Lisa Jardine - Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution

Having really enjoyed Neal Stephenson's book Quicksilver recently, a novel set during the late 1600s which frequently focuses on some of the lives of members of the Royal Society, I decided to learn more about these early scientists - men like Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Lisa Jardine's book on the Scientific Revolution seemed to be a good place to start.

Jardine begins with the scientific advances being made in the early 1600s in the fields of astronomy. Much of these were triggered by new technology in the fields of optics and time keeping. People gazing at the heavens, such as the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed could now precisely measure the position of stars as well as observe the skies in improved detail. The work that Renaissance thinkers like Galileo had done was built on and expanded. Much of the needs of this were driven by wider interests. The measurement of the heavens was important not simply for pure science, but because it added navigation, and as the world was being opened up to Europeans by traders, explorers and the military, accurate navigation was very important.

Jardine's book is well written and readable. She deals well with the debates and disputes that took place between scientists at the time. The arguments that took place in late 1680 and 1681 for instance as leading figures like Isaac Newton and Flamsteed tried to understand the comets that had been seen in November and January are covered well. Whether they were the same comet or different had enormous ramifications for the understanding of the solar system and Jardine explains this well. She also captures the frustrations of these new experimenters well, as they competed for funds or tried to get new ideas published before the others to secure their patents and scientific notability. Though Jardine's main thesis is that these new scientific minds were less concerned with day to day politics and more with seeking scientific truth. On a number of occasions scientists continued to communicate despite their respective countries being at war. One reason why the Royal Societies secretary, Henry Oldenburg was briefly imprisoned by the King.

The book is neatly parcelled up into different sections which often centre on a particular scientific theme - astronomy, map making, anatomy and clockwork for instance. While this makes the book readable and self-contained it highlights wider problems with Jardine's work. Not the least of this is an annoying level of repetition - several of the anecdotes she tells are repeated and we are introduced to key figures on more than one occasion. Were the book longer this might be necessary, but in this case it really is not needed.

Much of the book is made up of illustrations, though many of the black and white images are replicated in colour in the centre of the book. Oddly some of these are on facing pages, which is a strange layout. Omitting the duplication would have shortened the book considerably.

However this is a minor irritation. More problematic is Jardine's approach to the period. The late 1600s were a period of immense scientific development in western Europe. Jardine seems to make no real attempt to locate these changes in the context of a enormously changing world. Following the Dutch revolt and the English Revolution, new commerical interests were opening up the world. Slavery was beginning on a mass scale and global trade was rocketing. Inside England, new industrial processes were taking root as the economic and political situation was freeing up the ability of the rich to make more money from capitalistic methods.

Throughout human history, there have been geniuses like Leonardo de Vinci, Galileo or Newton. But Jardine doesn't get to the heart of why in the period being discussed they seemed to blossom in great numbers. It wasn't simply that people were suddenly more interested in the world, it was that the world had changed and was demanding to be understood. The financial incentives to understand for commerical, or military gain were also encouraged by a new layer of the wealthy who had the time to collect, study and experiment.

Sadly this lack of clarity over wider questions is hampered by other problems. On occasion Jardine is warrant to make somewhat glib generalisations. On one she writes that "Even during the period of Newton's presidency [of the Royal Society]... the physics, astronomy and mathematics we associate with the birth of modern science today was a minor, specialist interest". Given that Jardine has spent several large sections of the book discussing the importance that various figures in the Royal Society gave to these subjects as well as pointing out their importance to navigation and the longitude problem this seems an odd claim.

An isochrone curve. Image from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautochrone_curve

In addition to these generalisations I was disappointed by a number of other observations. For instance, Jardine writes that Jacob Bernoulli was the discoverer of the "isochrone, the curve along which a body with uniform vertical velocity will fall."

Bernoulli did not "discover" the isochrone. He was the first to solve the problem using calculus. Huygens did it geometrically 40 years beforehand. In addition her description of the isochrone is inaccurate. The isochrone is actually the curve for which an object moving without friction will reach the lowest point in the same time, independent of its starting position.

Sadly Jardine's focus on the individuals rather than the wider picture, obscures the real processes taking place in science during the 17th and 18th centuries. Later, while discussing the discovery of the structure of DNA in her epilogue, she writes that:

"What must strike us... is how similar the tales are that Hooke and Watson tell: tales of casual encounters in coffee houses, overheard remarks and data encountered fortuitously... brash remarks, rash promises of success, mistakes hastily withdrawn..."

