toiling over in the labs behind the walls of the exhibition space.

In the next scene, after the fall from grace, Adam and Eve, looking far less happy than before, are standing next to two lambs they have slaughtered on a sacrificial stone table. The sacrifice has a practical value — the original couple are now wearing lambskin suits and the lambs are skinless — and a spiritual one; the lambs are sacrificed, a visitor explains to me, in partial payment for the debt incurred by Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of knowledge. I tell the visitor it seems unfair for the lamb to pay for their mistake. “Well, it wasn’t enough,” he says. “God had to send his only Son to pay the ultimate price for their sin.” When I tell him that sounds kind of extreme, he looks at me and shakes his head slowly a couple of times before moving on.

Inside the Garden of Eden, Nancy Senai, who is visiting from Lansing, Mich., tells me, “It feels pretty nice to have something that is for God and about God, instead of all the evolution in other places.” I ask her if she thinks the history presented here is true. “God said it clearly, and I believe it the way he said it,” she says. “Everything else is uncertain.”

The great flood, which washed away all life on earth, is the key to understand the Catastrophe exhibit and the museum’s version of natural history. After Adam and Eve’s original sin, God told Noah to build an ark. He sent him two of every kind of land animal to repopulate the earth. Visitors to the museum walk among robotic representations of Noah and his building crew as they construct a supposedly full-scale section of the boat. After Noah has invited his sinning neighbors onto the ark and warned them of the coming flood, they mock him or are dissuaded from heeding his advice by the small pressures of daily life. The door slides shut and they are left behind to drown in the 40-day deluge that formed everything we see on Earth today, from Mt. Everest to Death Valley.

In Ham’s view, the great flood explains not only where scientists find fossils today but also the topography of the modern world. The Grand Canyon, he informs me, was made in a matter of days or weeks as the waters of the flood rushed away and the land was reclaimed. In the exhibit, you walk through a winding canyonlike corridor with spinning, dizzying lights into a wide-open room with videos, exhibits and diagrams explaining the hydrology of instant canyon-making. Ham says that instant canyon-making is based on the fact that volcanoes, such as Mount St. Helens, created reservoirs of water for a time in their altered topography. When those reservoirs breached, deep grooves were cut by the flowing water, leading to the fast formation of canyons.

After the flood, Noah’s descendants multiply again on Earth, but not quickly or broadly enough to satisfy God, who then introduces a slew of new languages to drive people apart, resulting in their dispersal around the globe. The ensuing C-for-Confusion theme is represented through a gritty and menacing back alley postered with newspaper headlines about the rise in abortion, drug use, homosexuality and teen suicide.

The entire exhibit, in fact, is awfully grim. A montage slide show of fetuses, starving kids, swastikas, tourniquet-bound arms ready for the needle bombard the wall in a room with a soundtrack of blaring sirens, boots marching in unison, and crying kids. In the middle of this urban mess is a big wrecking ball with the words “Millions of Years” carved into it. Ham blames the notion that the Earth is quite a bit older than the Bible suggests for just about all the world’s problems. Evolution, which requires large amounts of time for small changes to accumulate into larger ones, makes it far too easy for people not to believe the Bible, he says. And that loss of belief “is at the root of modern evil.”

Inside the Confusion exhibit, I strike up a conversation with Tim Shaw, a high school student visiting from Florida. “I don’t care how long it took to make the Grand Canyon,” he tells me. “It’s not how old it is that matters to me. What matters is being right with God. Darwin’s theory has no God. It can’t be right. I don’t know if this story is truer than Darwin’s theory, but I do know it’s better.”

Shawn is a composer of classical music, but may be better known as the son of famous New Yorker editor William Shawn and the younger brother of actor and playwright Wallace Shawn (of “My Dinner With Andre” and “The Princess Bride,” among many other projects). The matter of his family name is not merely one of pedigree. His upbringing, as “Wish I Could Be There” shows, encouraged whatever genetic predisposition to anxiety he had. His was a childhood marked by an excess of the usual secrets and lies. There was the matter of the Shawns’ “ambivalence” toward their Jewishness — his mother preferred to identify with her Swedish side rather than her Russian side, and William and one of his brothers changed their name from “Chon” to the decidedly more Anglo “Shawn.” There was his mentally ill twin sister, Mary, who, at the age of 8, was sent to a home and seen only once a year.

Then there was his father’s own agoraphobia, never discussed among the family but probably inherited and modeled by his son. (William persuaded his office building to maintain one manually operated elevator for his use.) There was his mother’s terror of storms, and her habit of ruling little Allen’s life with a ferocity matched only by her back-seat driving in taxicabs. And finally, there was the matter of his father’s double life with a second “wife,” New Yorker writer Lillian Ross. He interrupted road trips for surreptitious visits to phone booths; at home he took Ross’ calls on a separate line, vanishing into a closet with the receiver. Yet Shawn did not learn of his father’s lifelong affair until he was almost 30, when, he told the New York Times, someone “a bit angry at men … mentioned it in the context of a speech in which she was speaking disparagingly of the way men behave.”

