Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Matt Ridley
When I come to a book like this after reading a literary biography or a history of art, I always feel rather as though I’ve walked out of a cold and dusty room into a warm, sun-lit garden. Science is just so much richer than literature and art, and the richest of all sciences is biology. Living organisms are the most complex and beautiful things in the known universe, but they’re also some of the ugliest and most disturbing. This book gives you glimpses of all these facets of life, but then glimpses are all we have at the moment. That is part of the excitement of the book: we don’t know everything yet and Ridley often stresses how contradictory and fragmentary what we do know is.
However fragmentary it is, however, there is no doubt that it is all part of a greater whole. All known forms of life on earth use the same or very closely related genetic code to reproduce, because all known forms of life on earth have a common origin. Ridley uses the human share of this common inheritance: the genome of the book’s title is the complete collection of human chromosomes, 1 to 22, plus the sex chromosomes X and Y, and each chapter takes a chromosome and looks at an interesting gene or genes contained on it. He constantly reminds his readers that genes do not code for disease, but disease has often been the key to uncovering the functions of genes, and the book consequently discusses disease a lot, from Alzheimer’s and its effects on the brain to cholera and the links it has with human blood groups.
But even more important than disease to the story of the genome is evolution, one of the most powerful and profound ideas in science and also one of the most powerful correctives to human arrogance. We are cousins not only of chimpanzees and gorillas, but also of the moulds that grow on bread or the very strange bacteria that inhabit boiling, sulfur-laden volcanic vents thousands of metres below the ocean. In fact, those bacteria are in some ways more highly evolved than we are. Their genes don’t waste a single letter: everything is there for a purpose. Our genes are filled with junk, like a vast rusting scrap-yard with a few working engines scattered here and there:
Genes, remember, are stretches of DNA that comprise the recipe for proteins. But ninety-seven per cent of our genome does not consist of true genes at all. It consists of a menagerie of strange entities called pseudogenes, retropseudogenes, satellites, microsatellites, transposons and retrotransposons, all collectively known as ‘junk DNA’, or sometimes, probably more accurately, as ‘selfish DNA’. (Chromosome 8, “Self-Interest”)It’s called “selfish” because a lot of it seems to be there for no other reason than to be there: it simply exists to be replicated, not to help create the vast survival machines – human bodies, pine-trees, sea-weed – in which it rides. At some time in the past, for example, viruses seem to have insinuated themselves into our genome – the complete collection of genes possessed by a species – and taken a free ride with us down millions of years of our evolution.
Or rather, our evolutions. Human beings have two sexes and the sexes don’t just battle at the level of culture and politics, they also battle at the level of genes and biochemistry. Ridley describes some research into the links between birth-order and male homosexuality, for example. It seems that, for men, the more older brothers you have, the likelier you are to be homosexual. The effect isn’t strong, but it seems to result from an immune reaction by the mother’s body to the presence of a male foetus and the chemicals it produces as it grows a male brain and body from the default, which is a female brain and body. In some cases the immune reaction partly counter-acts those androgenic, or male-forming, chemicals, resulting in an incompletely male brain in a male body. The effect doesn’t work for female babies, but even they are part of the chemical war between the sexes. It’s genes from the father, for example, that take charge of growing the placenta, which can, Ridley says, be regarded as a kind of parasitic organ. It wants to take as much from the mother’s body as possible, because that benefits the child and its father. The mother’s body, on the other hand, wants to give as little as possible.
And so the foetus, male or female, tries to manipulate the mother’s biochemistry. Mothers, meanwhile, are waging a much longer battle:
A piece of simple statistics: because females have two X chromosomes while males have an X and a Y, three-quarters of all sex chromosomes are Xs; one quarter are Ys. Or, to put it another way, an X chromosome spends two-thirds of its time in females, and only one-third in males. Therefore, the X chromosome is three times as likely to evolve the ability to take pot shots at the Y as the Y is to evolve the ability to take pot shots at the X. Any gene on the Y chromosome is vulnerable to attack by a newly evolved driving X gene. The result has been that the Y chromosome has shed as many genes as possible and shut down the rest, to ‘run away and hide’ (in the technical jargon used by William Amos of Cambridge University). (“Chromosomes X and Y: Conflict”)The same chapter discusses the way fruit-fly semen has evolved to control the behavior of fruit-fly females. In fact, fruit-fly semen can actually be poisonous to fruit-fly females. There aren’t just more things in heaven and earth than we dream of, there are more things than we like to dream of: this book can disturb quite as much as it fascinates.
Something that does both is its discussion of the links between health and hierarchy. The constant message of government and doctors is, of course, that we control our health by what we do: we can eat or exercise ourselves fitter and longer-lived. The message of modern research seems to be that your position in the pecking-order is much more important than what you eat or do with your body in a gym:
In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person’s job was more able to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure. Someone in a low-grade job, such as a janitor, was nearly four times as likely to have a heart attack as a permanent secretary at the top of the heap. Indeed, even if the permanent secretary was fat, hypertensive or a smoker, he was still less likely to suffer a heart attack than a thin, non-smoking, low-blood-pressure janitor. Exactly the same result emerged from a similar study of a million employees of the Bell Telephone Company in the 1960s. (“Chromosome 10: Stress”)And no, that’s not a typo: Ridley did write “the 1960s”. I think it’s very significant that these results are not more widely known even now, in the early 21st century. Those at the top are perfectly happy with the situation, and those at the top are those who will ensure the situation stays as it is. It’s also very significant genetically rather than politically speaking, however, because it’s an example of how genes code for possibilities, not for certainties. Our genes don’t determine our destinies: our environment contributes hugely too. We are coming to the end of the nature vs nurture debate, though it was always, as Ridley points out, much more dogmatic on one side than the other. The hereditarians never denied an important role for nurture, although the environmentalists often, and absurdly, tried to deny any role at all for heredity. That is absurd because a chimpanzee brought up by human beings will not learn to speak: it simply doesn’t have the right heredity. Our genes fix the range of our destinies; our environment selects from that range, rather like a diner choosing from a menu.
But different diners won’t react to the same food in the same way, just as different genes will not react to the same environment in the same way. If left-wingers will take comfort from some parts of this book, such as the research into healthy and hierarchy just described, right-wingers will take comfort from other parts:
Suppose you wish to breed a strain of fox or rat that was more tame and less instinctively timid than the average. One way to do it would be to pick the darkest pups in the litter as the stock for breeding the next generation. In a few years you would have tamer, and darker, animals. This curious fact has been known to animal breeders for many years. (“Chromosome 11: Personality”)And now we’re able to explain it. Skin color, in animals as in humans, is a chemical phenomenon, and so are personality and behavior, because chemicals in the brain are what underlie personality and behavior. Differences in skin color are therefore associated with differences in, for example, criminality, which is an expression of personality. Blacks are on average more criminal than whites because they’re more extrovert, and they’re more extrovert because they have a less active norepinephrine system. When human beings migrated to colder climates, they evolved lighter skins and more active norepinephrine systems, which meant a more active metabolism, a more reactive nervous system, and more introverted personalities.
Ridley doesn’t quite extrapolate things so far, but those conclusions are there to be drawn in what he says about skin color. Some people will dismiss all this out of hand, but the important question seems to me much less whether it’s politically incorrect and much more whether it’s true. Lots of things in this book won’t be true, or will be seriously misleading, because research is advancing so fast that it was out-of-date even before it was published. There’s supposed to be an old Chinese curse running “May you live in interesting times”. We are certainly living in very, very interesting scientific times and we’ll just have to wait and see whether that’s a curse or a blessing, or both at the same time. This book is one of the things we should read while we’re waiting.