But sadly this is not the key lesson of how discoveries are made, nor is it a accurate explanation of the scientific method, which examines theories based on experimental evidence and then reworks them. This was the real legacy of the scientific revolution. Unfortunately these weaknesses mean that this book is not particularly useful in understanding either the context for the scientific revolution or some of the key discoveries of the period.

Related Reading

Johnson - The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

Adrienne Mayor - The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths and Myth in Greek and Roman Times

"The giant ogre Skiron used to throw victims off a rocky cliff near Megara until the hero Theseus threw Skiron over the precipice. After a very long period of time 'his bones were tossed between sea and earth and finally hardened into rock'." - Ovid, Metamorphoses.

"It is a matter of observation that the stature of the entire human race is becoming smaller... When a mountain in Crete was cleft by an Earthquake, a skeleton 46 cubits long was found, which some people thought must be that of Orion and others of [giant] Otus... Augustus preserved the bodies of two giants (Secundilla and Pusio) over 10 feet tall at Sallust's Gardens in Rome." - Pliny the Elder, Natural History.

I have to admit that when I first received Adrienne Mayor's book I assumed it was a work of pseudo-science, exploring perhaps some invented history of Greeks and Romans living simultaneously with extinct ancient creatures. However, despite the somewhat unusual presentation (I thought the book looked like a cheap self-published work, and several of the drawings are very amateurish and add little to the text) this turns out to be an exceedingly interesting book that rapidly convinced me of the authors' central thesis.

Mayor begins with a simple argument. In many of the areas of the ancient world around the Mediterranean fossils are easily found. In the wider areas that were influenced by the Greeks and Romans or known to them through travelers and traders, even more extensive remains are common. How did the ancient people understand these?

The two quotes above demonstrate that to a certain extent, many of the ancients had a surprisingly good grasp of how such remains might be formed. Lacking an understanding of the age of the world, they could not comprehend the timescales necessary to create fossils, but they could understand them as the remains of long dead creatures or races. Frequently the remains themselves were interpreted as human, though they were usually from mammoths or similar animals. In a lovely demonstration, Mayor rearranges the bones of a model mammoth to show how they could be altered to look like a large tall humanoid. An ogre, or an ancient hero.

In the Gobi desert remains of dinosaurs like Protoceratops are frequently found, often with eggs in their nests. Mayor shows how the shape of these dinosaurs with their curved beaks, long tales and crested skull could easily be morphed or interpreted as the classic ancient image of a griffin, with a bird like head and wings and lion's body. She then offers us evidence from ancient texts and archaeological remains to show how the ancients clearly thought that griffins did live in parts of the desert. With only a small amount of speculation Mayor adds that the legends that griffins guarded piles of gold could be understood by the flecks of the metal often found with the remains.

Some of the evidence that Mayor has produced is fairly convincing. A pottery vessel with depicting a hero fighting a monster easily resolves itself into an image of a dinosaur skull protruding from the earth. Another image of a human fighting a griffin seems unremarkable until you notice that the griffin, unlike the man, appears to be growing from the ground. A suggestion that the artist understood about bones found under the earth?

Mayor seems to know her classical sources well, and frequently lists sites were bones would have been found eroding from the ground, particularly on the Mediterranean coasts. It has to be said she builds an impressive argument.

But what did the ancients actually understand about these bones? Mayor demonstrates that many of them, including some of the most well known philosophers thought they were the remains of ancient beasts and the ogres who populated the earth before they died out at the hands of heroes like Hercules. While explaining this though, we learn that many of the ancients had a rudimentary understanding that species could evolve, change and go extinct. However while there were those in ancient times who understood these bones as remains of ancient humans or mythical creatures there were also those who saw them as being other animals. Mayor quotes a statement by Plutarch where he identifies some bones as those of a species of elephant (1,700 years before a modern scientist would make the same links). Notably though, prior to the discovery of contemporary elephants by the Greeks, these same remains were interpreted as a vanished monster known as Neades.

It is interesting to speculate whether the myths of giant humans or creatures like centaurs or griffins came first, or were they the result of people seeing fossil remains and creating myths. What it undoubtedly true though, is that in ancient times these remains were often venerated and debated as much as we would today. In fact, Mayor describes a period which is almost a "bone craze" as ancient cities and temples located remains and identified them as famous local heroes putting them on display.

