“Unweaving the Rainbow”, Richard Dawkins

“We pick up a trilobite and the books tell us it is 500 million years old. But we fail to comprehend such an age, and there is a yearning pleasure in the attempt.”

It is the same yearning pleasure I feel when looking at the night sky but not just romantically looking between it and the eyes of my beloved, happy with time and place, but looking beyond the perceived beautiful ceiling, looking as much as my  mind is able into the depth of the distance between the dots, and trying to push further that ability in a dizzying spiral of comprehension and stupour. It is the same dizzying spiral I get lost in when trying to understand how I have come to be alive out of the uncountable alternative humans and how it is possible that it is this particular human thinking a thought that somehow proves its existence.

Richard Dawkins, hero of scientific elation, wrote Unweaving the Rainbow as a response to people accusing him and other scientists of taking beauty and happiness out of the world by providing explanations. Especially the chapters that see him unweaving light and sound, taking easily understood concepts and taking them apart, finding poetry and metaphor in them, are where he shines. Later, it is more Dawkins as we know him, discussing memes, selfish cooperators and speculating about the evolution of the brain. (More unusually, there is also a single page on which, with a lot of foresight, he predicts the premise of the blockbuster Avatar, as well as a current long-distance intimacy project.)

I wish all those people who were proud of having no interest in/no talent for science would read this.

“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.

“Biohazard” – Ken Alibek

“Biohazard” walks the line between popular science and terrifying cold war politics: it is a blood-curdling account of the Soviet Union’s bioweapons research program, written by Ken Alibek (or Kanatjan Alibekov, before defection), its deputy director and foremost scientist.

I read this during my search for useful quotes for my PhD thesis (which is not on bioweapons!) and couldn’t put it down because I needed to know whether he would end with a reassuring “and that was the end of all our evil mass destruction science”. He didn’t. This book caused quite a stir in 1999, when it was released and Alibek’s main point, beside a need to confess the sins of his past, is to warn the West that Russia and other parts of the former USSR still had much more advanced agents of biological warfare than anyone could imagine.

A lot of this book describes the workings of the Soviet machine, inter-relations between different directorates, agencies and organisations, vicious political blackmail and Cold War diplomacy, and that can be a little confusing for the politically disinterested. Then there are Alibek’s descriptions of the strains of Ebola and Marburg viruses, anthrax, smallpox, tularemia and many other deadly pathogens his Biopreparat institutes were working with and they leave little to the imagination: how much damage could have been done and the horrible deaths people would have died in the event of a biological attack. If the animal testing wasn’t graphic enough, there were also the occasional accidental outbreaks in the testing facilities that killed workers and residents.

Despite his responsibilities and actions, I ended up liking Alibek, as he slowly comes around to once again “honoring the medical oath [he] betrayed for so many years”.

I was a child in West Berlin when the Wall came down and had always seen Mikhail Gorbachev as some sort of gentle and peaceful hero of unification and therefore was distraught to read that he signed off on “the most ambitious program for biological weapons development ever given to our agency”, including funding for a “viral reactor to produce smallpox at the Russian State Center of Virology and Biotechnology”, the facility known as Vector, that is still one of only two centers in the world today legally holding a stock of smallpox.

This book made me so uneasy and should everyone, and I’m not sure I recommend it – only to those with a strong stomach and a sunny optimistic disposition.

“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.

“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 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.

“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.

“The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life”, David P. Mindell

I wanted to read this book to gain some intellectual ammunition for arguments with people who disagree with studying evolution for the sake of it.

The first chapter is slightly off-topic as Mindell deals with three unpopular scientific discoveries and how they took their time with changing the accepted world view. Unexpectedly for me, this turned out to be the most interesting chapter of the book and might prompt me to read more books on medical history. It is nice to have a reminder of the un-importance of people’s previous beliefs – science has been true even when we didn’t know it or didn’t want to accept it, and evolution has always been going on, in the background, quietly but undeniably true.

After that, however, Mindell starts sounding overly defensive and hangs his arguments on the most tenuous links – “see, we’re right, evolution *is* important”. In his chapter on the evolutionary study of pathogens, I felt my PhD project nicely justified and, even though it read like a grant proposal, it was nice to hear “if we predict how and when a pathogen will respond we may avoid the worst effects”.

Many other chapters, like the one on domestication and the beginnings of agriculture, were all too familiar from college courses and other books .

I read “The Evolving World” partly at the same time as Dawkins’ “God Delusion” and it became painfully obvious how poorly Mindell compares with Dawkins as an engaging and passionate science writer. He falls into some of the annoying traps Dawkins mentions that scientists often find so hard to navigate, like defending the idea of non-overlapping magisteria for science and religion and treading very carefully not to offend anyone in a typical politically correct but boring style.

Finishing with the role of evolution in the courtroom brought a bit more life to the book in the end, but overall, Mindell’s words had a very unintended effect on me. Instead of wanting to convince people that evolution has many practical applications, I now just want to shrug my shoulders at people who demand immediate technological benefit and ask them what is wrong with devoting a career to studying evolutionary processes simply for the sake of knowledge.