Germany’s Secret Weapons in World War II, Roger Ford
I don’t know if Roger Ford is related to Brian G. Ford, but because they are both British writers who have both written about advanced German weaponry in World War Two it seems quite likely and perhaps Brian, who was writing as early as the 1970s and 1980s, is Roger’s father. If so, the son is still in the father’s shadow, because Brian’s German Secret Weapons is much more interesting than Roger’s Germany’s Secret Weapons in World War II. Someone who has read even a little about German military aviation in World War II – which should cover most readers of this book – is likely to have come across almost all the aircraft proper in it, for example, except perhaps the Gotha Go 229 or Ba 349, and experts in any of the fields covered, which range from rocket aircraft to miniature submarines by way of ultra-long-range artillery, are likely to have come across everything in the relevant sections, except perhaps some of the photographs.
And I’d doubt even that. I’d also argue that some of the weapons covered could have been covered a little less, or even not at all, to make room for some of the very strange and interesting weapons described by Brian G. Ford in German Secret Weapons: sonic cannons, for example. True, some of the stranger German Wunderwaffen, or Wonder-weapons, never made it into active service, and some never made it off the drawing-board, but when a book is called Germany’s Secret Weapons in World War II, you expect more from it than lengthy discussion of the Me 262 or V1.
Not that discussion in this book, even of the Me 262 or V1, is lengthy by the standards of many other books on military technology, but that was probably an advantage for readers like me, because greater discussion would have involved technical details that I, for one, am not equipped to appreciate. As it is, the prose is clear and simple and you can learn a lot from it about the way these weapons were devised and developed and did and did not affect the course of the war, as well as the way they could and could not have affected it.
Once they had developed the atomic bomb, the Allies were never in serious danger of losing the war, but if many of the weapons described here had been deployed earlier or in great numbers or different forms they could have prolonged it greatly or forced the Allies to use the bomb on German cities as they used it on Japanese ones. Germany’s own (luckily abortive) nuclear program is discussed here too, in three pages that also discuss chemical and biological warfare, and in some ways that epitomizes the failings of the book. It covers too many fields too briefly and only absolute newcomers to the history of military technology in World War Two are likely to feel much wonder at the nature and ingenuity of the weapons developed by German scientists and engineers in what were, in the closing stages of the war, extremely difficult circumstances.
Other readers will already have felt that wonder and will be expecting more detail than this book is able to provide. If you can afford the steep price, buy it for the pictures and as a good brief summary of the German Wunderwaffen program, not as a specialized reference work.
Fire on Earth: Doomsday, Dinosaurs & Humankind, John and Mary Gribbin
The best beginner’s introduction to the dangers of asteroid impact that I’ve come across: it’s well-written, clearly presented, and, despite being relatively short, has a lot of information in it. I’ve seen it criticized for its maths in a review on the web but I didn’t notice myself when I was reading it and I took away some powerful images of what asteroid impact has meant in the past and what it could mean in the future. Imagine every forest on earth set on fire, for example, or the atmosphere turning into the equivalent of an oven on medium-hot, or kilometre-high “tidal” waves crashing down on the coasts of every continent. All that is going to happen again one day unless the human race takes steps to stop it happening, and books like this are performing the invaluable service of publicizing the dangers and, one hopes, encouraging anti-asteroid programs like SpaceGuard. Please visit the following web-page for more details:
Google page for Asteroid impact
Impact Earth: Asteroids, Comets and Meteors: The Growing Threat, Austen Atkinson
On 19 May 1996 the world came very close to something that would have affected all of us. That is, it came close to being hit by a football-stadium-sized asteroid called 1996 JA1. The human race might have survived, but many millions of its members wouldn’t, and neither would many millions of other living things.
We were lucky that time, but the danger is still out there from asteroids as big or much bigger, and this is another in the lengthening list of books devoted to this very important topic. It’s by no means the best of them, but it’s certainly a good introduction, particularly to that recent near-miss, though I would recommend John and Mary Gribbin’s Fire on Earth: Doomsday, Dinosaurs, and Humankind or a visit to the following webpage instead:
Google page for Asteroid impact
Atkinson is good for those of a conspiratorial frame of mind, however, because he argues that the dangers of impact are being almost wilfully ignored by our governments. If some righteous anger is stirred up about our slowness to create some defence, that might be a good thing, but if it encourages the UFO crowd to add this to their list of concerns it won’t be. We should be taking the certainty that the earth will be hit again very seriously, because even a “minor” impact could wipe out an entire city, and “minor” impacts seem to happen every hundred years or so. The Tunguska incident, examined here as in almost every book of this type, is now recognized as the aerial explosion of a piece of cometary debris that could easily have destroyed London and devastated the home counties, killing millions and causing incalculable damage. By chance it happened over an uninhabited region of Siberia. Perhaps it would have been better if it had made more of an impression on the world, because we might now be ready for its 100th anniversary, in 2006.
As I said, “minor” impacts take place every hundred years or so, which means we are getting due for the next, and there is much less chance now that it will take place over an uninhabited region – there aren’t many left on an ever-more crowded planet. Atkinson’s book contributes to our appreciation of the threat, and though it could have been better written, it’s valuable for that reason alone. Watch the skies, because the skies are dangerous.
Artforms of Nature (Kunstformen der Natur), Ernst Haeckel
Exactly a hundred years old in 2004 and still going strong, Artforms of Nature is one of the greatest works of natural history illustration ever published and almost every one of its hundred plates contains something to delight or astonish the eye. Sometimes you’re reading a guide to Aztec or Mayan gods, sometimes a Lovecraftian bestiary, sometimes a catalog of jewelry, helmets, and tiaras for mutant empresses, mercenaries, and popes. Macroscopic and microscopic; marine and terrestrial; animal, vegetable, and mineralized animal and vegetable: they’re all here as Haeckel (pronounced “Heckle”) makes his selection of the beautiful and bizarre from all corners of the plant and animal kingdoms. Especially beautiful and especially bizarre are his drawings of radiolarians, microscopic sea-creatures that build spiked siliceous skeletons of astonishing variety and complexity.
But there are two flaws in my Dover edition, and one flaw that must appear in every edition. The flaw that must appear in every edition is that Haeckel doesn’t bring the same skill and attention to the few drawings of vertebrates as he does to the much more numerous drawings of invetebrates like the radiolarians or jellyfish: the plates devoted to frogs and humming-birds are disappointingly lifeless and uninspired. The first of the flaws in the Dover edition is that the plates are printed in black-and-white, when many of the originals are in color. The second flaw is that the cover, which is in color, has one of the ugliest and most badly drawn pictures of all in pride of place: a bisected sea-squirt from plate 85. When you consider the glories Dover could have chosen, it’s hard to understand why. Otherwise, all I can say is that if you read this and don’t think it’s one of the best art-books you’ve ever come across, I wish I could have been reading some of what you’ve been reading.
Online reproduction of Kunstformen der Natur.
Exotic Orchids, ed. Wilma Rittershausen; Orchids: A Guide to Cultivation, Dr Phillip Cribb and Christopher Bailes
Two contrasting books devoted to one fascinating family of flowers. Exotic Orchids appeals to the eye, being full of gorgeous color photographs and elegant line drawings of some of the most beautiful and unusual orchids in the world. If you want to understand why so many people love them, this book will show you. Orchids: A Guide to Cultivation, on the other hand, appeals to the brain as well, because it will show you the who, what, where and how of orchids: besides describing their cultivation and care, it includes a potted history of European orchid-mania and of the men who have hunted them in some of the world’s most dangerous and unhealthy places. The photographs here are much smaller but many are gorgeous too: the dappled purple of Thelymitra variegata, for example, or the pharaonic golden mitre of Bulbophyllum lobbii. The full richness and complexity of nature is impossible to grasp, but you can follow one of the threads a little way in one or another of these books, and see how men and women have improved and expanded on nature’s raw materials by breeding new varieties of orchid.
