“Dragon Hunter” – Charles Gallenkamp

“Dragon Hunter” is the account of Roy Chapman Andrews’ Central Asiatic Expeditions in the 1920s and reads like part biography, part adventure fiction. If Indiana Jones is a hero of yours, you should know that Andrews has often been suspected to be the model for this “indomitable archaeologist-adventurer” and you will probably enjoy this book very much.

Andrews  “possessed an entrepreneurial spirit of sweeping dimensions”, which made his career illustrious and incredibly successful, but he was also a hugely popular socialite in New York and in the foreign colony in Peking where he spent many happy years planning and carrying out his expeditions. Andrews’ friendships and acquaintances included those with a Russian prince, the mother of Czar Nicholas II as well as the owner of a high class Yokohama brothel, while his first wife Yvette was a close friend of Prussian princess Viktoria Luise.

While Andrews’ legacy, the Central Asiatic Expeditions, were borne out of his desire to explore the unknown, their scientific validation came from mentor Henry Fairfield Osborn’s racist theory that Asia must be the cradle of humankind and civilisation, as an African origin of man seemed “decidedly unpalatable”. Andrews therefore sets out to find the “missing link” in the Gobi desert. As biographers often do, Gallenkamp states this latent racism and moves on without much judgment. When the expeditions did not turn up any human fossils, this was outweighed by the volume of dinosaur and extinct mammal fossils they unearthed and the lack of support for any theory of human evolution was not considered a failure.

An educational side effect of this book is the insight the reader gains into Mongolia’s history and culture at the start of the last but also preceding centuries. A never-ending tug-of-war between Russia and China along with a rich religious history and the influences of nomads and immigrants make this land-locked country feel like the heart of Central Asia. Despite some unflattering remarks about the natives by the explorers (unmoral, dirty, adulterous, without compassion for the dying), some friendships develop between Mongols, Chinese and the American explorers, but for the most part, the foreigners living in Peking, including Andrews and his fellow scientists, shut themselves away into a happy enclave, remarkably insensitive and oblivious to China’s political upheaval in the 1910s, 20s and 30s and “learned to steel [themselves] against the civil unrest and atrocities that occurred almost daily”, like public executions. Battling Chinese warlords and corrupt Mongolian governments mean the expeditions end after a few years, buried in red tape and xenophobic (or anti-colonial) attitudes.

Andrews’ scientific achievements were significant and some of the fossils found by his multi-disciplinary expeditions shed a lot of light on mammalian evolution. The reason he was so enormously popular in his time was probably due to his “flamboyant nature”, charisma and love of adventure which he managed to convey to a huge audience. Gallenkamp concludes wistfully: “in terms of romance, daring, and sheer audacity, we will never see the equal of his grand adventure again.”

Read this if you have ever wished you were born when there was still a few blank spaces left on the maps of the Earth.

“Richard Dawkins” – Alan Grafen & Mark Ridley (ed)

This is a hommage to Dawkins, split into 25 essays in 7 parts, most focussing on the impact The Selfish Gene has had on the authors and their respective fields. For someone like me, who shamefully still hasn’t read the Selfish Gene, it further persuades to finally get around to it.

Steven Pinker’s contribution, as expected, is clear and interesting and concerned with language, as he deals with some of the confusion Dawkins’ use of the word “selfish” has caused – if human brains, effectively lumps of neural tissue, have conscious experiences like wanting and feeling, “there is no principled reason to avoid attributing states of knowing and wanting to other hunks of matter“. Genes “know” things through the sequence of their DNA, “try” by creating extended phenotypes whose effect is a differential ability to survive and reproduce, leading to feedback loops into the next generation of the gene. Pinker argues that a major achievement of The Selfish Gene was to allow the application of mentalistic terms to biology, which in turn has exerted a positive influence on the study of consciousness, where concepts like wanting and thinking can be dealt with as manifestations of abstract phenomena.

Selfish, of course, does not need to imply ruthlessness or the lack of collaboration, as genes often achieve their imperative by building organisms programmed to commit selfless acts and get along with their relatives and neighbours. We must remember, as Pinker notes, that “the motives of the gene are entirely different from the motive of the person“.