What becomes clear from Mayor's fascinating book, is not simply the way that ancient people tried to understand the world around them, but also how their ideas developed and changed. Sadly we have lost much of the evidence that would enable us to understand how the bones were displayed, though tantalising comments in ancient books clearly indicate that they were gawped at by tourists much as museum visitors might today. Mayor's book seems to have spurred other writers and scientists to look at old materials and books with different eyes, for the non-expert reader however it is a stimulating and informative look, not simply at how our ancestors understood fossils but how their ideas shaped the view of their own history and myth.

Related Reviews

Ward - The Call of Distant Mammoths
Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters

Rachel Hewitt - Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey

For those readers outside of the UK, the phrase "Ordnance Survey" will probably mean very little. But for millions of Britons over the years, the Survey has represented the maps and charts that we have used to find our way around the country. In particular, hikers, ramblers and climbers will know the garish pink covered maps that, in amazing detail, show the locations of windmills, ancient remains, monuments and public telephones, as well as mountains, roads and waterways.

It is easy to take this for granted, after all it is no surprise that nations have maps of themselves. From this point of view a history of the Ordnance Survey (and wider attempts to map the British Isles) might seem only of interest to a specialist readership. Yet Rachel Hewitt's book contains much of interest to those interested in the development of modern Britain, science and social history.

Hewitt begins with the failed Jacobite rebellion of the mid 1700s. The defeat of Charles Stuart at the Battle of Culloden led to "loyalist" troops hunting down the last of the rebels. They were hampered by a complete lack of maps. In fact, large areas of Scotland were not only very difficult terrain, they were also completely unknown to anyone but the locals.

For a developing nation this was an enormous problem. In addition to the military consequences the nation state also needed to know what it had in terms of resources, people and places. From these early beginnings the modern Ordnance Survey was born.

Hewitt ably traces the story of those early mapping exhibitions. The small groups of men who travelled though inhospitable terrain, measuring, drawing and noting the names of landmarks. Their equipment was rudimentary and their skills were new. Many of the earlier maps are closer to pictorial representations than the symbolic maps we know today. The accounts of the progress of the surveyors are fascinating.

A few individuals struggled to get national recognition, and eventually government realised the importance of the task. Yet it took almost a century before the first, full Ordnance Survey map of the country was finished.

Why did this take so long? It is illuminating that there was a full map of Ireland produced long before the whole of the England, Scotland and Wales. The South Coast was mapped repeatedly long before the mountains of Scotland. The reason for this disparity has everything to do with the needs of the growing British State. The South Coast was important because it was the most likely site of French invasion and understanding the location of strategic sites was crucial for the military. Ireland was Britain's first colony and the government needed to know its resources, people and places in detail. It is noteworthy that the "Great Trigonometrical Survey of India" was begun in 1817 and was well advanced by the mid-1840s, yet the final map in the first series of the British Isles (south west Northumberland) wasn't released until  1870.

One of the weaknesses of Hewitt's book is that she doesn't draw more of this out. In fact it is merely one element in an interesting story for the author, rather than a central theme of the story of British mapping. This is a shame because the story of the Ordnance Survey is one that illuminates the development of British capitalism. Capitalism brought together a particular method of organising production, one that needed incredible amounts of natural resources and people, as well as being incredibly dynamic in terms of scientific and technological development. All these elements are brought out in the story of the technological and social developments of the Ordnance Survey, yet they feel tacked on to Hewitt's history.

This is not to say that Rachel Hewitt's book is not a worthwhile read. She has collected an immense amount of forgotten history and tells a great story. It is one that interweaves William Wordsworth's poetry with the story of the determination of the distance between observatories in London and Paris. It mixes technological genius with stories of men camping for weeks on mountain tops in the hope of a clear day. Sadly this detail sometimes obscures the far greater story beneath.

Richard Fortey - The Earth: An Intimate History

Geology as a subject is one that most people know very little about. Few of us understand the processes that formed the world around us. How did the landscapes get shaped? What caused the seas and oceans and why are mountains where they are? Rich Fortey's book is a extremely readable introduction to the history of planet Earth. Rather than tell a long elongated story that starts at the beginning and proceeds ponderously towards contemporary times, Fortey describes places that he knows well. His story is actually the story of the development of geology as a science.