Wild Flowers of Britain and Europe, W. Lippert and D. Podlech, translated and adapted by Martin Walters; A Handguide to the Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe, illustrations by Marjorie Blamey, text by Richard Fitter; Wild Flowers of Britain and Europe, Andrew Branson; The Wild Flowers Book, illustrations by Eduard Desmartini and Vera Nicova, text by Eliska Tomanová, translated by Olga Kuthanova; The Concise British Flora in Colour, W. Keble Martin
These are all excellent books in their own way, but when I have to choose one to take on a country walk it’s Lippert’s and Podlech’s pocket-sized but comprehensive Wild Flowers of Britain and Europe, whose photographs are usefully arranged by color with only occasional anomalies, like the umambiguously yellow Wood Avens (Geum urbanum) appearing in the white section with its close but not very similar relative Water Avens (Geum rivale) and the absence of a few plants that are common in Britain but apparently not in Europe, like the spectacular Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera). Instead the book shows the understated Touch-Me-Not Balsam (Impatiens noli-tangere), whose acquaintance I have still to make, and the translator Martin Walters has to mention Himalayan Balsam in the notes.
A Handguide to the Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe doesn’t have this continental bias, but it’s not quite pocket-sized and isn’t arranged by color but by family, making it less easy to find an unfamiliar plant. I also think the color printing is slightly off in the copy I’ve got, but Marjorie Blamey’s paintings are otherwise a pleasure to leaf through, like Andrew Branson’s in Wild Flowers of Britain and Europe, which mixes in occasional photographs too and is arranged more usefully by habitat — Woodlands and Hedgerows, Pastures and Meadows, and so on. I’d say these two books are much more useful for revision and comparison than as field-guides. The Wild Flowers Book, one of many excellent natural history books from the former Czechoslovakia, isn’t useful as a field-guide at all: it’s far too big and you won’t want to risk getting it dirty. This is the book I choose for bibliophilic pleasure: although the front cover has a dull, almost entirely green Cuckoo-pint (Arum maculatum) that should have been swapped with the spectacular red Field Poppy (Papaver rhoeas) from the back cover, this truly is a beautiful book, full of delicately painted but scientifically accurate illustrations and with a highly useful introduction to wild flower biology by Eliska Tomanová.
Finally there’s the classic The Concise British Flora in Colour, the life-work of the clergyman W. Keble Martin. The illustrations are too crowded to make them works of art like those of The Wild Flowers Book, but any serious British wild-flower enthusiast will want to own a copy of this book for its still strong scientific value and its place in the history of British botany.
The Country Flowers of a Victorian Lady, Fanny Robinson; Flowers in Colour, A.C. Hellyer, watercolors by Cynthia Newsome-Taylor, woodcuts by J.D.C. Sowerby; The Pocket Encyclopedia of Indoor Plants, Age Nicolaisen, illustrated by Palle Brennhoi and Otto Frello; An Illustrated Guide to Flowering Houseplants, Jack Kramer; A Guide to Fuchsias, Leo Boullemier
Five flower-books spanning more than a century: Fanny Robinson, illustratrix of Country Flowers, was born in 1802 and died in 1872, though her “Book of Memory” wasn’t published until 1999. It’s a collection of beautiful watercolors and hand-inked verses dedicated to some unknown figure in Robinson’s past and drawing on the “language of flowers” widely used in the nineteenth century but mostly forgotten today. Plate 33, for example, uses the passionflower (Passiflora caerulea) and the newly arrived fuchsia to represent “Christian Faith” and “Taste” (in the aesthetic sense). Robinson certainly had a great deal of taste and talent, but doesn’t rise above talent to genius — few women ever do, after all, and her compositions, inevitably enough given the symbolism they are trying to convey, are sometimes a little crowded or discordant. That’s why I prefer the rare plates illustrating single flowers, like the snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) of plate 2, the rhododendron of plate 12 and, perhaps my favorite page of all, the waterlilies (Nymphaea alba) of plate 32.
Robinson’s spirit lived on in Cynthia Newsome-Taylor, the illustratrix of Flowers in Colour from 1955, who fills page after page with watercolors of beautiful garden flowers from all over the world, some of which would have been quite unknown to Fanny Robinson. Her color pages are complemented by J.D.C. Sowerby’s black-and-white woodcuts, which are reminiscent of botanic texts from centuries ago, and this tradition of illustration by hand was still strong in The Pocket Encyclopedia of 1970. However, with smaller pages to work on, its two illustrators don’t have the scope to create Newsome-Taylor’s eye-delighting macédoines. But it’s a more detailed and serious book and, being about houseplants, covers a greater variety of species from a greater variety of habitats. Cacti can’t be grown outdoors in Britain, for example, so you won’t learn that the “flowers of many types have a delicate, almost soporific fragrance” in Flowers in Colour. There’s wit in the illustrations too, with the containers sometimes given as much detail as the flowers they hold or an extraneous object like a copper kettle or bottle of purple sweets thrown in to create an air of domesticity.
But I disliked something strongly in this book, though it wasn’t the responsibility of the author or illustrators. As its specific name indicates, the Jacobean Lily from Mexico, a kind of surreal scarlet crucifix-cum-fuchsia, is one of the most beautiful and unusual flowers in the world: formosissima is Latin for “most beautiful”. Its common name in English is beautiful too, and so is the illustration in this book, but its generic name is the very ugly Sprekelia. The botanist who named it should have tried to match the beauty of the plant he was naming, but was as lazy as the geologists who gave beautiful new minerals names like cordierite or labradorite. A little over ten years after The Pocket Encyclopedia, in 1981, photographs have taken over in an Illustrated Guide to Flowering Houseplants, with hand-drawn illustration relegated to simple line drawings accompanying the text. Photos offer much more detail, of course, but we lose something by using them. They’re too easy, too readily satisfying, rather like fast food, and gorgeous as some of the flowers here are, I prefer the illustrations of the earlier books.
In A Guide to Fuchsias from 1989, hand illustration is reduced even further and unfortunately the photos aren’t printed on glossy paper, weakening the impact of these beautiful and fascinating flowers as they play variations in colour and variety and number of petal on that basic hanging form. It’s a serious guide to cultivation too, so text outweighs image much more than in some of the earlier books. The detail about pests and fertilizers raises a question I often ponder, mutatis mutandis, when I read specialist books like this. Rather as I’d like to know precisely how cavers differ in psychology from mountaineers, I’d like to know how fuchsia enthusiasts differ in psychology from orchid enthusiasts. Speaking for myself, I love both flowers but fuchsias don’t have the erotic, muliebripudendal charge of orchids or their steamy, jungle-or-greenhouse connotations and I’d predict they don’t attract such peculiar people or such obsession.
An Illustrated Guide to Pollen Analysis, P.D. Moore and J.A. Webb (1976)
William Blake didn’t like science or mathematics but this book is an excellent example of how you can “see the world in a grain of sand”. Or rather, in something much smaller than a grain of sand: a grain of pollen. Pollen is the microscopic signature of the earth’s plant-life, written in soil for hundreds of thousands of years, and plant-life is a hugely important thing for human beings and all other animals on earth (though not all animals under the sea). Because plant-life depends on the sun, wind, and rain, it’s possible to deduce what the climate was like back in the Stone Age by taking cores of ancient pollen-containing soil from bogs and marshes, and so palynology is a vital part of the attempt to understand how the earth’s climate has changed and is changing.
But pollen is also fascinating in its own right: it comes in an endless variety of shapes and there are even apparently dodecahedral pollen grains (Gypsophila species, I think I read elsewhere). Moore and Webb, who are probably both dead now, introduce their subject very well and very readably, and palynology, or the scientific study of pollen, is not only the world in miniature but science in miniature too. Science depends on precise, minute analysis, accurate, unambiguous labels, and mathematics, and the scientific study of pollen demands all three, as well as one of the most important technological advances made in the past five thousand years: the microscope. There’s also a tongue-twisting poetry to the terms palynologists have given to the sculpted shells of these tiny grains of organic matter: hexapantocolporate, for example, meaning “with six colpi scattered all over the surface of the grain, each colpus with a porus in its centre”. Best of all, though, I liked melissopalynology, or the study of pollen in honey. Pollen is something to be sneezed at, but palynology proves that it’s much more than that too.
