Simon Ings - Filed under 'reviews and opinion'

October 26, 2009

Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Telegraph, 4 October 2009

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/6250132/Catching-Fire-How-Cooking-Made-Us-Human-by-Richard-Wrangham-review.html

Just over two and a half million years ago, our brains swelled. Less than a million years later, they swelled again, our posture and our gait changed, our jaws shrank, and we grew taller. These two evolutionary changes define our species, distinguishing us from our fellow primates.

Richard Wrangham has new ideas about why these changes occurred. He has no argument with the generally accepted wisdom that our first transformation – from nimble tree-climbing australopithecines to sociable, tool-wielding habilines – was the consequence of a meat diet. But the character of the second change – from Homo habilis to the protohuman Homo erectus – has never been adequately explained, and Wrangham believes he has the answer: 1.8 million years ago, we learned to cook. Cooking improves the caloric value of food, and widens the range of what is edible. It literally powered our evolution.

Good, big ideas about evolution are rare. Often they’re merely 'just so’ stories, stringing specious skeins of cause and effect over a much more complicated intellectual landscape. At first glance, Wrangham’s argument seems to have been fished from that dodgy pot. Nobody can know for sure when cooking got going because the chances are minute that anyone will ever stumble upon an ancient half-eaten spit-roast and recognise it for what it is. (That archeologists have found earth ovens more than 250,000 years old is startling enough.)

Wrangham’s task, then, is to come up with compelling evidence that the invention of cooking is the only possible explanation for the transformation that stood us on our feet, shrank our guts, gave us silly teeth and receding jawlines, and swelled our brains to their current, horrendously fuel-inefficient size. The big news – I think it is big news – is that he succeeds. Catching Fire is that rare thing, an exhilarating science book. And one that, for all its foodie topicality, means to stand the test of time.

Homo erectus’s novel dentition, skull shape and gut capacity sit at the heart of Wrangham’s account. This is a hominid that chewed less and thought more. The circumstantial evidence Wrangham gathers is, if anything, even more compelling. His review of the anthropological literature, for instance, shows that no one, ancient or modern, settled or nomadic, has ever survived for more than a couple of seasons on an exclusively raw diet. Humans, Wrangham says, are as adapted to cooked food as cows are to grass.

These adaptations are both physical and psychological. Why do women still end up doing more housework than men? Why are so many instances of domestic violence triggered by apparent or perceived failures in the preparation and ready provision of food? Wrangham believes that human monogamy evolved as a protection racket, in which males ensure that their vulnerable stove-tending spouses don’t get their food stolen.

Wrangham’s slippage into the territory of evolutionary psychology naturally sets alarm bells ringing. But, once again, the alarm proves false. Wrangham’s life has been spent studying the behavioural ecology of apes. He grasps the economics of cooking and understands how it may have influenced primate social behaviour. His arguments are compelling and he does not claim too much for his insights into our species’ less-than-blissful domesticity.

For all our primate inheritance, we are still what we thought we were: an adaptable ape. Our past skews our present behaviour in ways we should try to understand. Ultimately, though, immediate economic circumstance dominates the way we cook and eat and behave around food. As domestic obesity rates continue to climb, this is both a liberation, and a worry.

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October 26, 2009

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution By Richard Dawkins

Telegraph, September 1, 2009.

http://c0122981.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/090907TGSOEReview.pdf

On June 22, 2000, the Human Genome Project published a list of the three billion pairs of nucleotides that make up the human genetic code. The project – an international, government-funded endeavour – cost around $3 billion, and was expected to take 15 years. By the time the results were published, two years ahead of schedule, the cost of gene sequencing had plummeted. By the time my own children are buying books like Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth, sequencing genomes will cost less than a thousand dollars per species.Then, says Dawkins,‘detailed DNA comparisons will fill in all the gaps in our knowledge about the actual evolutionary relatedness of every species to every other: we shall know, with complete certainty, the entire family tree of all living creatures.’

Evolution by natural selection is a theory in the sense that Newton’s laws of motion are theories.They are not hypotheses.They are descriptions (more or less well-phrased, and – in theory – always capable of improvement) of the real world.The weight of evidence for evolution is, and always has been, staggering. Dawkins gathers it up into a huge lump, calls it The Greatest Show on Earth and hurls it at the reader’s head from the highest heights his rhetoric can scale. He writes about the clocks (biological, nuclear and geological) by which the history of life on earth may be known.

He rightly reminds us that the fossil record is a relatively superfluous element of evolution’s evidential armoury, and he gleefully demolishes the more familiar creationist objections. Dawkins is to the modern evolutionary synthesis what Metallica’s Lars Ulrich is to heavy metal: a curmudgeon whose talent and passion have made him an unlikely poster boy. Fans will close Dawkins’ book as metalheads stagger out of Ulrich’s gigs, grinning from ear to bleeding ear, while those of moderate tastes will tut impotently: why do they have to play so loud?