The name “Lillian Ross” is conspicuously absent from “Wish I Could Be There”; so is Jamaica Kincaid, Allen’s ex-wife, with whom he has two children. For a man from such a famous family, of whom so much is known, the tactful silence seems almost too coy. But even in this quasi memoir, Shawn wants his privacy. Indeed, as an agoraphobic — someone who is afraid of both open spaces and enclosed places, who, when asked what he is afraid of, might plausibly reply “everything” — he is obsessed with control and dreads revealing more of himself than he must. “Severe phobias can bring with them the fear of discovery and of becoming an outcast,” he writes. “Shame begins inside, with being afraid to admit, even to oneself, that one is in some respects hampered.”

Shawn argues, rather sensibly, that while phobics are predisposed to their anxieties, those anxieties may be triggered and conditioned by environment and experience. “Wish I Could Be There” uses science, clearly put into layman’s terms, to talk about the relationship between the mind and body during a phobic episode. Shawn reviews some basic biology lessons about how the brain fires and the mind creates an explanation for the sweaty palms and racing heart — a “shoot first, ask questions later” scenario. Once you’re in the midst of responding to fear, your emotions step in to give you a way to think about and understand the panic: This open field must present a danger, otherwise why would I be having trouble breathing? In this way, a phobic’s fears are almost rational; the only other explanation for the body’s sudden attack, after all, would be that you were actually going crazy. The circuit is completed when the desire to explain the fear, to create a story around it, winds up reinforcing it.

There are certainly some weird phobias out there — ephebophobia, fear of adolescents — but the common ones are, Shawn thinks, common for a reason. From Darwin, he gets the idea that our fears are vestiges of evolution, deformed and out of place in modern times: In open spaces, there is nowhere to hide from attack; in the dark, predators lurk around any corner. Phobias are the cure that has become a disease. (Darwin, too, was terribly anxious, and “would awaken trembling in terror in the night,” although in his day he apparently suffered without understanding.)

From Freud, Shawn gets everything else — notions of trauma, memory, repression and, most crucially, “the insight that we carry our past inside us as a permanent present.” He seems eager to redeem Freud’s usefulness, bristling that “new books on the brain seem almost mockingly dismissive” of him. Not so Shawn. He dwells on the case study of 5-year-old Little Hans, who “developed a morbid terror of horses” around the same time that his mother had another baby. Shawn admires Freud for recognizing that “Hans’s phobia was constructed on top of an evolutionarily primed wariness about animals” while understanding it as “Hans’s outlet for the conflicted longings and fears of punishment he hadn’t been able to express in other ways.”

Shawn has a literary mind, and it is no surprise that he’s drawn to such a literary thinker. “Freud’s genius revealed that the infinite resourcefulness of the human mind necessitates a greatly expanded concept of what can constitute ‘danger.’ The fear mechanism constructed for tigers in the forest can be used by humans to fight tigers in the mind.” (Feminists take note: Shawn’s discussion of hysteria makes no mention of Dora, the patient who famously broke off treatment, and whose story Freud published as his own.) The fact that he “never got over the suspicion” that he caused the birth trauma suffered by his sister might explain his phobias: They could be, as Freud thought, displaced anxieties, “a discharge of fear in a safe place.” Still, Shawn wonders, “if phobias are decoys, what will strike us when the decoys are removed? What awaits us in the emptiness of space?”

Shawn’s looping, meandering style, with chapters organized by theme (“Father,” “Conditioning,” “Alone/Not Alone”), sprinkled with anecdotes, invites self-analysis. But Shawn, it must be said, is not a champion storyteller. His subject is always interesting, but his style can be reverie producing. (Occasionally one might reread a paragraph a few times without noticing.) And yet something sinister vibrates underneath. Much like a conversation with an extremely anxious person, the same territory is mined over and over, unearthed from many angles in a search for something — a definitive cause, a cure — that can never be found.

In music Shawn found joy and freedom, the ability to experiment and to be dark and daring. “Some lurching hidden tragic power coursed through me and made me shiver and feel that I had been living a very long time.” And yet the overall tenor of the book is muted and tender, steeped in quiet reverence for fragile attempts to manage fear and muddle through as best we can. Of his father, Shawn writes that he “tended to treat people the way the character Alyosha in Dostoevski’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ recommends: ‘like patients in a hospital.’” On the one hand it is true that we are all, as we learned from Freud, sick, and that the best thing we can do with life is help each other through it. On the other hand, we are not, or not only, hospital patients.