This book is filled with mistakes

Mutants: on the form, varieties and errors of the human body

by Armand Marie Leroi

Leroi may have spent over five years researching and writing this book, but it is so easy to read and so enticing that the stories it contains could have been plucked direct from history. Leroi has pulled off one of those great feats of effortlessness in combining folklore and legend with science – including cutting-edge understanding. Mutants is a thrilling description of how the human body takes many forms, how these come to be and how people have responded to them over time.

The author tackles a number of mutations over the course of this book, each contained within its own chapter. There’s one chapter on limb deformaties, one on short and tall people, one on hermaphroditism, and so on. Through each of these, Leroi weaves historical accounts of people who had such mutations, and even delves into legend. The brief history of cyclopiea is particularly well drawn. We learn about how the Greeks came to deify that condition and then hear how genetic mutations cause it by failing to produce enough of the curious hormone known as ‘sonic hedgehog’. I was also moved by the accounts of ‘cleppies’, or people with hands and fingers that resemble crab claws. The story of the two seventeenth-century political dissenters, their warning to their executioner and his wife’s subsequent delivery of clawed babies is the stuff of horror movies and nightmares. And yet it is incredibly believeable and so realistic, thanks to Leroi.

That realism is perfect for Mutants. Long seen as outcasts or freaks, mutants are of course part of humanity. In Leroi’s sensitive analysis, they are readmitted into humanity. Anyone who thinks of them as outside of society are, it is clear upon reading this book, ignorant. Educating us about the great diversity of human form is an admirable project indeed, and one successfully executed by the author.

The origin of sense

On the Origin of Species

By Charles Darwin

Such is the power of this book that most people in the developed world understand its basic concepts unconsciously. That said, the book itself remains very important.

The theme of Darwin’s book that is most striking is its tacit argument for sense. Darwin spent decades observing nature and noting down what he saw. This extensive research enabled him to draw the conclusions that came to shape our view of the natural world, but it is his practices that are the most influential. In this book, Darwin details his observations and how anyone can use them to interpret nature. It is as simple as that. Interbreed pigeon varieties for decades, he seems to say, and you too will come to the same conclusion as I: that their unique variations exist for a reason and have diversified from those of a common ancestor.

Darwin’s logic is so sound, that he hints at things he didn’t even know about. Although Mendelian genetics was under way while Darwin was working on his theory, he was not aware of the practice. So it is with surprising confidence that Darwin states, “community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking,” speaking in part of genetics. “And not some unknown plan of creation,” he adds.

The question of creation occurs time and again in this book, almost always as a counterpoint to one of Darwin’s observations. He ponders why, for example, there are no frogs native to New Zealand and then shows that it is because that country is an island and frogs wouldn’t emigrate there because they cannot survive the sea water that would block their route. “Why, on the theory of creation, they should not have been created there, it would be very difficult to explain,” he says.

Perhaps the single most surprising thing about this book is in many ways how little Darwin knew. Creation theory must have held back naturalists for so long before Darwin dared to delve. The modern reader will be shocked by how his own basic, 20th-century understanding of genetics fills in a great many gaps in Darwin’s theory. Usually in this book, where Darwin says, ‘that’s the way it is, but I don’t know why,’ the reader can answer him with genetics. How this book would have been different, if only Darwin had read Mendel!

In many ways, that makes this book a more thrilling read today than it would have been when it was published in 1859. We know so much more now; nothing can hold us back in the thirst for knowledge.