Mythbuster!

The Myth of Mars and Venus

By Deborah Cameron

Although I haven’t read much of the literature around the idea that men and women are from different planets and are therefore unable to communicate with one another, I’ve been sceptical of it for a long time.

A beautiful journey

My Beautiful Genome

By Lone Frank

Although scientists have been studying genes for decades, the consumer genomics industry is only just finding its feet. A rash of companies have rushed into the market over recent years. They offer all sorts of genome services, from tracing your ancestors through to your likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s and even genetic-match dating.

The outstanding book about Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot

Some books contain knowledge, others thrills. Skloot has managed to fill her book with both. The story of Henrietta Lacks was on the edge of history until Skloot took up the challenge of dragging it back to the centre. Lacks would have been all but forgotten had it not been for the investigative skills of this impressive young journalist. And yet the great impact Lacks has made on modern science continues to reverberate today. How could she have been forgotten? Well, lots of reasons (as Skloot outlines), but perhaps the most sensible explanation is that she herself did not do anything directly. It was cells from her cervix that enabled the acceleration of research 10 times faster than would have been possible without her.

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.

Tying up the loose ends

The Elegant Universe

By Brian Greene

Although this book is for someone with more than just a casual interest in the nature of the universe, it is nevertheless an excellent account of the most challenging big idea of our time – String Theory. Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe proved very popular when it was first published a decade ago, and it is not hard to see why. His approach to String Theory is one of absolute wonder and, at the same time, the cool objectivity a decent teachers needs in order to explain it to his pupils.

Greene strikes this balance with perfection. His examples are tangible and understandable, his descriptions reasonable. And he weaves together some of the biggest ideas in physics beautifully: in Greene’s hands, you can hear the universe clicking together. No longer are Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s space-time and Feynman’s quanta locked in their contradictory silos. Greene shows how String Theory unites them. Tantalisingly, he even hints at discoveries expected but yet to happen as of the time of writing. It’s now up to me to find out what’s happened in String Theory over the last decade. Now that the Large Hadron Collider is warming up properly, what a great time!

Astonishingly alive

The Diversity of Life

By Edward O. Wilson

This book is something of a revelation to me. I have read only a few books about the natural world – most of them being older or much older than myself – and have wondered whether it is possible to write such a book in an almost literary style. You know the kind I mean: beautiful descriptions of nature that feel more at home in a novel than a field guide to mushroom picking.

And Wilson’s cracked it. The opening ‘scene’ is breathtaking. All he does is describe a night he spent in the rainforest in the middle of a storm. But the words he employs, the fluid sentence structure that strings them together and the heart-and-mind insight he provides elevates it above almost any other such account I’ve read, in fiction or otherwise. Of course, Wilson’s a man of science too. This book is not a slur of anecdotes about camping in the bush. Wilson takes his reader on a journey through the natural world in a way that Darwin never could have. Writing a century and a half after Darwin, Wilson is much more comfortable plotting the origins of species and, more importantly for this book, their place in the contemporary world. That is not to say urban environments, but the entire biosphere. Wilson breaks down every layer of every biome and shows us just how much life is there. Only a million or so species have been identified and studied, he says, but between 10 million and 100 million probably exist. The sections I found particularly insightful are those in which the author describes the interconnectedness between every life form in an ecosystem: the ‘weeds and bugs’ living in every one of the five or so strata of a forest floor are especially memorable.

I would suspect that, for many readers, the most memorable part of this book is actually the final third, in which Wilson enters polemical mode. After having outlined the great diversity of life and why it is important for our planet, he sets forth his manifesto for a reversal of environmental destruction and real custodianship of our natural world. It is both enlightening and persuasive. Twenty years after this book was published, I can’t help but feel that it has fallen on the scrapheap. Aren’t we still cutting down rainforests? Aren’t we still extinguishing species because we desire their meat, bones or skin – or just because we want to live where they live? And yet Wilson has some very practical ideas and some compelling arguments. Perhaps it’s time that this book came back into the public consciousness. However, I feel that its greatest flaw is that it is only one-third polemical. The rest would be characterised by some as boring science or – worse – a birdwatcher’s field notes. Wilson and others know how important the preservation of biodiversity is. The question is: how do you make all 7 billion of us care?

Everything and everyone, explained

Guns, Germs and Steel

By Jared Diamond

Most people have wondered at one time or another why history unfolded so differently in different parts of the world. Why did the Europeans conquer the Native Americans, and not the other way around? Why did some people develop paler skin than our forebears, and others darker? Why do some people live in skyscrapers, and others still in mud huts? For most of us, these questions remain in the pub or around a dinner table. We develop them no further; they are simply too big.

Diamond is the kind of insatiable scientist who devotes his time and energy to these sorts of questions. He’s also smart enough to know that most of us are interested in them, but are short on time and expertise. And so he has written what has to be described as one of the most comprehensive and compelling books on human history ever. I haven’t read many others, but the sheer number of surprises I found when reading Diamond’s is enough for me to believe that no other book like this exists. In tracing how the environment, geology, climate and biology caused the development of human life to unfold the way it has, Guns, Germs and Steel is an astonishing piece of work. To top it off, Diamond is a thrilling writer.