Dawkins takes evolution’s classic anecdotes, reveals the evidence underpinning them, and demonstrates their power to explain, not just one or two curious phenomena, but the whole warp and woof of nature. Consider, for example, the tree. Any right-thinking tree should conserve its energy and hug the ground. It only takes one tree to grow a stalk, however, and suddenly every tree must grow as tall as possible to capture more light than its neighbour. Among the trees wander elk, whose sexually impressive antlers are too big and heavy for their heads.The elk, in turn, are hunted by wolves, whose speed, grace and intelligence have all evolved – at swingeing cost – to deal with the elk’s habit of running away. All of nature is an arms race, and every arms race is futile.

Dawkins is a master of scientific clarity and wit, but he grows ever more garrulous.Anger (at creationists, religious apologists and, as it seems, any passing twit) saps his creative imagination, and when this happens he sounds both metallic and hollow, as though he were lecturing from inside an old Huntley and Palmers biscuit tin. But there is magic here, too, in passages that recall early masterpieces like Climbing Mount Improbable. Watching the dissection of a giraffe’s recurrent laryngeal nerve (the one that infamously runs from one part of the giraffe’s head to another via the heart) we’re given a visceral sense of the disarray that prevails wherever living systems are exposed to virtually no selection pressure: ‘the overwhelming impression you get from surveying any part of the innards of a large animal is that it is a mess... a decent designer would never have perpetrated anything of the shambles that is the criss-crossing maze of arteries, veins, nerves, intestines, wads of fat and muscle, mesenteries and more.’

This is good, but familiar. Dawkins claims he must keep repeating himself; that the blandishments of the Intelligent Design lobby force him into the position of ‘a teacher of Latin forced to waste his time and energy defending the proposition that the Romans and their language ever existed’. This is a very big alibi for a straightforward retelling of familiar material. More likely, rehearsing evolution’s basics may be one of the very few things Dawkins still has left to do.

Now in his 67th year, Dawkins is long overdue for his philosopause – that period in a scientist’s life when philosophical explorations seem so much easier and more enticing to write about than the rigours of the lab and the field. Dawkins’ career, however, is weirdly back- to-front: his philosopause is long behind him. Dawkins’ notion that cultural information evolves through natural selection was first propounded in The Selfish Gene, published in 1976. Dawkins theory of ‘memes’ is a classical piece of philosopausal thinking: it rings true – it may even be true – but, more than 30 years on, it shows absolutely no sign whatsoever of birthing any real science. Dawkins’ atheism keeps the meme alive, powering his idea of religion as mass delusion. Dawkins the science writer, however, steers clear of memes, preferring to riff more and more stridently on the fundamentals of real biology.

‘History,’Dawkins says,‘is written all over the body, not just once, but repeatedly, in exuberant palimpsest.’ The same may be said of Dawkins’ work. It too has its notorious detours and vestigial polyps. The Greatest Show on Earth is a minor addition to Dawkins’ body of work. But there is still grandeur in his view of life, and timeless merit in any good tune turned up, Spinal Tap-style, to 11.

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October 26, 2009

Kubrick's Moon

On Saturday 18 July 2009 I was at the BFI on London's South Bank, exploring Kubrick's designs for space travel with Will Whitehorn, Chris Riley, Theo Kamecke and Tony Frewin. This blogpost was written to introduce the event.

A couple of years before I was born, on December 14 1962, Mariner 2, NASA’s first successful unmanned planetary probe, flew by Venus.

The thick, featureless clouds of of our solar system’s only other blue planet had, for generations of observers, carried the veiled promise of extraterrestrial life. I remember inheriting from my elder brother a children’s guide to space, written just before the Mariner launch. I remember the artist’s impression of Venusian seas, and Venusian fish.

Mariner 2 did not catch any fish. The Venus it discovered was, in truth, a kind of Hell, with an atmosphere so thick and heavy it would spread a hapless human visitor like jam over rocks five times as hot as boiling water.

Some years later, between July 14 and July 15 1965, Mariner 4 flew by Mars. No one expected to see gondoliers plying the planet’s canals. At the same time, few expected to see a terrain so cratered, so moonlike, so obviously inimical to life. We still claim – with a sort of inverted optimism – that Mars is a ‘dead’ planet. In all honesty, it has almost certainly never been alive.

I am old enough to remember my mum waking me up and carrying me through to the living room to see Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. Even then, thanks to Mariners 2 and 4, the dream was already dying. For three hundred years, from the Scientific Revolution on, philosophers had been musing comfortably on the likely profusion and form of extraterrestrial life. The inter-war generation dreamt of one day exploring a living cosmos. It was left to the Apollo generation to measure the weight in disappointment of our patently empty sky.

If They are out there, why aren’t They here yet?

Kubrick took the business of an apparently lifeless cosmos seriously enough to send his assistant Tony Frewin off with a movie camera to interview 21 scientists and philosophers about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. At one stage, extracts from these interviews were supposed to preface the film. In the end, Kubrick let the film distil its own answer. We have too limited an idea of what life is. We have virtually no idea of what life might become. Technology is so powerfully transformative, we may simply not be able to detect all the traffic whirling above our heads – unless, that is, it comes crashing in upon us in the form of an oversize John Player Special cigarette packet.