Despite people having studied the Earth for centuries (usually in an effort to find valuable minerals) it is only very recently that the processes that have shaped the planet's surface have become accepted by the majority of scientists. The story of how "plate tectonics" came to be understood is one that involves a large array of different thinkers, each contributing small bits to the whole, and a few whose correct ideas were pretty much dismissed out of hand.

This history is fascinating but it also allows Fortey to dwell on places that demonstrate particular aspects of geological processes. While describing Newfoundland for instance, he doesn't simply explain why the east of the island is so different to the west, he takes us on an long journey through time that eventually ends up on the shore of a forgotten ocean, Iapetus. What begins as a description of the island, introduces the idea of shifting continents back through enormous lengths of time, until the reader can imagine the repetitive clashes of plates and then their fracturing as oceans close and reform over millions of years.

Fortey's writing is also wonderful. For a subject that rarely contains rapid change, he brings the subject alive, peppering his writing with literary quotes and pieces of poetry. He has the knack of making the reader understand the power of the Earth's internal forces and the majesty of their slowness. Take his description of the rock ("brownish, like spiced cake") that makes up many of the buildings, to say nothing of the surrounding landscape, of Sorrento in Italy:

This rock is called the Campanian Ignimbrite. Its origin was a catastrophe that happened 35,000 years ago: a gigantic volcanic explosion threw out at least 100 cubic kilometres of pumice and ash... An explosion of steam and gluey lava blew out a great hole in the earth... not so much a bite out of Italy's profile as a huge punch. A vast cloud of incandesccent material buoyed up with gas flowed like a fiery tidal wave across the limestone terrain. Lumps of volcanic rock were carried along willy-nilly in the mayhem....

Here he describes the mental work of scientists trying to understand the complicated history of particular landscapes, which have had millions of years of changes piled onto each other.

Structural geologists love such things. They read the flexures in the rocks with the certainty of a blind man reading braille. They can easily imagine what it is for a fold system to be caught up in anther subsequent phase of contortion, fold imposed on fold. I admire this capacity to think in three dimensions - four, if you include time - more than I can say.

While Fortey's language is wonderful, at times its near poetry distracts from the subject matter. It is easy to get carried away with the flow of the narrative, and miss the detail of what the author is telling us. In particular since geology is an unknown subject for me, I found it full of strange words and concepts and had to re-read parts to understand it all. I also kept having to remind myself that some of the things being described take place over eons, millions of years. The closing of the Pacific Ocean as the tectonic plates move towards each other is taking place at the speed of the growth of human fingernails. An apt metaphor that helps us understand why it will take around 350 million years. Luckily, given the subject matter, Richard Fortey's book is full of such simple analogies and I'd recommend it to anyone trying to understand what is taking place beneath our feet.

Related Reviews

Fortey - Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution

Brian Clegg - Gravity: Why What Goes Up, Must Come Down

Brian Clegg is a fairly prolific writer of popular science books and he has a knack for putting across quite complex concepts in a fairly straight forward way. His decision to write a book on gravity should be welcomed because the topic is one that seems simple but in reality has some enormous complications.

Clegg begins his survey of our understanding of gravity with a examination of the way that we've understood it  historically. The common sense view of gravity is that things fall down. We know today that the rules of gravity are more complex than this - in essence the basic idea is that (following Isaac Newton) objects that have mass attract every other object with mass with a force that is inversely proportionally to the square of the distance between them, multiplied by their masses. (Things with mass attract other things, but less powerfully the further they are away).

For those of us who have had a modern science education or watched film of astronauts this may seem logical. But as Clegg points out, this understanding is very new and if we go back to the earliest ideas of gravity we have to look at some quite "alien" ideas.

The Greek thinker Aristotle had very different ideas about why things fall when you drop them. He believed that things are naturally at rest. In the Aristotilian world view, if you push something it moves until the push is removed. "The place where it stops moving depends on its elementary nature - so Earth, for example, stops moving when it as close as it can get to the centre of the universe". For the Greeks, "earthy objects had a natural heaviness (gravity) that made them want to be at the centre of the universe, while airy objects had natural lightness... that made them move away from the centre".

Such concepts seem odd because the Greeks were limited like by their different view of the universe. For them the Earth was the centre of the universe, the stars and planets fixed in place and a mere four fundamental elements. They were also limited by the stubborn refusal of people like Aristotle to find experimental verification for their theories. Their ideas seemed logical at the time, but wouldn't have often stood the most basic of tests. Famously it took the arrival of Galileo to show that objects of different weights did not accelerate at different rates, a result could have been proved with the technology available to Aristotle and his contemporaries.