Why Men Don’t Listen And Women Can’t Read Maps: How We’re Different and What to Do About It, Allan and Barbara Pease
The argument presented in books like this – that men and women think and behave differently because of their biology – is often dismissed on the ground that we’ve seen it before, in the infamous pseudo-medical misogyny of the ancient world and pseudo-scientific misogyny of the Victorians. Dismissing the argument like that is a little like saying that because we couldn’t cross the Atlantic in a dug-out canoe, we can’t cross the Atlantic in an airplane.
In other words, the evidence for the argument is different to what it was and, for me, much more powerful and much more convincing. No-one would deny that men and women have innately different bodies, for example, but many people reject the idea that we might have innately different ways of thinking and behaving. But thought and behavior are based on the brain, and the brain is part of the body. The problem is that it’s a hidden part, on the inside, so we don’t see the male/female differences there the way we see the male/female differences on the outside.
At least, we didn’t see them in the past, but we are starting to now, with brain-scanners that can examine the living, working brain. This book presents some of these early findings about the way differences in the brains of men and women could account for their different strengths – and different weaknesses: as this book puts it, why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps. These scientific findings are presented in a simplified and light-hearted way, so don’t come to it if you want a survey of the original research in all its complexity and ambiguity. Read it instead as a good popular introduction to ideas that are slowly becoming respectable again. In the past we foolishly thought we should blame women for not being men, then we discovered the truth and realized that we should blame men for not being women. We’ve been doing that for the past thirty years, and it’s about time we realized that it’s just as foolish.
Living Jewels: The Natural Design of Beetles, Poul Beckmann
Richard Dawkins wrote about the Blind Watchmaker, but the Blind Watchmaker often works in collaboration. This book is about his brother, the Blind Jeweler, who creates the cases for the watchwork of beetles. Sometimes those cases are gorgeous, sometimes they’re grotesque, and sometimes they’re both at once. Beetle 77 in this survey, Phanaeus igneus floridanus, is a squat giant with a huge curving horn on its head, but its thorax and body shimmer with metallic purple, green, red, and gold. If you can imagine a glam-rock sumo-wrestler, then beetle 49, Julodis hiritiventris sanguinipilig (sic – should be hirtiventris sanguinipilis), is pure punk: green legs and a long dark-blue body scattered with tufts of yellow-orange bristles. Elsewhere you’ve got New Romantics with elaborately patterned bodies and sweeping, dandyish antennae (Rosenbergia straussi and Batus barbicornis), death-metalheads with gleaming black bodies and fearsome-looking but completely harmless horns (Xylotrupes gideon and Allomyr(r?)hina dichotomus taiwana), and even Status-Quoites wearing what looks like worn, work-stained denim (various Eupholus species).
It’s entertaining to look through this book and imagine whose backing band or album cover a particular beetle should play in or sit on, but sometimes you won’t be able to, because there are more beetles than musical genres. Beetles, or rather evolution, has invented more than human beings have, but the same forces have been at work. Topologically speaking, a doughnut is identical to a tea-cup, because one is a distorted variant of the other. Similarly, all the beetles in this book are distorted topological variants of each other: like genres of popular music, they’re variants on a theme. Evolution hasn’t altered the ingredients of beetles, just the quantities used to cook each species: changing the width and shape of the thorax, the length and design of the antennae and legs, and so on. But topology isn’t psychology, and just as glam-rock sounds quite different to punk, though the common ancestor is clearly there if you listen, so a doughnut or Phanaeus igneus floridanus looks quite different to a teacup or Julodis hirtiventris sanguipilis.
There’s much more to beetles than appearance, of course, but one of this book’s necessary failings, because it’s a coffee-table conversation-piece rather than a scientific survey, is that it tells you almost nothing about the ecology and behavior behind the photographs. And the book’s title is misleading, in fact, because the jewels aren’t living: all the photos are of dead beetles on white backgrounds. It tells you very little about the meaning and history of the (sometimes misspelt) scientific names too, even though these are fascinating, beautiful, and grotesque in their own right. Instead, there’s a brief but interesting – and occasionally wrong: Chrysophora isn’t Latin – introduction, then page after page of the gorgeous and grotesque photographs people will be buying this book for, and finally some brief “Beetle Profiles”, describing where individual species were caught and how their family lives and feeds. I would have liked to know much more, though the beetles’ beauty is in some ways increased by its mystery and by what might be called the futility of its appearance. Countless millions of these beetles have lived and died without any intelligent brain ever appreciating their beauty and strangeness, and if human beings disappeared from the planet they would continue to live and die. They’re not here for us, but without us they could never be appreciated as the living jewels they are. Some might draw metaphysical conclusions from that and decide that they are here for us after all, but I draw a mathematical conclusion: mathematics governs the evolution of both beetles and brains, which is why beetles can appeal to us so strongly.
Living Jewels – incomplete website accompanying the book.
Influence: Science and Practice, Robert B. Cialdini
Every couple of years or so I read a book that divides my life into two periods: BIRI and AIRI. That’s “before I read it” and “after I read it”. Trivially, of course, every book I read does that. I’m about to read Biggles’ Second Case, for example, and that will divide my life into BIRI and AIRI too.
But Biggles’ Second Case will not change the way I look at the world and won’t teach me anything completely new and unexpected. This book did. Could there be any connexion between a widely publicized suicide and, say, a jet-liner crashing? BIRI, I would have said I didn’t know. AIRI, I can say with confidence: definitely. And frighteningly. When someone commits suicide and receives a lot of publicity, it has been proven that not only do other people start committing suicide more often, which is what you might expect, but that more jet-liners crash and more people die in car-crashes too.
Why? Because people are imitating what they see in the newspapers and on television. A depressed or troubled pilot or car-driver sees someone else solve their problems for good by killing themself, so that pilot or car-driver decides to do the same. But he disguises his suicide as an accident, so that his relatives get insurance or avoids the stigma of a suicide in the family, and a good way to disguise a suicide is to take other people with you. You might think that’s highly immoral, but very depressed people don’t think rationally and may even believe they’re doing the people they kill a favor.
Conclusion? Well, there are two conclusions. First, try to avoid flying or driving for a fortnight or two after a big news story about a suicide. And second, recognize how important the power of example is in human behavior. Monkey see, monkey do. And in a lot of ways human beings are just monkeys without the fur. Monkeys imitate what other monkeys do, but there’s an important qualification. What some monkeys do is more likely to be imitated than what some other monkeys do. That’s because monkeys live in hierarchies and authority is very important to them. Just as it is to human beings. In fact, authority is so important to us that it can override reason and common sense completely:
A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. Instead of writing out completely the location “right ear” on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read “place in R ear”. Upon receiving the prescription, the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient’s anus. Obviously, rectal treatment of an earache made no sense, but neither the patient nor the nurse questioned it. (ch. 6, “Authority”)That example of the power of authority should make you laugh, but other ones discussed by Cialdini won’t. Suppose, Cialdini proposes, someone asked you to take part in a learning experiment in which you, the teacher, punished mistakes by giving electric shocks to someone else, the learner. Each time they made a mistake, you gave them an electric shock, 15 volts higher each time on a scale that ends in “DANGER! SERIOUS RISK OF INJURY OR DEATH!” . How high would you go?
Well, unless you’re very exceptional, you would go all the way or a long way towards it, despite the screams and pleas for mercy of the person you were punishing. Just so long as you had a scientist in a white coat standing beside you and telling you to carry on. How do we know this? Because the experiment has been performed by a psychologist called Stanley Milgram. It was a fake: the learner was an actor in another room who wasn’t receiving electric shocks at all, just pretending over an intercom that he was, but the people who took part in the experiments as teachers didn’t know that and they still obeyed the instructions of the white-coated scientist at their side. They didn’t like doing it, but the scientist had authority and far too often human beings obey authority blindly and unreasoningly.
You might think you already knew that, but this book will show you how much you still have to learn. You might also think that you yourself are much less inclined to blind, unreasoning obedience that the rest of us, but unless you’re very exceptional, you’re not. The way people say they will behave and the way they actually behave is sometimes very different, because a lot of what we do is automatic. Cialdini examines the effects of this not just in politics and ethics but also in advertising and commerce. There are a lot of people out there who want your money and your custom, and guess what? Some of them aren’t very honest.