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 has been hailed as a masterpiece of mysticism. It is the exact opposite: a loud, long, monomaniacal celebration of praxis: the brute human business of learning through doing. By doing, we learn about ourselves, and we learn about the world, and we do both imperfectly. Everything we do goes ever so slightly wrong – because the world is very big, and we are very small. Then again, we will never run out of things to do. 2001 is brutally teleological. Murder and warfare are revealed as key elements of human evolution. Evolution falls away eventually, superseded by other, faster, more flexible forms of human progress – like technology. But technology doesn’t necessarily make us happier, or better, or kinder. It just is.

2001 is not about mysticism. It is about yearning.

The Apollo and Soyuz missions convinced a generation that space travel was heavy, slow, inefficient, and could be achieved only by mobilising the powers of the state. The comics, meanwhile, claimed that space travel, like air travel, would one day be the preserve of the dedicated, intelligent and resourceful hobbyist. That rocketplanes would be like early aeroplanes: light, simple, and manoevreable.

2001 steered a middle course. NASA engineers advising the film, including Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange, knew what could be done with the materials of their day, and at what cost. Techologically, their vision of space travel is, I suppose, roughly equivalent to the Concorde builders’ vision of air travel: a lightweight aesthetic hampered by the sheer heaviness of available materials. Politically, 2001’s vision of flag-carrying airlines in space suggests that the great government institutions like NASA will not quite monopolise life off the planet: that some limited enterprise will one day be possible, at some swingeing corporate cost. If 2001’s vision of the future has dated at all, it is not because, three years after its release, NASA began sending men to the moon on top of overgrown ballistic missiles and, by the grace of God, got away with it. 2001 remains to this day a catalogue of all the things NASA wants to do one day, but somehow never finds the time or the money for. 2001’s future looks dated because it is too heavy, too big, too massive – in short, too much like NASA.

In pursuit of a 1965-vintage veritée, Stanley Kubrick shunned the futures presented by the comic books: their retro-futuristic resettings of the Air War in outer space; their nostalgic nods to the barnstorming days of aviation. But it was artists like Flash Gordon’s Alex Raymond and Dan Dare’s Frank Hampson who, untroubled by materials science, held true to the first rule of flying – a rule blurred by the Apollo programe’s collosal, fuel-hungry moonshots – that weight is your enemy, and lightness is everything. The other day, in preparation for Saturday’s event in NFT1, I went to see Will Whitehorn, the president of Virgin Galactic – the private space company preparing to send tourists into sub-orbital space on regular excursions. In his scratched-together office off Bond Street (almost next door to, and virtually identical to, the offices of the charter airline my mother used to work in after the War), Will explained to me that Virgin Galactic will also be using its launch system to place satellites in low-earth orbit. Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft are small, light, and fuel efficient, and have been built without state funding. They are the size of small business jets. They are made of packing foam and resin, their engines burn old tyres and laughing gas, and they look as though, at any moment, Dan Dare might climb down from the cockpit of one of them, pipe clamped in his strong jaw, a fishbowl helmet under his arm.

Saturday’s discussion in NFT1 brings Will, and Tony together with Chris Riley to tease out the ways in which 2001’s tale of the future is becoming, inevitably and inexorably, a tale of future past. Wrangling these very different talents will be like herding cats – but I have a good idea where I want to steer things. I don’t want us to analyze the film, so much as unpack some of the technical and aesthetic and scientific work that went into it. And I don’t want us to do this for its own sake, but rather so we can say something about the world 2001 was addressing, and about the assumptions we bring now, not just to Kubrick’s film, but to the very idea of our future in space.

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October 26, 2009

Books by Baker, Barrow and Stewart

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/3563703/Data-surfing-data-serfs.html

The Numerati: How They'll Get My Number and Yours by Stephen Baker

Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know by John D Barrow

Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities by Ian Stewart

Late in the day, and carrying little by way of new information, Stephen Baker's The Numerati is none the less a strikingly well-argued and positive account of a wired, watched world in which private lives are no longer an option.

In the near future Baker describes, you will pay a company called SpareMetheDetails.com to provide you with an exercise regime to address all those medical complaints and physical shortcomings you'd rather not know about; your online dating agency will boot you off the website because your ex-wife is emailing lies about you; and the supermarket, knowing you're disloyal (you chase bargains wherever you find them) will drive you away with absurd and inappropriate offers.

By digitising our every commercial exchange, and by inviting us to digitise more and more of our social dealings, the "Numerati" - the mathematician wizards who set the policies of institutions, insurers, retailers and governments - are increasingly able to model how each of us behaves in any given situation. In some respects, they already know us better than we know ourselves. The digital revolution that promised to bring tailored goods and services to my door will soon only give me what they think I deserve.

Getting us to face that future with confidence is Baker's task. For a start, he says, we are not being turned into numbers. "Turning us into simple numbers was what happened in the industrial age. That was yesterday's story." Our mathematically parsed lives (from our daily spending habits to our voting patterns) reveal us as complex entities that bloody-mindedly refuse to behave like components. In the control rooms of commerce and the state mathematics brings us to life. Whatever future our mathematical avatars are ushering in, it will not be an assembly-line future.