As the last chapter of The Selfish Gene deals with memes, the phrase coined by Dawkins describing cultural replicators, so do some of the essays in this collection. Robert Aunger notes that no significant body of empirical research has developed out of the excitement sparked by the meme theory. The problem seems to be that memes can be used to explain everything, and therefore explain nothing.

One of my favourite essays was that by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, which discusses the effect of The Selfish Gene on the research of family relations. They identify in-laws as a “cross-culturally ubiquitous source of marital conflict”, discuss why full siblings may cooperate more than half siblings and why people more often comment on an infant’s resemblance to its father than its mother.

As this review presents only a small sample of a sample of fields influenced by Richard Dawkins’ writings, and as nearly every essay in this collection comments on his readability and style, The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype, should probably be required reading for anyone professing an interest in the biological sciences.

“The Happiness Hypothesis” – Jonathan Haidt

Its title smacks of self-help and its bright yellow smiley-face cover made me hide it in public but The Happiness Hypothesis is a hugely interesting and pleasant book that I can’t stop talking about. Haidt promises to put “ancient wisdom and philosophy to the test of modern science” and covers a number of areas in philosophy, psychology, sociology and evolution.

Haidt’s one-sentence meaning-of-life answer I’ll leave for the reader to discover but it is not nearly as exciting as some of the happiness-related insights he shares along the way. My favourite idea, as all others derived from convincing psychological experiments, is that people are happiest in a “state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities”.

The author’s metaphor of choice for the way our minds work is that of a wild elephant (our urges and passions) with a semi-able rider (our reason). Our mind also has a nifty feature called the interpreter module that will fabricate often ludicrous explanations for our own behaviour when an experimenter tricks us into making subconscious decisions. We learn another few unpleasant things about how our brains work such as our negative bias: “bad is stronger than good”. When making decisions, one negative aspect typically outweighs several positive ones, such as in a relationship where “it takes at least five good or constructive actions to make up for the damage done by one critical or destructive act” or in preparation of a meal where “food is easily contaminated (by a single cockroach antenna), but difficult to purify”.

You can also find in this book the origins of disgust and how a sometimes healthy fear of bodily functions led to frankly ridiculous religious notions about the impurity of women; a vindication of gossip, which may have been the reason for the evolution of language and without which there would be chaos and ignorance because it “extends our moral-emotional toolkit”; and a recap of the Platonic idea for the origin of love.

Aside from the occasional common sense agony-aunt spin on, for example, different types of love, there is a nice chapter about Love and Attachments, in which Haidt equates passionate love with a dangerous drug: “People are not allowed to sign contracts when they are drunk, and I sometimes wish we could prevent people from proposing marriage when they are high on passionate love”.

The main messages to emerge from Haidt’s entertaining, clever and convincing research all sound true (if a little familiar) and are a great summary guide to becoming a happier person: Look after your social contacts, attempt to raise your base level of contentment in one of three equally effective ways (meditation, cognitive therapy or Prozac) and add variety to spice up your life. We don’t need to follow several religions’ advice to forsake all external pleasures as the right type can positively influence our happiness.

Maybe this is a bit of a self-help book but one that comes guilt-free for the skeptic as it provides adequate and refreshing scientific backup.

“The View from Mount Improbable”, Richard Dawkins

“The View from Mount Improbable” is perfect for swotting up on Dawkins when you don’t have much time. It is an extract from the 320-page “Climbing Mount Improbable” and is published as part of a Pocket Penguin series, which is well worth checking out.

Dawkins starts with a summary of his famous metaphor for the results of evolution as an incredible mountain peak with a seemingly unclimbable ragged front. But his metaphorical mountaineers are so “intent [...] on the perpendicular drama of the cliffs, they do not think to look around the other side of the mountain. There they would find not vertical cliffs and echoing canyons but gently inclined grassy meadows, graded steadily and easily towards the distant uplands”.

