“Measuring the world” – Daniel Kehlmann

What a fantastically funny read! “Die Vermessung der Welt” is two biographies in one, lovingly weaving together the lives of Carl Friedrich Gauß (Gauss) and Alexander von Humboldt, both of whom lived and changed German science in the late 18th and early 19th century.

Both men, as good scientists, had an obsession with knowledge. Humboldt, tiny and possibly homosexual Prussian aristocrat with a famous older brother and a thirst for adventure, without much talent for human interaction, tirelessly and with little regard for his fellow travellers, measured most of South America, in the process accidentally tasting human flesh, forming strange attachments to a stray dog, mapping the canal connecting the Amazon and Orinoco rivers and stealing human corpses. Gauß, from a poor family and reliant on patronage, impatient with the slow wit of everyone else he met, at least partially aware of the social faux-pas he committed, turned his mind to several big mathematical problems at a time and completed his masterpiece, the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, in his early 20s, and was known as the prince of mathematicians.

Kehlmann’s genius lies in the exclusive use of indirect speech between all of his characters, which creates a comical distance between reality and these extraordinary protagonists although I cannot vouch for the English translation as I read this book in German.

This book has to be taken with a pinch of salt, however, as some liberties appear to have been taken with facts and many anecdotes are so droll they must have been invented by the author. But the alternating (and then joining) chapters of Humboldt versus Gauß are so hilarious and the characters Kehlmann shapes so infuriatingly strange and German that I personally wouldn’t care if it was pure fiction.

“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.

“Irreligion”, John Allen Paulos

I have a crush on this book. It’s so neat and clever and pretty and fits nicely into any handbag – ok, maybe it’s the perfect accessory rather than a crush, but “Irreligion” is definitely a book any religious skeptic will always want around.

John Allen Paulos is a mathematician-atheist who has collected, like Dawkins, the most common arguments for the existence of God, and, like Dawkins, he refutes them one by one in a hugely entertaining way. Some of them I understood a lot better in the short and sweet form presented here, even though there is nothing original in them. Paulos’ witty style, spiced with personal anecdotes was a pleasure to follow and quotes like “much of theology [...] is a kind of verbal magic show” are worth remembering.

I cannot possibly badmouth the God Delusion, but at some time in almost any long-term (reading) relationship comes the point where you like to flirt with the cheeky book next door because it makes you laugh in unexpected places and gives you just what you needed in a lighter and quicker way.

“The Devil’s Doctor” – Philip Ball

Although this biography of Paracelsus starts as a promising guide to medicine and magic in the late middle ages, finishing it turned out to be almost as painful as one of the crude surgery practices described therein.

Philip Ball, a former editor for Nature, introduces Paracelsus, renegade doctor, occasional skeptic, devoted Christian, dabbler in magic, would-be reformer of medicine, boastful megalomaniac, self-styled theologian and passionate alchemist, as a living paradox. There are dozens of contradicting viewpoints that remain of Paracelsus’ writing, outlining a character increasingly difficult to categorize as either “buffoon or genius”, as Ball points out even in his acknowledgements.

Paracelsus was a traveling medic and surgeon (quite distinct professions in those times) with questionable medical qualifications, who made enemies wherever he went. His religion, according to Ball, “might be best described as reformist in spirit, Catholic by default, and wildly unorthodox in practice.” He was “struggling to do something like science with a miner’s coarse lexicon and the mind of a poet”, never actually making a discovery that is still valid today, yet he single-handedly “started a medical revolution and founded a chemical tradition”. He had views about everything, calling Luther and the Pope’s arguments equivalent to “two whores debating chastity”, likening himself to Jesus and setting out dos and don’ts for young doctors: useful (possessing a “gentle heart and a cheerful spirit”), interesting (“should not be a runaway monk, should not practise self-abuse”) and perplexing (“must not have a red beard”). Most importantly, he tried to save lives, more often failing than not, but nevertheless being better at it than most of his contemporaries. Paracelsus advocated the use of personal experience, local cures (determined by astral influences, unfortunately) and his home-made drugs over the outdated recommendations of Galen.

This is not merely, or perhaps even mainly, a biography. Ball presents an account of Renaissance magic and science that is at times much too detailed and drags on for at least four chapters too many, peppered with relevant Paracelsian facts wherever appropriate. Then again, why not? We have here a person who seems to bind together, by his traveling route and larger-than-life nature, conflicts, wars, kings and the birth of a new religion, so maybe using Paracelsus’ life and journeys like a red thread through Renaissance Europe is a great idea. If only it wasn’t quite such a long thread.

“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 Skeptic’s Dictionary” – Robert Todd Carroll

For this post I was going to read a dictionary, front to back, A to Zombie in this case, and then make some nerdy quip about it. So I started at acupuncture but was immediately side-tracked and ended up reading this book like a Choose Your Own Adventure: starting with chi, and from there energy, looking up the how-cool-would-this-be-if-it-contained-a-shred-of-truth entry for iridology, then reading about the various ways people use to back up their claims; pragmatic fallacy, regressive fallacy and confirmation bias.