Baker's reassurances continue: "The ideal industries for the Numerati are those in which they can goof up regularly and still top the status quo." Digitising people en masse is hard; digitising individuals (attempting, for example, to track terrorist cells through the digital ether) is fraught beyond all imagining. Though the book is subtitled "How They'll Get My Number and Yours", the chances are that they won't. Not, anyway, if Jeff Jonas has his way. Jonas, who sold his relationship trawler to the CIA, is now a privacy advocate, frantically re-engineering his work to protect individual rights. If Jonas's story is typical, there is money and kudos to be had from reining in and humanising the future Baker describes.

Baker tracks down and talks to Jonas and many other key players in this digitised realm. Most of his subjects are not mathematicians. They come from the humanities. They studied history. They dropped out and messed around for years before stumbling on their Big Idea. Mathematics is simply their lingua franca. The future is wildly interdisciplinary: David Heckerman, a researcher at Microsoft, applies spam-detecting algorithms to HIV, work that could one day lead to an Aids vaccine.

What kind of world are the Numerati making for the rest of us? If decisions that affect us are going to be based on the real-time mathematical modelling of people then we had better make sure that those models reflect reality, and not some prejudiced take on it. Over the next few years, therefore, we can expect to find ourselves arguing ever-more desperately with the "computer says no" apparatchiks of the information economy. "At work," Baker warns, "perhaps more than anywhere else, we are in danger of becoming data serfs - slaves to the information we produce." To win our arguments - and save our selves - we will have to be able to explain exactly why "their" models of us are wrong. It's an onerous obligation, to be sure, but one "that will lead many of us to give more thought to who we are".

It would do us no harm, either, to know more about the maths underpinning those models - and it would be hard to imagine an easier, friendlier, more entertaining introduction than John Barrow's 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know. In his introduction, Professor Barrow bends over backwards to understate his book's value. Certainly, it's a title you are supposed to dip into. Most of Barrow's stories describe mathematical conundrums. There are biographical pieces, and some historical oddities. My favourite is the 1918 Soundex phonetic system, invented to deal with spelling errors in censuses. There are even belly laughs - as when a change in the points system saw the football teams of Grenada and Barbados attacking their own goals in the 1994 Shell Caribbean Cup.

I suspect the craft behind this fun book will only really come to light as we attempt to tell Barrow's stories to our friends. Suddenly, we will realise how much effort Barrow has expended in explaining difficult things simply.

Ian Stewart, unlike Barrow, believes in the sturdiness of his Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, and advises puzzle buffs to work through his book in order. His confidence in his handiwork is not misplaced, and his anthology is more structured than Barrow's. Stewart began collecting mathematical trivia when he was a schoolboy. The child is clearly the father of the man in this case, and the book's goofy and unabashed enthusiasm will charm any interested teenager. That said, Stewart does not write nearly as well as Barrow. At his very worst, he comes across as someone you should avoid at parties, stuffing his over-elaborate conundrums with weak jokes and execrable puns. His book is more of a collection of puzzles than the tour of wonders his title implies. While providing a great deal of mathematical entertainment, he can't help but remind us that mathematical ability, like musical ability, is not character forming. It is not urbane. It is not intuitive.

Stewart communicates very well over the divide that separates the Two Cultures. Barrow, on the other hand, makes you forget the divide is there.

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October 26, 2009

Liver: a Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes, by Will Self

Nature, 16 October 2008

We live, by and large, Panglossian lives, reading purpose into the world, and into ourselves. Confronted by our bodies, we wonder at our watchlike precision. Each part of us does something. A heart pumps blood. A skull shields the brain. Eyes see. Hands grip. The liver…

At this point, we begin to lose confidence in a craftsmanlike creator. Not that the liver serves no purpose; on the contrary, the liver has incredibly many functions: glycogen storage, decomposition of red blood cells, plasma protein synthesis, detoxification, bile production – and that’s not even to mention its regulatory abilities. When we look at the liver we see, not a tool for living, but a living thing – and this is a much less comfortable proposition. Like Dirk Bogart’s Servant, the liver intimidates us by its efficient ubiquity.

Liver is not body horror in the science-fictional sense – for a moving and melancholy admission that our bodies are not our own, watch the films of David Cronenberg. Liver is something else, and for afficionadoes of Self, something entirely expected. It is satire. In Self’s vision, our livers are more valuable than we are, more able; above all more alive. The liver is the only organ in the body that can self-regenerate – and still we contrive, over our lives’ course, to squander its magnificent estate.

The four lobes of Self’s liver are stories, casually interlinked. Structure is relatively unimportant here, and the weakest story comes last. That said, Liver contains by far the strongest Self fictions in years, as the denizens of Soho’s Plantation Club, ‘aping the mores of Maclaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas, and lapsing into the secret language of formerly outlawed inverts,’ cast a miasma of grain alcohol over successive protagonists: a terminally ill hospital administrator; a demigod-like Hoxton ‘creative’; a drug-abusing Peter Sellers fanatic.