This short book is then dedicated to the alleged bane of Darwin’s theory: the evolution of the eye. As it takes Dawkins only 56 tiny pages (including drawings) to dispel conclusively all qualms anyone might have with this eye issue, I will not attempt to summarise it further.

Read this book to brush up on arguments against creationists and their continuing reluctance to understand that evolution is, in fact, quite the opposite of chance resulting in perfectly adjusted organisms. Instead, it is a series of random mutations, selected for the small improvements they confer on an organism, over thousands of generations, to eventually give an organ, a mechanism or a species that appears to be made just so for its environment.

“The Maths Gene”, Keith Devlin

This book had been on my shelf for months, but I’d been looking forward to the promised explanation of “why everyone has it, but most people don’t use it”. Devlin is quick to point out that the maths gene is of course a metaphor for an innate ability and he then provides lots of evidence for our inherent number sense and mathematical mind.

Cool baby experiments (hooray!) illustrate his points by showing that in a human’s first year of life, “number is apparently a more important ‘invariable’ than color, shape or appearance”: A baby’s surprise, measured by amount of time spent looking at a presented object, is much greater when two objects turn into one than when, say, a ball turns into a rattle.

Another memorable example of how deeply anchored our sense of arithmetic is invokes the mental number line that most people “see” when picturing numbers. Although for most of us this is subconscious, it is nice to find out that I am one of 14 % of people who are aware of doing it. I felt personally addressed again when Devlin mentions how people who become fluent in a second language keep doing arithmetic in their native tongue because it is remembered by sound patterns.

One of his most important messages is the distinction between arithmetic and higher mathematics. While many people (proudly) claim to be “terrible at maths”, the times tables have little to do with mathematics. Maths is instead the science of patterns; patterns like fractals, for example, self-similar figures like broccoli or the Koch snowflake, made of ever-smaller triangles stuck onto the middle of each side of an equilateral triangle. This is fascinating stuff and it’s great to have mathematics pointed out in everyday phenomena: Animal fur, flower shapes and even wallpaper all get fair mention. Elsewhere, Devlin offers a slightly cheesy mathematical soap opera and a fake missing person story to make the reader take note. Maybe he keeps his examples deliberately down-to-earth to fight against the stereotypes of the head-in-the-clouds mathematician, but I don’t care – it works.

A lot of effort is spent on linking maths to language, because Devlin’s main argument is that mathematical and linguistic ability are two parts of the same coin. This is a nice concept but given that I was slightly bored with The Language Instinct, there were too many language syntax trees in this book for me.

Devlin advances his own theory of why all humans have the capability for abstract thought, which he equates to mathematical ability, and it goes something like this: during evolution, the brains of hominids grew and changed structure, which allowed for off-line thought, which was a great advantage and led to maths and language. It takes several chapters to arrive at this point and I’m in no real position to summarise but I think those are the bones of the theory.

As weak Homo sapiens became able to recognise and act on more and more intricate (abstract) patterns, he didn’t have to spend as much time and effort on just surviving and hence we can spend our time today reading, painting, travelling and carrying out other useless activities.

“I do not believe that a basic mathematical ability is any more unusual than an ability to talk”, Devlin says, but people are put off by the notation and, often, teaching methods. “It is a great pity that for so many years our teaching methods have obscured one of humankind’s greatest conceptual inventions”.

This book is really quite the declaration of love to higher mathematics and should be of considerable interest to non-mathematicians. Hopefully you’ll come out of reading “The Maths Gene” convinced that mathematics, rather than being all about numbers and equations, is the discovery of fundamental facts in an abstract world invented by the human brain.

“The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment”, Richard Lewontin

What a lovely philosophical book!

Instead of blindly following ways of thinking inherited from generations of other scientists, Lewontin rethinks evolution and development.

This is science criticism, but not in a sweeping, bitter way. Rather, it is subtle criticism of details that have a great effect on how we think about established dogmas like “DNA makes proteins” and “organisms adapt to fit their environments”.

The three main parts of this book discuss how the trinity of genes, organism and environment all act as cause and effect in relation to each other.