Well, again, you might think you knew that, but again, this book will show you how much you still have to learn. There are some very cunning but very simple ways of influencing people’s behavior and making money from them or getting them to do what you want them to do, and if you want to be able to protect yourself from them, this book is a very good place to start. Have you ever noticed that ads don’t always include the price of the product they’re advertising, for example? An oversight on the part of the advertiser, perhaps?
No, a deliberate attempt to exploit an important aspect of human psychology. Once we start doing something, we like to carry on. Reading an ad is a passive process. It doesn’t commit us to anything, even if we like the look of the product. But if we like the look of the product and have to find the price out for ourselves, we’ve stopped being passive and started being active. In a small way, we’ve committed ourselves to the product and we’re likelier to carry on and buy it than we otherwise were.
There are other little advertising tricks like that, some even more effective, and I’m very glad to have learnt about them. For one thing, it’s more proof that I’m right not to believe in free will. Human behavior is deterministic and this book offers lots of fascinating examples of how. And not just in politics and commerce: in religion too.
Though in some important ways religion isn’t distinct from politics and commerce: it is based on authority and greed too. However, in other ways religion is distinct, because politics and commerce rarely offer miracles. Christianity, for example, teaches that Christ promised he would rise from the dead after three days and then fulfilled his promise. How else do you explain the way his grief-striken disciples threw themselves into preaching Christ’s message with such energy and conviction?
Well, maybe you explain it by looking at the example of a much more recent religion discussed by Cialdini: a flying saucer cult in the 1960s that predicted a vast flood. The flood would engulf the world and everyone on it, except, of course, for the true believers of the cult, who would be rescued by flying saucers at the last moment. Before the moment of global disaster, the cult was very secretive and insular and was very reluctant to speak to the media or make converts.
But after the moment of global disaster, all that changed:
Within a few hours, they [the cult] had moved from clannish and taciturn hoarders of the Word to expansive and eager disseminators of it. (ch. 4, “Social Proof”)Why? Because, as you’ve probably noticed, global disaster didn’t arrive: there was no flood and no flying saucers arrived to carry the cult to salvation. The cult was a laughing-stock, and though they had an explanation for the failure of their prophecy – on the night in question their prayers “had spread so much light that God saved the world from destruction” – nobody took it seriously. And that, Cialdini suggests, is why they threw themselves into evangelism so fervently. The only way to rescue their egos from the wreckage was to convert other people to their beliefs. If everyone believed, no-one would laugh.
That didn’t work either: after such a spectacular failure, the cult predictably failed to convert anyone and soon withered away. Perhaps they should have chosen a rather smaller prophecy whose failure to come true was easier to conceal. Like Christianity. Christianity teaches that Jesus rose from the dead and then went to heaven. How do you disprove that? It’s much more difficult. Nowadays, it’s probably impossible. Maybe that’s why Christianity prospered while the flying saucer cult didn’t. Christ’s prophecy failed and his disciples, like members of the cult, reacted by throwing themselves into evangelism, with the enormous advantage that the failure of Christ’s prophecy wasn’t so spectacularly obvious, or even obvious at all once a little time had passed and Christ was safely in heaven.
And that’s where I was too when I was reading this book. Wouldn’t you be if you could read a book that taught you about religion, suicide, the dangers of authority, why advertisers leave prices off their ads, and much more beside?
A Mind to Crime: The Controversial Link Between the Mind and Criminal Behaviour, Ann Moir and David Jessel
You might not know this, but someone has already invented a car that can run practically for ever on a single tank of petrol. In fact, he did it a long time ago. Way back in the ’seventies. But the oil-companies went calling on him with a large suitcase full of money. Or had him murdered and his workshop burnt down. And that was the end of it.
Or so the story goes. It’s a good story too and we’re quite ready to believe it. In our ideal world, we wouldn’t have to fill up with petrol regularly and frequently. In the oil companies’ ideal world, we do. So if anything happened that threatened to change their ideal world into our ideal world, they’d do something about it. In other words, they have a vested interest in the status quo.
Just like lawyers and politicians and the rest of our glittering panoply of criminal justice. They have a vested interest in the status quo and the status quo is that large numbers of people – almost entirely men – are locked up for committing crimes. Then they are let out, are free for a time, then are often locked up again for committing the same crimes. Like filling up a tank with petrol, all this is inefficient, expensive, and has ugly consequences. Prisons are unpleasant places and do unpleasant things to people’s psyches. Just as petrol does unpleasant things to our environment.
But that’s the status quo and some people benefit from it. Lawyers and politicians and so on. Which is why if they were offered a solution to crime, I don’t think they would take it. In fact, they have already been offered solutions to crime and they have already refused to take them. Tentative solutions, anyway, and certainly new and potentially very fruitful ways of thinking about crime and what causes it.
This book is a look at some of these new ways of thinking. The old ways – or rather, way – was never very fruitful. The old way was based on the idea of free will: that moral choices take place in a vacuum, metaphysically disconnected from genetics, biology, and environment. That was never an intellectually coherent idea, because there was always one very big piece of evidence against it: the fact, which Jessel and Moir constantly stress, that crime is a mostly male affair. 95% of violent crime is committed by men, for example. How does free will account for that? Maleness is not a choice: it is something you’re born with, or not, as the case may be.
Just as other things underlying crime may be not be choices but things you are born with, or have imposed on you by your environment. It’s obvious, really. I can speak and walk upright. A goldfish can’t. Why not? Because it’s a goldfish, which means it doesn’t have the same body as a human being like me. Above all, it doesn’t have the same brain. What we do is based on what our brains are, so if you want to understand why some of us do certain things the most obvious place to look is the brain. Some people do certain things because their brains are certain things.
Damaged, for example. Brain damage can explain paedophilia. Though some of us don’t want it to explain paedophilia, because we enjoy the righteous indignation paedophilia arouses. But if paedophilia is abnormal, and the morally indignant are loudest in proclaiming that it is, doesn’t that suggest there is something abnormal about paedophiles? And if paedophiles are abnormal, doesn’t that suggest there is something abnormal about their brains?
The same reasoning applies to other forms of crime, just as it applies, in general, to the male domination of crime. Male brains, on average, are different from female brains, so men, on average, are likelier to behave in certain ways than women are. Violently, for example, or riskily. Men do that because violence and risk don’t mean as much to them as they do to women. The burnt child fears the fire, but men don’t get burnt as easily, because of the way their brains work.
Jessel and Moir detail some of the ways in which male brains, in general, and criminal brains, in particular, make them less responsive to stimulation and so more eager to seek it out in heightened forms. In fact, they have rather too many ways of explaining the male search for excitement and propensity to commit crime. Is it chronically lower levels of a brain chemical called serotonin or chronically lower levels of blood-sugar, or a mixture of the two? Or are these two aspects of a single condition?
The answers aren’t clear yet, but it does seem clear that to understand human behavior we have to understand the brain and the forces that shape it: our genes and our environment. Crime is about the way humans behave, so to understand crime we have to understand the brain. This book is one of the first popular accounts of the early days of the scientific quest to achieve that. When it is achieved, we are going to have a great deal of power over ourselves and other people, and if you want to help ensure that power is not abused – or at least be ready for it to be abused – you should read books like this.
Cats’ Paws & Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature & People, Steven Vogel
One of the best and most intellectually stimulating popular science books I’ve ever read, and if it doesn’t change the way you look at the world you must have come across its ideas before in books like D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. As the title suggests, it’s an examination of the differences between the evolved mechanisms used in nature and the designed mechanisms used by human beings. And there are some very big differences: except, in a way, for the flagella of bacteria, the wheel does not seem to appear anywhere in nature, and neither do pure metals or metal alloys. Straight lines and right angles are very rare in nature too. Why? Vogel examines these questions in detail, explains the mathematical and mechanical or bio-mechanical principles controlling what can and can’t be done in the two worlds, and looks at how much human beings have borrowed and could borrow from nature. Very highly recommended.