Self’s writing is not new. It is not radical. (Describing Birmingham in terms of metastisis, it declares its conservatism.) Self’s satire is profoundly classical, rooted more in Alexander Pope than Jonathan Swift. Poor diseas’d flesh takes plenty of collateral damage, as when a character’s ‘massively engorged liver passed beyond mere macrovesicular steatosis into the irredeemably gothic realms of steatonecrosis,’ but contemporary behaviour is Self’s real target. ‘Confronted with the nobility of feeling, high culture and deep spirituality,’ Self, like the ‘Martian’ of his first story, Foie Humain, ‘sees nothing but the stereotypic behaviours of anthropoid geese.’

of course, mere distance is only the beginning. Satire depends for its success upon a pitiless accuracy. Self’s prose, however much it veers drunkenly between the appetizing and the nauseating, is almost always on the nail: proof that the more accurately you describe a thing, the more surreal it appears. An old woman hussled towards extinction by her daughter’s poor timekeeping. The determined alcoholic gavage of a hapless barman. A homeless boy eating ‘a sweet bun seamed with beef’ in a burger bar. This is either the poetry of alienation, or the 20/20 insight one acquires in the face of approaching death. Self plays both sides, nowhere more affectingly than in the collection’s magnificent centrepiece, Leberknödel.

Joyce, a retired hospital administrator, knows that her cancers will not stop ‘until they had toppled the sovereignty of consciousness itself, and replaced it with their own screaming masses of cancerous tissue.’ Appalled at the ‘bad habit’ of terminal decline, she arranges her own suicide. Seemingly reprieved, she finds, however, that her living has become as much of a bad habit as her dying. Having taken the Martian’s-eye view of gooselike humanity, she cannot reverse the process. She has thrown off the veils of meaning, and now looks objectively at her life, her world, her friends, her sot of a daughter – and finds that she has already killed herself.

The highest office of any intellectual activity is the acquisition of knowledge. Fictional knowledge is both essential and fleeting, and the test of its truth is vague and long-winded, as works are strained through successive filters of fashion, criticism and cultural shift. Ayn Rand once ranked with Tolstoy. Flaubert was reviled by his contemporaries. Self usually affects contempt for this process, presumably because worrying about the value of his art will only distract him from the ephemera so essential to it.

Leberknödel (liver dumplings to you) may be an exception. There’s a different kind of ambition at work here. An eye to posterity in that playful nod to Flaubert, as Self gleefully italicises every middlebrow cliché passing through Joyce’s dying mind. Like Madame Bovary, Leberknödel sets satire aside in favour of a spiky yet humane morality. Our bodies are not ours. Nor are our feelings. We think our perceptions are ephemeral, but they are rooted in a physics that will outlast us. Redeemed, secured, and left to herself, Joyce even manages to argue herself away.

If humans are such delicate tissue, why satirise them? For Self to kick the floor out from under himself in this way is no mean achievement. Liver’s hysterical grotesques – The Poof, the Martian, His Nibs, the Cunt – cannot and are not meant to hold.

Joyce will endure.

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October 26, 2009

Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments by Alex Boese

Telegraph, 17 August 2008

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3558662/Review-Elephants-on-Acid-and-Other-Bizarre-Experiments-by-Alex-Boese.html

There is a connection between vaudeville and science, and it is more profound than people credit. Alex Boese's collection of bizarre scientific anecdotes illuminates this connection, claims far too much for it, and loses the thread of it entirely. This probably doesn't matter - by Boese's own estimation, Elephants on Acid is a book you dip into in the bathroom. There's even an entire chapter, 'Toilet Reading', dedicated to this very idea. But Boese, quietly meticulous, is a champion of the idea of science. So, at the risk of taking a mallet to a sugar-coated almond, let's take him seriously here.

Boese is the curator of a splendid on-line museum of hoaxes - museumofhoaxes.com. To move from deliberate fakery to science gone awry, deliberately or not, is, Boese argues, but a small step. Hoaxers and experimenters are both manipulators of reality. But only experimenters wrap themselves in the authority of science. 'This sense of gravity is what lends bizarre experiments their particularly surreal quality.' More charitably, he might have added: only scientists run a serious and career-busting risk of hoaxing themselves. Boese's accounts of unlikely experiments include sensible and legitimate studies into risible subjects (how could studies into human ticklishness not sound silly?) Elsewhere, accounts of doubtful 'discoveries' reveal how badly credulousness and ambition will misdirect the enquiring mind. Wandering among Boese's carnival of curiosities we learn, for example, the precise weight of a human soul and acquire a method for springing crystalline insects out of rocks.

Less convincing are his stories of research misinterpreted by gullible or hostile media. A sharper editor would have spotted when Boese's eye for a good tale was leading him astray. In 1943 the behaviourist Burrhus Skinner invented a comfortable, labour-saving crib for his baby daughter - only to be pilloried for imprisoning her in an experimental 'box'. This is a tale of irony and injustice, deftly told. But it is not 'bizarre science'.

It's devilishly difficult to get good at something unless you can find the fun in it. The more intellectually serious a work is, the more likely it is to have playful, even mischievous aspects. Science is no exception. The more entertaining, and less troubling, of Boese's tales involve ingenious, self-aware acts of scientific folly. We learn a truly magnificent (and wrong) formula for working out the moment at which cocktail parties become too loud. A study that involves erotically propositioning young men on a wobbly bridge must surely have fallen out of the bottom of an Atom Egoyan movie. And pet owners should heed a slapstick 2006 study entitled 'Do Dogs Seek Help in an Emergency?' ('Pinned beneath the shelves, each owner let go of his or her dog's leash and began imploring the animal to get help from the person in the lobby.')

