“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.

“Sex, Drugs & DNA: Science’s taboos confronted”, Michael Stebbins

If you enjoy reading a genre that is part personal vengeance, part terrorist handbook, part counter-terrorist manual and part random bits of science education, this is the book for you.

Stebbins makes his intentions clear from the preface in which he promises to “address the stuff that pisses me off the most.” He cites Michael Moore as a great influence and inspiration and if you enjoy Moore’s style of documenting the US government’s failures, Stebbins will be right up your street, too. I kept swaying between being taken over by his Moore-ish negative enthusiasm and feeling slightly patronised by his overwhelming use of “bullshit”, “crap”, and “piss”. Other childish ways of grabbing the reader’s attention are his extremely unsubtle use of irony, inane references to pop culture in an attempt to prove – what? and his tiresome (if sometimes funny) analogies.

Some interesting points are raised in this book, however, and I couldn’t believe some of the ridiculous initiatives and actions he mentions regarding science education and research, like the Wedge Report. The chapter on bioterrorism is intentionally terrifying and despite his apologies does read like a bit of a user’s manual. Other areas covered include GM foods, cloning and sexuality so Stebbins really did pick the most controversial topics topics he could find. A good summary rant is this one taken from the chapter about global warming: “The failure of scientists to educate the public, of journalists to report the truth and of responsible politicians to constantly call out and prevent irresponsible legislation from becoming law has left the deathly stench of irresponsible and morally criminal elements in this nation unchecked and rolling in profit.”

From an editorial perspective the casual relationship with apostrophes, the neon sign book cover (yes, I was judging) and the sans serif font somehow contributed to my feeling of reading a tabloid newspaper (albeit one with a conscience).

I am not sure that scientists are such a homogeneous collection with one voice as he implies with frequent uses of “scientists want” and “scientists have never”, but maybe science does need a mouthy defender like him, and for that Stebbins can be commended, even if some of the issues are of limited interest to readers outside the US.

“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.

“Madame Curie”, Eve Curie

This is the second biography of a scientist I’ve read, this one written by a family member – Marie Curie’s daughter, who, incidentally, died at the age of 102 while I was reading this book. The close relationship between subject and author had all sorts of implications. Most noticeably, this is probably the most thorough and personal book about the double Nobel laureate anyone was ever likely to write.

Eve Curie, born when her mother was 37 and her father was to live only 16 more months, naturally mentions the scientific achievements of Madame Curie, and goes into great detail on her attitude to work, but the physiochemical ins and outs of the discovery of polonium and radium (or any other of Marie Curie’s works) are largely glossed over. Since I am not well versed in physics or mathematics this suited me fine and from the start I was taken captive by the life of the Polish student who adores her family and her country but is unable to pass the opportunity of studies in France.

I became engrossed as in a novel, waiting excitedly for the chapter entitled “Pierre Curie”, where the serious and hard-working heroine meets the love of her life. The love story between her parents is described tenderly by Curie and if not textbook romantic, it is certainly fulfilling and extraordinary.

It is odd and possibly intentional how the biography progresses when Pierre Curie dies in a traffic accident. Up to this point, Marie’s life was recounted chronologically and in minute detail, while afterwards her years blend into each other. Moods and events in the physicist’s life are described in a seemingly arbitrary order and her sorrow of having lost her husband is palpable.

Coincidentally I was reading this book while in Paris and found myself on an accidental secular pilgrimage: depressed at the street corner where Pierre died, enjoying the view in the street where Marie spent the last years of her life, and even unexpectedly found that their bodies had since been moved to the Panthéon, the resting place of the people France is most proud of.

Eve Curie’s arcane writing style (the book was first published in 1937) throughout evokes the admiration for her famous mother, without euphemising her flaws. Madame Curie is portrayed as a highly intelligent and motivated woman with no great natural skills for housework or personal friendships and no time for leisure. She raised her daughters sometimes controversially (the elder, Irène, also won a Nobel prize later, so her methods can’t have been all wrong) and scorned all publicity and anything that would distract her from science. Her religious views changed from Catholic, raised by a pious mother, to the view expressed in the following excerpt from a letter to her cousin.

“Let everybody keep his own faith, so long as it is sincere. [...] I respect sincere religious feelings when I meet them, even if they go with a limited state of mind.”

In fact, the many examples of Marie’s writing, her direct quotes and letters addressed to her, are among the highlights of the book. As a young woman she writes down the beautiful headstrong motto: “First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events”. At the height of her undesired fame she points out to a journalist how “In science we must be interested in things, not in persons”, and this seems to sum up her character well.

Unusual events from Marie Curie’s life that I had never heard of include her friendship with the royal Belgian couple and her creation of an X-ray lab on wheels servicing military hospitals during the first World War.

Despite this intimate book, Madame Curie remains alien to me, she is unlike anyone I have met in real life. But maybe therein lay the appeal, for me and all those she inspired during her lifetime.

“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.

“Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code”, Matt Ridley

I enjoyed this book immensely! Biographies of brilliant people might be a completely untapped source of reading pleasure for me. Surely, a lot of it is due to Ridley’s easy style and entertaining anecdotes; I have only read his “Genome” and can’t remember how I felt about it, but I’ll definitely read more of his works in the future.

But what I loved the most was finding out about this astonishing man, who I always thought had stood in Watson’s shadow, which was apparently not the case at all.

I was so enamoured with Crick by half-way through the book that I was totally shocked by the revelations about his radical views (at least he held them in the 1960s and 70s) on races, eugenics and sterilisation of “genetically inferior” people. I don’t know what to do with this information and it seems like neither did Ridley. It is mentioned dutifully but the author doesn’t really take a position and maybe that is not the job of a biographer. As I uneasily read on about this man with the incredible imagination, admiration gained the upper hand again and by the end I cried when he dies.

The fact that Crick was a raging (yes!) atheist helped, of course, but the main reason for liking him is expressed in this last sentence of the epilogue: “He would have liked to find the seat of consciousness and to see the retreat of religion. He had to settle for explaining life.”

“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.