On Growth and Form, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson
This study of the mathematics of the growth and form of plants and animals is among the most famous of classic biological texts, but I must admit I was disappointed by it: elementary though its mathematics was, most of it was well beyond me and what I most enjoyed were the pictures. Some of the quotes were beyond me too: despite this being a revised edition published in 1990, none of them were translated in footnotes and the wisdom of Kant’s “die Ursache der Art der Existenz bei jedem Theile eines lebendes Körpers ist im Ganzen enthalten” will undoubtedly pass many readers by. D’Arcy Thompson was a true polymath, intimidatingly well-read in literature and philosophy as well as science, and he was writing in 1917 for better-educated and more leisured readers. The final edition of this book indeed, published in 1942, ran to 1116 pages, but the 327 pages of the revised edition still manage to cover a very wide range of topics, from bee cells to antelope horns by way of leaf-shapes and radiolarian skeletons. In each instance D’Arcy Thompson explains how mathematics illuminates our understanding and governs the form taken by a particular structure.
This mathematics is at its purest, or most obvious, in the realm of microscopic life, where, evading the direct influence of gravity, certain animals are, like crystals, much more strongly influenced by pure physics and reproduce forms familiar in mathematics for millennia: the so-called Platonic polyhedra, for example, appear among and give their names to the radiolarian species Circoporus octahedrus, Circogonia icosahedra, and Circorrhegma dodecahedra. When animals get larger, the mathematics needed to explain their forms becomes more complex, and so less obvious, because more factors are at work: not just gravity but inertia, for example. D’Arcy Thompson’s explanation of the “screw” of the narwhale’s horn rests on the ingenious suggestion that the swimming animal “(so to speak) goes slowly, slowly, little by little, around its own horn”, which is held in place by inertia and rifled by irregularities in its base as it grows from the head that turns beneath it. The most famous section of the book, however, examines the way bodies and skeletons can be related to each other by mathematical transformations – as was recognized, D’Arcy Thompson points out, at least as long as ago as the physiognomic studies of Albrecht Dürer, who illustrated how quite distinct profiles can be seen derived from one another by altering the internal proportions of a grid laid over one or another of them.
D’Arcy Thompson applies a similar technique to the bodies of crustaceans and fish and the skeletons and skulls of dinosaurs and mammals: “These anthropoid skulls, then, which we can transform one to another by a ‘continuous transformation’, are admirable examples of what Listing called ‘topological similitude’.” These transformations are precisely what took place in the process of evolution, but it’s an inevitable weakness of a biologist like D’Arcy Thompson, writing well before the discovery of the structure of DNA, that he cannot relate gross biology to subtler changes in the genes that underlie it. Another weakness of this book may rise more from its readers than from its authors, however, if they gain the impression that mathematics is somehow separate from biology, guiding the form and growth of plants and animals like a kind of immaterial spirit. But rather than noting that mathematics is not separate from biology, we should note that biology is not separate from mathematics, because mathematics is two things: first the principles of existence and potentiality that arise inevitably from the interrelationship of entity, and second the symbolic language human beings have invented to express and explore those principles. It is no wonder, then, that biological growth and form, governed by mathematics in sense one, can be expressed as mathematics in sense two. On Growth and Form describes a few meshes of the mathematical net that enfolds all forms and all life, actual and potential, but in the end most modern readers will find mathematically transformed descendants of this book like Steven Vogel’s Cats’ Paws & Catapults much more readable, because much less intellectually challenging.
Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us about Human Nature, Kenan Malik
There is one big disadvantage to writing clear and easy-to-understand prose: when your arguments are weak and your conclusions faulty, people will notice. This is why post-modernists avoid writing clear and easy-to-understand prose, of course, and why Kenan Malik might have been wise to be less honest and join them. Although he is good at pointing out some of the flaws in his opponents’ reasoning, I could see no intellectual rigor in his own, which is one reason I got bored and gave up reading this book: Man, Beast and Zombie is full of clear and easy-to-understand vacuities, rather like a book of conservative theology. And that is how, despite his avowed atheism, I would define Malik: as a theologian who has merely redefined the old religious idea of the autonomous divinely emplanted soul, not eliminated it. Human beings, he repeats again and again, are distinct from animals because they are rational creatures with history and culture. Therefore, he concludes, they have a freedom to shape their destiny denied to animals and to the “zombies” some contemporary neuroscientists and philosophers would make of them. He produces no mechanism for this putative freedom and his reasoning seems to be: human beings are special; freedom is special; therefore human beings are free. I don’t believe in free will and I completely disagree with this conclusion: far from liberating us, history and culture merely make our behavior determined in more complex ways, and it is not rational to believe that human beings are governed by reason. True, certain human activities like mathematics, supremely, and science, more or less, are governed by reason, which is why they have been so successful, but certain other human activities, like politics, are not.
It’s difficult to see how they can be: many political questions are simply too complicated and too unclear to be settled by rational argument, and one sure sign that politics is closer to theology than mathematics is the passion of those on opposing sides in, say, the argument over the Iraq war. Neither side has a clear proof of its position, because neither side knows what all the variables are and neither side can accurately predict the consequences of altering those variables, or leaving them unaltered. It’s possible, indeed, that both positions could lead, in their different ways, to disaster. Despite this, each side insists that it has reason and logic on its side and that the other side is driven by emotion and unreason. Anyone who has seen a religious conflict will find this very familiar, but then politics, like religion, is tribal, and it is not only naïve but highly unobservant to believe otherwise. Malik’s irrational attachment to the power of reason is scientific in one sense, however, in that we can run experiments to test it. The return of African nations to the control of blacks and the mass immigration of non-white non-Christians into Europe over the past fifty years have been experiments in the power of reason over irrational forces like tribalism and religion. The irrationalist racist Peter Simple predicted that black rule in Zimbabwe would be a disaster, and the irrationalist racist Enoch Powell predicted that there would be serious trouble in Europe; Malik’s humanist and rationalist predecessors placed their trust, reasonably enough, in humanism and reason.
Simple was proved completely right in Zimbabwe and preliminary results from France, Holland, and northern England are tending to support Powell. Yes, human beings are neither beasts nor zombies, but we are not angels either and it is only rational to recognize the power of unreason in our affairs. If there were more rationalist utopian humanist atheists like Malik in the world, it might be a better place, but then again, it might not, and as Malik has surely noticed by now, rationalist utopian humanist atheism appeals to very few people. The Enlightenment, from which Malik’s ideas are derived, had profound effects but was never a mass movement. One of its profound effects arose from the liberation of science from religion. Science has flourished ever since, but whether that has been, and will be, good or bad or both is another complicated and unclear question. What is neither complicated nor unclear was the failure of the Enlightenment to prevent irrationalist movements like Nazism and Communism. Though both Nazism and Communism did, of course, accept and abuse the scientific fruits of the Enlightenment, and both did, of course, claim to have reason and science firmly on their side. So does Malik. By their fruits shall ye know them.
Hizb-ut-Tahrir certainly has odious views on Jews, Hindus, gays and women. But to compare it to the BNP is absurd. It has won respect and support among some young Asians because, at a time when western society is experiencing a virulent anti-Muslim backlash, it seems willing to stand up for the dignity of their communities. Extending the meaning of incitement to racial hatred to include the activities of Hizb-ut-Tahrir is to demean the real experience of racism, while posting new restrictions on all our rights to free expression.Top“No platform or no democracy?”, Kenan Malik, New Statesman, September 6, 1996.
But Rumeana Jahangir, a media worker, said: “If I found out that somebody was planning to bomb the middle of London I would go and inform because it is haram [an act forbidden by the Qur’an].” To which the Hizb ut-Tahrir member said: “I would say to hell with your civic duty.” He was interrupted and told that Muslims could not justify killing people. [...] The Hizb ut-Tahrir member said his party represented a view that was part of the Muslim community. The table then stopped his input, saying: “We are getting distorted by one person.”
“What is the impact of the ‘war on terror’ on British Muslims?”, The Guardian, Tuesday November 30, 2004.
The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Richard L. Gregory (ed.)