Yet, for all its hilarity, Elephants on Acid proves to be an oddly disturbing experience when read cover-to-cover. The decision to put all the truly gut-wrenching vivisection stories in the first chapter was foolhardy. Robert White's 1962 attempt to isolate a monkey's brain by removing, piece by piece, the face and skull, absolutely belongs in this book - but it is delivered so early that it's one hell of a hurdle to clear in the first five minutes of reading. Other horrors lurk in wait for those who persevere (Ewen Cameron's brainwashing experiments of the 1950s are particularly horrendous). Boese's off-the-cuff observation that the Cold War had its surgical and psychological aspects is not staggeringly original but it does mollify our easy outrage at such past 'mistakes'. Quite rightly so, for most of what we primly label 'maverick science' is no such thing; it is simply science that served a long-since-vanished purpose.

Most disturbing of all, however are those celebrated and familiar behavioural experiments that, while harming no one, reveal human gullibility, spite, vanity and witlessness. Philip Zimbardo's prison-psychology experiment at Stanford University had to be terminated, so keenly did his volunteers brutalise each other. Testing the limits of obedience (clue: there aren't any), Stanley Milgram invited volunteers to inflict what they thought were potentially lethal electric shocks to people. Few demurred. Ironically, these kinds of experiments share methods with many stage magic routines.

The connection between vaudeville and science is profound, all right - and not particularly funny. Boese is right to invite us to dip in and out of his book. His facetious mask cannot hide for long the underlying seriousness of such striking material.

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October 26, 2009

Summer Books: The Future

The Times, July 3, 2008

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4264149.ece

What are your children going to be when they grow up? Are they even going to be human? Thinking about the future is compulsive; it's irresistible.

Each of the books listed here comes at the future from an odd angle. Each captures the sheer weirdness of the human project far better than books that wear their futurology credentials on their sleeves.

Carl Elliott's Better Than Well (Norton, £19.95/ offer £17.95) punctures the bubble of newness that surrounds our obession with self-improvement, surgical enhancement and recreational drugs. Elliott reckons that when we turned away from religious belief, we lost our best alibi for being imperfect. We turned our desire for perfection away from God and on to ourselves: and now we are giving ourselves a hard time.

Anyone who slogged through Oliver James's Affluenza has to read this: a smarter, funnier and infinitely more helpful diagnosis of the modern malaise.

David Levy's Sex and Love with Robots (Duckworth, £12.99/£11.69) claims that the next generation will be physically entwined with animated plastic dolls, and will be a lot happier for it. Levy doesn't think robotics will enable us to conquer Space, Time and the Body.

Equally, he doesn't think the humanoid robots under development in Japan will usher in the end times. He simply has the measure of what people are like: generally kind, full of yearning, and in need of a hug. Robot companions, in Levy's deadpan vision, seem no freakier than pets.

James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia (Penguin, £7.99/£7.59) tells us what we can and cannot do about the changing climate. He's one of the few thinkers on this issue prepared to say which battles are worth fighting, and which battles are lost.

Lovelock's refusal to moralise our predicament is by turns chilling and refreshing. Selfishness, greed, political mismanagement and shortsightedness are not the point. We are simply too many, and we are having far too much fun, and there is not a lot we can do about this but die in large numbers. Every species has its season, and ours is done.

The future is going to be odd, shaped by a world and by a physics that are much, much bigger than we are. Fiction carries further than opinion. First published in 1885, Richard Jeffries's After London (Dodo, £14.95/£13.46) is the first great English novel about evolution. Set far in the future, it describes a world that has continued to adapt; domestic animals have evolved into frightening wild forms. Its plot - a hallucinatory journey across the poisoned marshes of a sunken London - is as powerfully focused as anything by J.G. Ballard.

Farther still into tomorrow, The City of Viriconium (Spectra, £8.99/£8.54) misreads itself back into existence again and again, cheating the End of Days by chasing itself along its own songlines. Since 1980, M.John Harrison has been fighting a one-man war against the domestication of literary fantasy. His ironical tales of an uninhabitable city refuse to be bounded; they are as frustrating, frightening and as irresistible as the future itself.

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October 26, 2009

ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century by Susan Greenfield

'Nothing new about neuroscience.' Telegraph, 8 June 2008

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3553908/Nothing-new-about-neuroscience.html

What can neuroscience say about the experience of being oneself? What can it say about personality? Can it predict how the self might change over a lifetime, and redefine itself from one generation to the next? Susan Greenfield, at any rate, has plenty to say in ID, her 'quest for identity in the 21st century', and much of it is humane and persuasive.