While flicking for those entries I passed others that looked interesting and made notes to return to them. So I did, and even I have not admittedly read the whole dictionary, I must be close.

Carroll is the creator of skepdic.com and in a nice Introduction describes the four types of people he wants to reach with this book (basically everyone except the “true believer”). The entries are written with a palpable skeptic undertone (on avatar: “These notions seem so obviously a mixture of the true, the trivial, and the false that one hesitates to comment on them.”) but will acknowledge any relation to real phenomena fairly.

Some of my highlights included finding out about urine therapy, the different made-to-fit versions of Nostradamus‘ predictions, the Bible code entry and of course the penile plethysmograph, which measures invisible change in circumference of the penis and “[i]n addition to identifying false gays, [...] is used to treat sex offenders and to identify potential sex offenders”.

While reading the Skeptic’s Dictionary I passed an unlikely evening in the company of a tarot card reader and a woman who was about to go to her study group on reflexology, iridology and natural healing. Only politeness and embarrassment prevented me from laying on the skeptic’s arguments and spoiling the mood. If you have fewer inhibitions, by all means buy this book, it will provide you with all the ammunition you’ll need.

“Small World” (or “Nexus”) – Mark Buchanan

It was a mistake to read both Barabási’s “Linked” and this book by science journalist Mark Buchanan. At least in such a short space of time, but I’m tempted to say you’ll really ever only need one or the other. Published within a few months of each other in 2002, not only do these two books cover exactly the same topic (small world, scale-free networks in everday life) but they use the same anecdotes (lame Bill Clinton jokes, Internet hacker stories, the excitement of having an Erdös number – mine is 4!) and even some of the same chapter titles. I can only imagine how mortifying it must have been to find out about each other.

As this review must necessarily be a comparison to the book I read first, let me just say they both have slightly different focal points. Although both authors are physicists by training, Buchanan gives a little more detail about the biological networks found, like the neural connections of C.elegans, while Barabási concentrates more on his own playground – the internet and WWW.

Overall, Buchanan’s style surprisingly is a little less readable than Barabási’s, or maybe I was just not as tolerant the second time round. There is quite an abstract chapter about rivers and the modelling of their meandering course to the sea and Small World is longer without saying much more than Linked.

To be fair, I would still recommend this book as an introduction to network theory. I just felt a little cheated.

“Linked” – Albert-László Barabási

Having some vague notions about connectedness and network topologies I had been looking to learn more about this buzz area. If you are in the same boat, “Linked” is an excellent place to start as it offers nicely sized chunks of information on scale-free networks, power law distributions and the small world phenomenon.

The subtitle “How everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science and everyday life”, while being too long to include in the title of this post, gives an idea of what this book is all about.

For example, the omnipresent Six Degrees of Separation is explained and de-mystified (did you know it was first documented in a Hungarian short story and that Kevin Bacon is not actually the most connected actor in Hollywood?) to show that there is a short path between any two nodes (proteins, actors, websites, friends) in many networks, even though that number is not necessarily six.

Barabási opens each chapter with a human-interest anecdote; this and the fact that the only equations he uses are demoted to footnotes make for fluent reading and an accessible style. You will read about the 9/11 attacks, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, networks of cellular metabolism, the Internet and the World Wide Web (perhaps, like me, you will finally understand what the difference between the latter two is).

“When will a thinking machine, orders of magnitude faster than a human brain, emerge spontaneously from billions of interconnected modules?” Apart from a tiny sub-chapter about how our wired up planet might give rise to a self-aware super-computer, Barabási’s portrait of networks is all positive and instills in the reader the excitement that made him study them in so much depth. I couldn’t recommend it more.

“Is Pluto a planet?”, David Weintraub

No, apparently. Or at least there isn’t a meaningful definition in sight that will make Pluto a planet without also including about 15 other objects in our solar system. Although Weintraub eventually comes down on this inclusionist side, the overall taste the book left in my mind was: No, Pluto is just a large Kuiper Belt object.

“Pluto earned its status as a planet by accident”, we learn, because the people who happened to find it were really wanting to find one to explain the supposed differences in Uranus’ and Neptune’s predicted and observed orbits by the new planet’s gravitational tug. They saw Pluto, called it a planet and the name stuck.

This book raised more questions for me than it provided answers, which I really enjoyed. For example: Could you measure the parallax of a train that looks like it is moving when you are on the one pulling away? How come I didn’t know that the Moon does not actually orbit the Earth but they both orbit a point very close to the centre of the Earth? Who named Pluto? Can you observe the change in planets from prograde to retrograde motion or is it theoretic? Why were the moons of Mars called Fear (Phobos) and Panic (Deimos)? Answers, anyone?

Weintraub takes the reader on a tour through astronomy’s history and while he is very thorough I was hoping for a style slightly more awe-inspiring, given the suitable topic. Thinking about Pluto’s moon Chiron and its likely fate of a change in orbit, “perhaps directly into the Sun or onto a collision course with Earth or Jupiter or Saturn” – this is the kind of spine-tingling sense of foreboding you can only really get from astronomy and I love it.