An octopus can learn to recognize the difference between a square and circle by sight, but not the difference between a cube and a sphere by touch. Why is this?
You can learn the answer from this book in the section on “Invertebrate Learning” and if it’s the sort of question you like having answers to this book will reward you many times, because it’s full of odd and illuminating information on all aspects of brains and behavior, whether human, octopus, or beetle. What it isn’t, on the other hand, is particularly full of information, odd, illuminating, or otherwise, on the mind, and perhaps that’s as it should be, because minds are much trickier things to investigate and talk sense about than brains. In fact, the definition given under “Epiphenomena”, one of the most important terms of the brain-mind debate, is just wrong:
Phenomena that occur in association with, or are supervenient upon, a given set of events, yet supposedly are not caused by those events.No, epiphenomena are caused, they just don’t cause in their turn. That mistake sums up the value of most of the contributions on the mind rather than the brain in this book: that is, they aren’t very valuable at all. Perhaps Companion to the Mind was preferred because it would sell more copies, but Companion to the Brain would be much more accurate, as well as saying what is valuable about this book: the insights and new ways of seeing the physical world that it can offer. Why do octopuses fail to learn the difference between cubes and spheres, for example?
Apparently because they don’t have rigid limbs. Human beings can judge distances and shapes by touch because they’re comparing them against the fixed lengths and shapes of their hand and fingers. An octopus, on the other hand, has infinitely variable and varying tentacles, and can’t compare its own body against the external world.
“Man is the measure of all things” takes on new significance after that, and you might start to look at your hands in a new way too. As you might start to look at many other things in a new way after reading some of the entries in this book, because it also looks at such topics as optical – and auditory – illusions, subliminal perception, sensation, intelligence, and neurochemistry.
Unfortunately Freudianism and psychotherapy are taken seriously too, but in such a general book that’s hard to avoid and I suppose it had to do something to justify its somewhat misleading title. Much more pleasing is the inclusion of unexpected topics like astrology and out-of-the-body experiences. In other words, no-one is likely to be completely satisfied with this book, but almost everyone should find something of interest, although electro-chemical determinists like me will probably find most of all.
Jet, Helen Muller
A fascinating and well-illustrated book dealing with the use of the black gemstone jet by jewellers, sculptors, and other artists. Geologically a hard black form of lignite, jet occurs in different forms with different properties in various parts of Europe, with most production, now or in the past, taking place in Germany, Spain, and Northumbria. Among other highlights there was a fascinating section on the role of jet in the Victorian jewelery and clothing used in women’s mourning, which followed strict rules defining such things as how long a certain size of jewel could be worn and when widows could begin to wear other colors than black. Some of the worksmanship in jet was of a very high quality, and I can still remember an astonishingly detailed miniature bust of Mary Queen of Scots.
Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars, Margaret Wertheim
Some people enjoy sniffing glue or petrol or cutting their arms with pieces of broken glass. I’ve got a depraved taste too, but it doesn’t destroy brain-cells or cause any other kind of lasting physical harm. At least, I hope it doesn’t.
And what is it? It’s reading books with “Gender” in their titles, like this one. I find it hard to resist them, because a good laugh never goes amiss and that’s what books with “Gender” in their titles so often supply. I thought I’d found another good laugh in this one when I read “Her writing is among the best I have had the pleasure to read” (an unidentified reviewer in Nature) on the back cover and then opened the book to discover sentences like this:
By binding people into the same cosmological framework, a shared world picture becomes one of the primary glues that holds [sic] communities together. (pg. xi)Gosh. A “world picture” capable not only of binding people into a framework but also of acting as a primary glue. That’s quantum weirdness at its weirdest. Subtler, but even funnier, was to come:
Modern Mathematical Man has not just been a passive observer to the tide of iniquity, but all too often a willing contributor. (pg. 11)“Tide” was a dead metaphor in that sentence until Wertheim cleverly brought it back to life by saying Modern Mathematical Man “contributed” to it. A tide is a mass of water in motion, and a Man would contribute to a mass of water by, well, you can work it out for yourself.
After those two good laughs, I was expecting more, then damn, I came across this:
I suggest that contemporary physicists’ obsession with a theory of everything is socially irresponsible. In expecting society to provide billions of dollars to support this quest TOE physicists have become like a decadent priesthood, demanding that the populace build them ever more elaborate cathedrals, with spires reaching ever higher into their idea of heaven. Since a theory of everything would not only be utterly irrelevant to daily human life and concerns, but also incomprehensible to the vast majority of people, TOE physicists can be likened to the late medieval Scholastics. This is the twentieth-century equivalent of asking how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. (pg. 14)And I agree with that almost completely. Like Wertheim, I think that it’s wrong to spend huge sums of money on particle accelerators and cyclotrons when there are other much more immediate and deserving causes not just in science but everywhere else too. But, unlike Wertheim, I don’t think knowledge for its own sake is wrong or that pursuing a theory of everything is pointless in the abstract: if it says something true, it’s valuable, and I don’t agree with what sometimes seems to be her claim that “truth” is constructed by scientists rather than discovered by them in an objective reality.
And she certainly argues elsewhere that human nature is one and indivisible, existing in a metaphysical space where free will can shape it quite independently of biology:
Why is it of all the sciences this is the one proving most difficult for women to break into?Wertheim’s explanation is that physics is a “priestly” craft, intimately connected with and influenced by an age-old patriarchal religious worldview, and just as the priestly craft of Christianity has sternly resisted the inclusion of women for centuries, so has the priestly craft of physics. Men and women have an equal ability to conduct physics, but society and culture unjustly prevent women from exercising their ability.
Maybe so, but there’s another possibility. To become a physicist demands both high intelligence and very good maths, and the tiny group of human beings who possess the two happen – it seems – to be overwhelmingly male, just as the tiny group of human beings able to play chess at the highest level happen to be overwhelmingly male, with those women present in both tiny groups having what might be called “masculinized” brains. If that is the case, physics has taken on a priestly air because that is what abstract professions dominated by men tend to do, rather than physics being dominated by men because it has a priestly air. The present advances in neurology mean that it shouldn’t be long before we know for certain one way or the other.
And of course, if Wertheim is right her analysis is only part-complete: what about the exclusion of blacks and the working-class from physics both ancient and modern? On the other hand, male Asians, both eastern and western, have probably been greatly over-represented in modern physics. I’m not quite sure how that fits into Wertheim’s theory, though perhaps it has something to do with the strong priestly tradition in Asian societies.
The Left-Hander Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness, Stanley Coren
A very interesting though not particularly well-written book that is a good example of how an entire world can open before you when you pay attention to something that might seem fairly trivial.
In this case, it’s “handedness”: the propensity of human beings to favor one or another hand, mostly, in every culture and period that’s been surveyed so far, the right. In every known culture too, except the Chinese, left-handedness is associated with clumsiness or misfortune (for example, sinister and gauche are the Latin and French words, respectively, for “left”).
Only “handedness” isn’t really the right word: we also favor our left or right eyes, feet, and ears, and probably our left or right nostrils too. Coren discusses the consequences of and possible causes for these preferences, and there’s a fascinating section on how left-handedness is a “trait marker” for a complex of physical and psychological disorders (among the last of which, by implication at least, he included homosexuality, which I imagine will have brought him some stick). If say 10% of the population is naturally left-handed and 90% naturally right-handed, then if (say) 5% of each group become oppositely handed because of genetic or environmental damage, there will be a far larger group of “abnormal” left-handers: 5% of 10% is 0.5% of the population as a whole; 5% of 90% is 4.5% of the population as a whole.
After this survey of the nature and causes of left-handedness, Coren discusses how left-handers – most of whom are male – seem to die younger than right-handers, perhaps as a result of living in a world that’s biased against them. Right-handers – like me, and you too probably – don’t usually notice how everything is designed for their benefit: tools, keyboards, door-handles, even alphabets. Left-handers suffer more accidents in industry and manufacturing, an obvious sign of what is perhaps a much more pervasive disadvantage. Nonetheless it’s one that is almost completely ignored in favor of disadvantages, real and alleged, based on more obvious traits like sex or sexuality or race.