Selfhood is on a dimmer switch: at any moment, we are more or less ourselves. It is good for us to blow our minds occasionally. It is good to forget ourselves. It is, by the same token, healthy to recover our sense of self again, to develop it through reading, conversation and thinking. Greenfield wonders whether new media are entertaining us to death, ponders the well-worn territory of status anxiety and considers the psychological appeal of fundamentalism. Society makes the self possible, and different societies create different kinds of self. The selves of some societies are more conscious of themselves than others. Can we - should we - engineer our future so as to encourage a particular sense of self in future generations?

Greenfield is two women: the social pundit and the neuroscientist. The pundit, generous in intent, mediocre in delivery, digs no deeper than the usual tertiary sources. Oliver James's Affluenza. Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You. Even Michio Kaku. The neuroscientist, on the other hand, studies the biomechanics of dementia, conducts original research and communicates it with broad-brush descriptions that leave a surprising amount of the detail standing.

In ID, Susan Greenfield imagines she can fuse these two halves of herself. She should know better. Early in the book, she reproduces a cartoon that captures perfectly what is going to go wrong with this idea. In the cartoon, rain falls on a prune. The prune swells, lifting a lever which flicks a lighter which lights a candle which boils a kettle which blows a whistle which startles a monkey. The monkey jumps on a swing. Attached to the swing is a scythe, which cuts a string which releases a balloon which opens a cage door, releasing several birds. The birds are tied to the spokes of an umbrella, and as they fly into the air, the umbrella opens.

The cartoon crops up in a discussion of genes. Greenfield is quoting the British geneticist Gaby Dover, who likes using Rube Goldberg's self-opening umbrella as a way of explaining how genes work. Or rather, how they don't work. In Dover's analogy, a gene is a prune. It might conceivably cause an umbrella to open, but to suppose that this is all it does, and that it does so reliably every time, is to imagine that living things are Rube Goldberg cartoons.

But Goldberg's prune could just as easily be a brain cell, which sends a signal through a synapse, travelling back and forth through an uncertain number of transient networks, which contribute information to an unspecified and constantly changing number of theoretically problematic meta-networks, which feed their outputs back and forth through umpteen brain loci, which create the scent of roses. Greenfield knows a lot about prunes and has some unexceptional views about umbrellas. She imagines that her mastery of prunes excuses her from the close study of umbrellas.

She tours us ably through the brain's biochemistry, in order to reveal, in a long-winded fashion, what we knew already. Religion comforts people. Instant gratification is addictive. Artists are a little bit schizophrenic. Greenfield knows perfectly well - indeed, is at pains to point out - that there is no medicine for the human condition - so why does she feel the need to reach so far down the chain of scientific reduction to explain what we already knew from simple human observation? Greenfield imagines she is bringing us insights from neuroscience but she is really just spotting connections between her work and the world outside. This is more interesting for her than for us.

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October 26, 2009

The Baby in the Mirror by Charles Fernyhough

'Babies are bags of bits.' Telegraph, 23 May 2008

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3673478/Babies-are-bags-of-bits.html

In his account of the first three years of his daughter's life, the novelist Charles Fernyhough recalls how she 'would march around the house, a piece of half-chewed bread held aloft like a martial cross, and point out all the things I wasn't allowed to do...Even the flow of air could mess up her plans, which meant that we were often required to cease breathing altogether. "No! Dad-dee! No!" It was like having a cuddle with Hitler.'

Athena is a schoolgirl now, and these stories of her early life in County Durham and Turramurra, in Sydney's hilly northern suburbs, must seem as unfamiliar to her as any stranger's tale. Toddlers are memory-proof. They are made of Teflon: nothing sticks. The baby in Fernyhough's mirror is no more. True, her father has his notebooks and his videos - but he too is falling victim to a selective amnesia that wipes the vividness from tantrums and broken nights. In so many ways, toddlerhood is lost time.

Fernyhough has used his daughter's development as a hook on which to hang a considered, up-to-date summary of what we know about how babies develop. But The Baby in the Mirror is more than a high-concept popular science book with some family snaps thrown in. The spirit of Jean Piaget - the Swiss psychologist who turned a father's fascination with his offspring into a fertile natural science - hovers over this book. When Fernyhough needs to sum up an idea about development quickly and accurately, he looks to his daughter, and where a lesser writer would have reached for generalisations, he simply tells us what he sees: the look of comic concentration with which Athena registers the effects of an action; the surreal cack-handedness of her first jokes. The result is an informed and humane introduction to the literature of infant observation.

Fernyhough observes his daughter as she works tirelessly to understand what's plausible and what's not about this madhouse in which she finds herself - a world of blossoming richness and complexity. Rubbing up against this world will turn her brain from 'raw proliferating matter' into one of the more complex objects in the universe. With equal acuity, Fernyhough records his urge to invest Athena's smallest gestures with meaning. This is a fascinating story, if it is a story at all.

This is the problem: babies are bags of bits. They acquire and mislay abilities at a dizzying rate. Development is not a series of lessons learned. Some babyish 'abilities': such as stepping and swimming, are primitive reflexes that vanish shortly after birth, swamped beneath a welter of fumbling experiments in gross motor control. Babies actually forget how they originally recognised faces, and reacquire the skill using a different part of the brain. It's frustrating: toddlers get up to all sorts of new tricks, but do not seem to grasp them in any obvious or convenient order. At around eight months they learn how to use thumb and forefinger to pick up an object - yet they don't yet know how to let go.