The book could not have been written by anyone else. Others could have tackled its central questions, but their responses would have been different. That’s because Diamond is canny: he knows that his readers need a personal guide through this long and arduous journey. So he brings together his experiences as an ecologist in New Guinea with his travels in Australia and Africa, and his upbringing as an American. Fascinatingly implicit in his approach to the question of how history unfolded differently on different continents is that he is an American with a top-class education and the resources necessary to write such a wonderful book – resources that include computers, literacy, food supplied by others, security, etc. It is to this depth that Diamond traces human history. The reader is surprised to hear that Africa’s poverty relative to Europe’s propensity of food is down to the fact that Africa started with fewer domesticable plant species than Europe thousands of years ago. It sounds obvious (indeed, it is!) but it’s the kind of problem that was compounded by other factors: eg, Eurasia’s west-east axis with no geological or environmental barriers in the middle promoted better migration and sharing than we see in Africa, whose north-south axis hinders cross-continent migration thanks to the different climates it spans and the existence across one great swathe of a huge desert.

These are but tiny, and no doubt ill-expressed, insights into Diamond’s view of history. Although he has condensed eons into a mere 425 pages, it is a comprehensive and lucid piece of work. Astonishing.

An intellectual adventure

African Exodus

By Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie

Readers willing to look beyond the rather academic paperback style of publication will find in this book a great deal to contemplate that is not beyond their layperson’s understanding. The publisher’s choice of book size, cover illustration and paper type may deter some general readers, but the content of Stringer’s argument is comprehensible to anyone familiar with anthropology as a non-specialist.

As one of the main proponents of the Out of Africa theory of human origins, Stringer is well placed to make this argument. Indeed, one of the book’s chapters is a diary-like account of Stringer’s own journey around Europe as a young man to examine fossilised skulls held by museums. He’s hardly Indiana Jones, but African Exodus reads in part like an adventure – albeit intellectual – at times. Stringer repositions the opposing multiregional theory of our origins (the rise of Homo sapiens simultaneously in different parts of the world) and gradually unfolds the Out of Africa theory with such superior logic that the former idea is left in the wilderness.

The layperson may find it difficult to keep up with the various species and genera discussed in this book, and a general ‘best current thinking’ diagram at the beginning would not have gone amiss, but for the most part, McKie’s clear and concise prose keeps the interest up. Perhaps what I shall remember most of the book are the amazing facts it contains: for example, that there is greater genetic diversity between different people in Africa than there are between an African and, say, a European. Astonishing knowledge – this book’s full of it.

Brilliant from the beginning (whenever that was)

The Origin of Humankind

By Richard Leakey

You would be forgiven for raising an eyebrow to the idea that a book with this scope contains no more than 160 pages (not counting the index and preface). And yet Leakey manages to pull that eyebrow back down – all the while explaining how you came to have a brow in the first place.

The Origin of Humankind is a story of eons. Its first few chapters discuss our rather sloppy view of ancient humans. This covers our interpretations of the oldest hominid fossils. But you can find that elsewhere. Leakey includes a unique running commentary as to how the squabbles between anthropologists and archaeologists mean that we’ve done more inferring than proving when it comes to ancient man. Leakey occasionally takes his own view, but has written this book in such a way that it introduces its reader to countless theories and explains how they interpret the scattered facts we’ve collected, and that’s it. This is a useful tactic: it keeps the book short and does not get too bogged down in detail – perfect for the layman. In that sense, Leakey’s wisdom shines through not what is included here, but what is omitted.

Furthermore, the book’s title is cleverer than at first glance. Although it may seem like a rather generic and obvious title for a book about, well, the origin of humankind, you would be wrong to think that it centres on the moments Homo erectus became Homo sapiens. Equally, this is not a book that is only a description of the fossil record. The ‘humankind’ of Leakey’s title is a much broader concept. So much so that he questions from the opening paragraphs onwards what we mean when we talk of ‘humans’. This question underpins every more scientific observation described here: Leakey points out that there remains a lack of consensus on for just how long the Homo line was connected to the Australopithecine line. Any question to this conundrum has an implication on the greater wonderment of when we became ‘human’. Leakey takes this question further, by expanding into the development of art, language and ultimately, the mind.

He shows, therefore, that the origin of humankind was not a spark, but a gradual flowering. It is an exhilarating journey in such a short read.

Eye-opening at the tiniest scale

The Selfish Gene

By Richard Dawkins

Sometimes it’s just good fun to read a book by a writer with such a distinctive and strident voice that it appears to drown out all opponents. As a scientist, Dawkins is probably sensible enough to listen to others in his field. But the great joy of this book is the singular vision he offers. Dawkins pushes through the crowd of a generation of scientists in order to clamber up to the soapbox and scream his thrilling theory. His view of the gene as a competitive, political molecule worthy of Ancient Rome is enticingly reflected in his own audacious approach. While Darwin dithered, Dawkins dives in.

And then there is the theory itself. Pick your superlative: influential, controversial, profound. History has shown that it is all these things and more. To the layman, the concept behind The Selfish Gene is exciting. To the scientist, it must have been downright shocking. Dawkins’ central thesis rests on the very plausible assumption that until his book, science has viewed genes upside down. He argues that because we have studied bodies for centuries, upon the discovery of genes, we formulated theories about how genes code for different aspects of our biology and why. The selfish gene theory posits that bodies are merely survival machines produced by the genes themselves in order for them to continue replicating. It’s a huge idea of the kind that does not come around very often.

And Dawkins is the writer to do it justice. His prose is clear, crisp and not technical in the slightest. He uses brilliant examples that open the reader’s eyes to the natural world. Above all else, his rhetoric is deeply attractive.