Mapping the Mind, Rita Carter
One of the most significant events of the 20th century happened towards the end of its closing decade. The name of one of the two chief players was Blue, and the name of the other was Kasparov. Before the event, Kasparov had been the greatest chess-player in history; after it, he was only the second-greatest. He had been beaten by Blue, and Blue – Deep Blue, in full – was a computer.
In previous victories over Deep Blue Kasparov had described himself as upholding the honor of the human race. Hubristic language duly punished by nemesis, and it hurt: Kasparov was badly upset by his loss. He needn’t have been. Grandmaster chess, for all its prestige, is a trivial activity, and Deep Blue was a trivial machine. That was why Kasparov’s loss was significant: because it proved how trivial chess was. There is a very great deal more to being human than the ability to play chess, and this book is a very good introduction to what that something more is.
Imagine, for example, what happened after those chess games were over. Deep Blue would have been switched off, and Kasparov would have gone away to – what? Maybe have a meal. Watch a movie. Read a book. Or any of those million other everyday things that are far more complex and subtle than playing chess at international grandmaster standards. Deep Blue is now the best chess player in history, but it can’t savor a peanut, let alone a full meal, or appreciate any other form of pleasure or sensation, or feel any kind of emotion. Those things are what is interesting about being human, and they all depend on the brain and what it does with the electrical signals passed to it by the sense organs: the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, the skin.
In that order: human beings are visual animals above all else, and that’s part of why this book is so good: it has very good pictures of brain regions and structures and perceptions that are sometimes science, sometimes art, often both. They do strange and educative things to your visual centres while the text does strange and educative things to your cortex. The whole gamut of human behavior is here, from smelling a flower through having sex to looking at a picture. Or defecating in someone else’s glove:
J.P. is a classic case [of psychopathy]. As a young boy he had a normal IQ and could, when he wanted, do most things – including school work – as well as any other boy of his age. His social behaviour, however, was monstrous. He lied, cheated and stole. Once he borrowed a glove, defecated into it, then returned it to its owner. (ch. 8, “Higher Ground”)But like chess, psychopathy is essentially trivial. A psychopathic computer will be far easier to create than an ethical one, and far, far easier than an emotional, conscious one. Unless, of course, you suppose that human beings are machines, in which case creating emotional, conscious computers is no more difficult than ovulation and ejaculation. Whether or not we are machines, and whether or not we will be able to create other machines in our own image, the present century will tell. This book records the first steps along some long and winding roads, and puts up lots of signposts for what’s to come.
The Mitchell Beazley Pocket Guide to Mushrooms and Toadstools, David N. Pegler
A little gem of a book in a consistently excellent natural history series, and rather like its subject it’s an example of something very rich and rewarding that’s growing quietly in an overlooked niche. Representational art, banished from the academies and galleries over the past fifty decades, has survived in natural history illustration, and when I think of recent art that’s moved or delighted me I often think of men like Ralph Thompson, who illustrated Gerald Durrell’s books about animal collecting in Africa and South America. David N. Pegler is more realistic and probably an even better draughtsman than Thompson, and though you might think he has less scope for quirkiness and humor, with non-animal, let alone non-mammalian, subjects, you’d be wrong. Each of the fungi illustrated here is a finely detailed, delicately tinted portrait in miniature and in situ, often accompanied by the dried leaves or bark or pine-needles of the spot in which Pegler presumably found it, and one of the pleasures of looking through the book is uncovering the unique and often witty touches Pelger has added to some of the portraits. For example, there’s the beetle crawling towards two specimens of Tricholoma portenosum – ‘so good to eat the French call it “Marvellous Tricholoma” (Tricholome merveilleux)’ – and the crumpled sweet wrapper lying near three Agaricus xanthodermus, the Yellow-staining mushroom found in or on “Parks, roadsides and wasteland”.
But Pegler usually lets the fungi speak for themselves in their bewildering variety of voices from their startlingly wide range of habitats: there are fungi that specialize in sand, marsh, burnt ground, and dung, as well as the more familiar dead wood and leaf-litter. As so often, the English-speaking world still has a lot to learn from the French: where many Brits or Americans are familiar with two or three edible species, the French are familiar with dozens. The Italians, on the other hand, maybe knew a lot about another kind of mushroom during the Renaissance: the poisonous varieties whose black-skull-on-white-background (averagely poisonous) or white-skull-on-black-background (deadly) add a regular macabre frisson to Pegler’s drawings. One of the deadliest fungi, the Destroying Angel (Amanita virosa), is one of the most beautiful too, like an evil young witch out of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: pure white, slender-stemmed, and with lacy clinging veils, but revealing its true nature by its “heavy soporific smell”.
“Do not mistake for Agaricus silvicola”, Pegler warns (the Latin adjective silvicola, meaning “wood-dwelling”, only exists in the feminine form). One of the ways to avoid mistaking the two is that A. silvicola, the Wood mushroom, “smells of aniseed”. Fungi can delight, or revolt, the nose as well as the eye: there’s the Coconut-scented milk-cap (Lactarius glyciosmus) and the Geranium-scented russula (Russula fellea) on the delightful side, and the Nitrous mycena (Mycena leptocephala), “often smell[ing] of nitric acid”, and the Stinking parasol (Lepiota cristata), with its “unpleasant rubbery smell”, on the revolting. Because this is meant primarily as a guide to identification and has to cram hundreds of species into a pocket-sized space, Pegler doesn’t have the space to say a lot about any particular species unless it helps identification like that, but each must have its own and often unique ecological story to tell and Pegler has managed to make his drawings portraits from the wild and not just mycological mug-shots. This makes the book my favorite of the Mitchell Beazley Guides that I’ve seen. All have been excellent but the Pocket Guide to Butterflies, for example, has no artistic charm or whimsy, because all the butterflies are drawn strictly, severely, and solitarily for identification, with nothing accompanying them.
Besides which, European butterflies don’t come in many varieties or colors: although they have sometimes hidden charms of their own, they’re frumpish and dowdy set beside their glittering, gleaming, multi-spectacular cousins from the tropics. That isn’t true of European fungi, as Pegler demonstrates: both they and their spores come in all shapes, sizes, and patterns, and all colors too. The Hygrocybe genus gleams with reds, yellows, and lilacs, and the species belonging to it look much more like “magic mushrooms” than the genuine article: the unassuming little Liberty Cap (Psilocybe semilanceata), which can poison the mind if not the body. Fungi can drive you mad, kill you, or delight your palate, eye, and intellect, and this book captures their richness and variety better than any other I’ve come across. Art, natural history, and culinary guide: it’s all here and The Mitchell Beazley Pocket Guide to Mushrooms and Toadstools is, in its quiet way, a much greater example of high culture than anything the modern Turner Prize has produced.
The Skeptical Enquirer
Eye-opening, stimulating, often very funny and informative, and refreshing as an ice-cube down the neck on a hot day after the muggy illogicality of the mainstream media, but I’m still a little skeptical about The Skeptical Enquirer. I want to like it, because I oppose a lot of the things it opposes, but there’s a disturbing whiff of inquisitorialism in the way the organization behind the magazine, CSICOP, or the Committee for Skeptical Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, goes about things.
Because its members sometimes seem to want not just to defeat their opponents but to stop them being allowed to speak as well. I agree that astrology is mostly nonsense, for example, but I was disturbed to read a reader’s letter in one issue announcing that he’d managed to have an astrologer banned from the air-waves for contravening an advertising rule, and there’s an interesting exchange in Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas between Hofstadter – a member of CSICOP – and a sociologist in which the sociologist seems the true skeptic: neither dismissing astrology completely, like Hofstadter, nor thoughtlessly embracing it. It’s a tired old response to people who dismiss the paranormal, but there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy and I’d no more want CSICOP and its organ to have control of the media than I want the present crew to have control of it. There’s a golden mean of skepticism and CSICOP don’t seem to have found it yet.
© 2005-6 Simon Whitechapel