This is a warning to Mind Your Metaphors, and not let human perception alter the questions we ask of science (as, for example, in the issue with the evolution of the chin) and then fit the answers we receive into categories we can understand.

“It is easy to be a critic”, Lewontin says, but he does it so well! His arguments are extremely well structured and when he explains how physical signals of the outside world determine the life of an organism “like shadows on the wall, passed through a transforming medium of its own creation”, it is logical as well as poetic.

He talks about some cool quirks of evolution, like this one:

“The time between the origin of a species and the time that a mutation of just the right sort occurs and reaches a high enough frequency to be significant in the selective process is of the same order as the total lifetime of the species”, so that most possibly beneficial mutations are never seen.

We shouldn’t ask what a certain feature is “good for” and instead realise that often it is due to the meandering nature of evolutionary progress.

The style of writing is quite personal, despite the abstract topics, and asides like the philosophical musings about avoiding maybe a few but never all causes of death make this a really enjoyable book, that I felt good for reading.

Even if I don’t know if I personally can take on his advice and practise better science for it, Lewontin makes that seem desirable.

“A Devil’s Chaplain”, Richard Dawkins

This book for me was mostly a slightly embarrassing reminder of how tastes and opinions change. I had bought and read only some of the essays published in this book in 2002. My review of it was published in our college newspaper. I am too afraid to go back and read it in full, but I remember my dislike of Dawkins and pencilled notes in the book itself remind me how derogatory and one-sided I found the author and his book.

I have since come full circle on the Dawkins Appreciation Curve and embrace his justified arrogance and argumentative strength. This book is a great way to start into Dawkins’ writing as this collection offers essays on all his topics of interest and allows the reader to choose one or all to read up on in more depth.

Most of his arguments concerning religion are familiar to me now from the “The God Delusion” and some of his evolutionary viewpoints are probably better described in the books devoted completely to that particular topic. It was very interesting, however, to read the essays in the section on Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins’ most publicised adversary. I’ve always wanted to know where their main conflicts lie and even though it’s still hard to grasp from a few forewords to books and book reviews, at least I gained a little insight.

One thing I still cringe about was the letter to his daughter on her tenth birthday, which concludes the book. Maybe I’m just not aware of the tone in which to address a child of that age, but this does not seem to be it. It is a mixture between oversimplification and a patronising voice on one hand, extremely abstract ideas and sentences on the other hand.

The eulogies and lament, predictably, brought a few tears to my eyes and I step a good bit away from my previous criticism of coldheartedness on hearing of the death of a close friend.

I do think, though, prompted by the letter to his daughter and his brief excursion into travel writing about a trip to Africa, that Dawkins should not meddle in styles of writing other than the one he has so obviously mastered: biting, fiercely intelligent, thought-provoking and awe-inspiring science writing.

I have now erased all my pencil marks.

“The Language Instinct”, Steven Pinker

I was excited to read this classic and the introduction sounded really ambitious.

Chapters One and Two were very interesting and give the reader plenty of stuff to talk about at a party, if you can remember anecdotes. Like Leroi’s “Mutants”, these chapters relate unusual phenotypes, like well-spoken but mentally retarded teenagers. It’s nice to find out about pidgin and creole languages as well.

When compared to Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” at first I thought this book was much more accessible, because it deals with concepts familiar to everyone, rather than abstract theories, and it was easy to connect with Pinker’s line of reasoning, even if you had never thought about these topics before. Later on, though, I felt myself comparing “part read” to “part left to read” and hoping the latter was smaller a lot!

As soon as Pinker hits syntax trees in Chapter Four, he just loses me in the forest. It is uninteresting, dry and not crucial for understanding the rest of the book. There is so much technical stuff here I’m sure it can only interest the most hard-core theoretical linguists.

Much like with many intellectuals, Pinker’s opinion blazes through that he is much more intelligent than the average man. Which is probably true but I would like to figure that out on my own.