Holding all these stories in the air is a difficult business. The Baby in the Mirror is well organised, but Fernyhough is oddly reluctant to advertise the fact, and gives his chapters arch titles such as 'Um…' and 'It's About a Little Mouse'. More signposting would have improved the book immeasurably. Practical difficulties aside, how do you write a story about someone who's not yet a person? A 'weird bit of disco apparatus' that smells and hears what it sees? A creature whose growing competence is acquired through experiences it cannot remember? The bottom line is, you can't. Fernyhough's imaginative reconstructions can only be approximations. 'With words', wrote the psychologist Lev Vygotsky, 'we can work with things that are not there.'

The insistent and exclusive 'is-ness' of the toddler's world begins to recede even as language develops. Athena's acquisition of language is part and parcel of her growing ability to wield rules ('No! Dad-dee! No!'). Through them she embeds herself, at last, in time - and is a toddler no more. With only words to work with, Fernyhough cannot recreate his daughter's world. It is an impossible task. But he trusts to his abilities as a writer ('fiction-making', he suggests, 'has more than a little of science about it'), and he does it anyway. Good for him: his book is both a triumph of informed imagination and a startling testament of love.

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October 26, 2009

The Finger Book by John Manning

'How race began.' Telegraph, 19 April 2008

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3672734/How-race-began.html

In 1823, while serving in Spain under Louis XVIII, Captain Casimir Stanislas D'Arpentigny met a gipsy girl who read his hands and inspired him to write his opus La Chirognomie, which, while not a work of science, isn't mere charlatanry.

John Manning's studies of hand shape are impeccably modern and unimpeachably scientific. Nonetheless, cheiromancy had been around for a very long time - much longer than the evolutionary psychology which is Manning's métier - and a whiff of the occult lingers over his latest, infuriating little book. Men's ring fingers are longer than their forefingers. Women's forefingers are longer than their ring fingers. Manning, who has travelled the world measuring countless hands (and gives the impression that he's been having a whale of a time doing it) says that measuring our fingers can tell us who we are.

In the womb, the hormone testosterone promotes the development of the ring finger. Male foetuses are exquisitely sensitive to testosterone. Female foetuses are more sensitive to oestrogen, which promotes the growth of the forefinger. An oestrogen-rich environment for the first three months in the womb will feminise male babies, while a testosterone-rich environment will masculinise females. Everything follows from such accidents of birth: our propensity to systemic disease, our susceptibility to infections, our athletic abilities, sexual preferences, behaviour, levels of happiness - even our talents.

To paraphrase Senator John Kerry, it's a Big Ask. But Manning doesn't stop there. Black people are black because their skin stores large amounts of the pigment melanin. What is it for? It's not sun-block. Native South Americans living in the tropics aren't black. As a group, explains Manning, black men are more sensitive to testosterone, and this makes them more masculinised than white men. Men who are more masculinised have better cardiovascular health, but are more susceptible to infections. Manning argues that melanin acts as a mechanical barrier to microbes. In other words, black skin evolved to compensate for a weaker immune system.

Why would pale, lumbering, asthmatic white men evolve to have hypersensitive immune systems and poor cardiovascular health? Because white men have for several millennia been monogamous homebodies whose relatively uneventful lives enable them to sire children in their dotage. The vast majority of black ancestral marriage patterns, on the other hand, involve polygamy, and polygamous societies are violent. In the evolution of blackness, tolerance to disease wasn't so much of an issue. Black men lived fast and died young.

All in 170 pages. Astonishingly, this is all deadly dull.

Five years have passed since his heavy-going academic work Digit Ratio, and Manning has still not taken the trouble to make his work accessible. Manning's turgid prose is not the product of a conscientious scientist preserving the precision of his work. It is what you get when a lazy writer fails at his job. Everyday English is as specialised, in its way, as the language of the science journal. It is the language of human exchange. It is a language that anthropomorphises as much of the world as possible. Above all, it is the language of narrative. When we, in our innocence, read that "a low finger ratio may exert a protective effect against breast cancer", we take the word "exert" seriously and we say, quite rightly, "What nonsense!" When we are invited to "suppose... that music is merely a form of male sexual display", we think of Elizabeth Maconchy, we think of Mitsuko Uchida, and we dismiss such a reductive little game out of hand.

If Manning had set out to be misunderstood and misinterpreted, he could not have written a more effective book.

"It appears to be the case that homosexuals, particularly male homosexuals, have fewer children than heterosexuals." Well, golly.

Manning is a brilliant thinker. Like most evolutionary psychologists, he has an overdeveloped appetite for just-so stories, but you never get the impression that plausibility is standing in for evidence. He never conflates knowledge and opinion. The lingering impression left by this book - aside from it being by a man too busy to do it properly - is Manning's intellectual honesty. Assuming that the evidence for it continues to mount, Manning's theory of how racial differences originated - a thrilling mix of medicine and anthropology - will deserve and surely get its own book. I'll be first in line to buy it. But it ought not to be beyond him to learn how to write for a public.

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