There are some fascinating bits, though, that I will take away from this book. I love all the baby experiments showing innate understanding of certain events and ideas (no babies were harmed…) and can’t wait to observe those things myself some day (cringe, I know!). I also got a strange urge to learn the variant of Lardil, an Australian language, with a unique 200 word vocabulary that is allegedly learnable in a day and can express “the full range of concepts in everyday speech”.

Overall, though, I was slightly disappointed at yet another “masterpiece” that just dragged and dragged. Fascinating topic, no doubt, but maybe I should have started on the Language Instinct for Dummies.

“Why People Believe Weird Things”, Michael Shermer

I thought this book might fit nicely into my new-found love for denouncing idiots but it turns out Shermer is actually quite gentle as a Skeptic.

The first and second part of this book are very enjoyable as we learn about common characteristics of cults and movements like the Satanic panic of the 1980s and the witch hunts. The recovered memory scam, too, was really interesting to read about.

Unfortunately, these first parts are the only ones in which Shermer actually addresses the question posed in the title – the rest of the book he goes into his pet peeves in way too much detail.

Sure, the section on creationism was interesting but still slightly too long. It is nice, however, to see a bullet point style list of creationist “arguments” and a scientist’s replies. The arguments are known but nicely summarised.

The section on Holocaust denial is useful as I wasn’t aware of an organised movement of those pseudo-historians. My issues with this section are that a) it is much too detailed for anyone but other Holocaust historians – especially the section of biographies of some deniers screams “I’m a Holocaust scholar, this is what I know about”, rather than “this is what you should know about”, and b) it does not mention anywhere why it is that People Believe these Weird Things.

After reading and totally subscribing to Richard Dawkins’ “God Delusion”, I was also frustrated with Shermer’s attitude to religion – as a former born-again Christian he traipses around its perceived territory, advocating non-overlapping magisteria and giving a lot of what Dawkins calls undue respect.

In the last section, Shermer loses the plot and goes off on a tangent on some physicist with a religiously coloured theory of the universe. The Weird Thing is that Shermer himself now draws on arguments that I could only describe as pseudoscience to explain why this physicist (Frank J. Tipler) believes the things he does. His paragraphs on sibling position seemed especially far-fetched.

With this ironic note Shermer ends a book that started promising but got harder to read and less credible towards the end.

“The God Delusion”, Richard Dawkins

The book cover mentions that Richard Dawkins has recently been voted one of the top three intellectuals alive today and it just makes so much sense. He is effortlessly academic and challenging in his writing style, his arguments and his topics and were it not so desperately ironic considering the subject of this particular book, I would worship him.

Some years ago, on carelessly flicking through “A Devil’s Chaplain”, I got offended at Dawkins’ lack of tolerance for other people’s opinions but now I think I understand what he means when he argues that God is indeed a delusion and that religion deserves no undue respect, no tip-toeing around misconceived notions and no special status in matters of opinion. Dawkins covers it all here, all the angles from which religious zealots could possibly attack his arguments. Creationism is dealt with, but, refreshingly, does not become the main focus of the book as we move from the poverty of the agnostic stance to deconstructed arguments for the existence of God to the roots of religion and much more.

“What is the primitively advantageous trait that sometimes misfires to generate religion?” he asks, and this wonderfully irreverent tone continues throughout the book. While he sometimes seems to go out of his way to use words like “outbreak” or “infested” to show his view of religion as an unfortunate condition, this is probably done to desensitise people, or in his own words, raise the reader’s consciousness.

Dawkins brilliantly illustrates the ridiculous idea of deriving morality from scripture: if religious leaders argue that some passages of the Bible are symbolic, surely the decision of which parts those are and which are to be taken literally is just as easily made by an atheist as it certainly can’t be based on the text itself.

This book is necessary as a loud counterpart to too many religious fanatics, who apparently are finding a foothold in Britain, too.

The last chapter describes how science and a sense of wonder can easily replace and surpass religion as a source of consolation and inspiration. Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and “The God Delusion” have made me realise that I could never be anything but an atheist and thanks to this book I have the knowledge to back it up and the feeling that this is a beautiful state of affairs.