The bulk of the book is devoted to more modern ideas about gravity and much of this is based on the development of the ideas of Albert Einstein. Clegg gives us a potted history of Einstein's theories. He covers the special theory of relativity in a few brief pages, concentrating on General Relativity as it is here that gravity plays its most important role. Einstein's innovation in the general theory was, in its most simplest form, to show that space and time are shaped by gravity. There are all sorts of consequences of this and Clegg does a good job of summarising many of the key points (the way that light from distant objects can be "bent" by the presence of mass for instance). He also gives a useful history of attempts to prove the theory, such as expeditions to see the way that the position of stars was distorted by the presence of our sun, something only viewable during solar eclipses.

After looking at General Relativity, Clegg moves further into the exotic. Firstly he discusses attempts to link general relativity together with the science of Quantum Mechanics - the ideas that govern what takes place on very very small scales. Famously this has yet to be achieved, but Clegg gives us some tantalising glimpses of the possibilities. Most intriguingly, Clegg discusses the  work of a Czech physicist, Peter Horava, who has managed to mathematically link general relativity with quantum theory, but only in the special case of the mathematics that might have taken place in the very early stages of the universe.

Finally, after briefly being diverted by discussions on time-travel, Clegg examines the way that gravity works. We are used to thinking of the influence being instantaneous. But gravity only works at the speed of light. Exactly HOW this happens is a matter for enormous debate. Again here mathematics is king. Some of the enormously complex equations suggest that gravity might be like other forces such as electromagnetism, whose influence is governed by the movement of packets of energy called photons. Experimental attempts to spot these packets of gravity (gravitons) have so far been unsuccessful, in part because of the great difficulties in spotting them amongst all the noise caused by masses around us.

Much of this discussion is fascinating, and Clegg's skill as a writer is to get across such ideas. I suspect that most readers will understand 90% of the book and will take the rest on trust. Some of the concepts - such as gravity itself causing further gravity - are hard to get ones head around, but often Clegg does them justice.

However there are some problems with the book. The first of these is editing. In a couple of places the sentences read very badly, and there is at least one nonsensical line ("One pound weight of coffee on the Moon would be 6 times as much coffee 1 pound weight of coffee on the Earth"). At least one of the URLs in the references, supposedly linking to a video demonstrating the properties of gyroscopes doesn't work (chapter 11, reference 3 if the publishers are reading). These are annoying problems that should have been picked up before the book was published.

More problematic is Clegg's way of drowning the reader in ideas and concepts. He mentions the idea of quantum tunnelling on page four for starters - throwing the reader in at the deep end. In the space of a few pages (84-85) Clegg discusses, tidal forces in planets and moons, red giants, extraterrestrial life, followed a few pages on by the life and death of stars. All these things are linked, but it felt like a roller coaster of a read.

These criticisms aside it is a useful book. In the final chapter Clegg quotes the American physicist Richard Feynman saying "the most impressive fact is that gravity is simple". In a way that is true but I fear that Clegg makes too much of this. Gravity might be simple, but understanding it is an incredibly difficult task. This is why many of the scientists discussed in the book devoted their entire lives to trying to solve aspects of the science. Cleggs book is a good attempt at making some difficult science easier.

Related Reviews

Clegg - Infinity: The Quest to think the Unthinkable
Johnson - The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
Cathcart - The Fly in the Cathedral

Rachel Carson - Silent Spring

The fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson has been covered widely in the media (see this rolling coverage by The Guardian for instance). It seemed a good opportunity to read this famous book, often credited as being the trigger for the modern environmental movement and certainly one that continues to provoke wide debate today. Carson's book is a beautiful read, it is eloquent, learned and funny. To take one example; when describing attempts to eradicate the Japanese beetle from croplands, she describes Sheldon in Illinois. Of which she says, that "perhaps no community has suffered more for the sake of a beetleless world." Carson puts across complex ideas well for the layman readership and it is no surprise that it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the first few months of publication.

The book concentrates on one key environmental issue - the use of chemical pesticides to destroy insects and weeds, particularly for agriculture. Carson rages against the over-use of the chemicals, she describes how the over use of chemicals like DDT to destroy pests (over 200 new pesticides were created between the 1940s and publication) has led even to a "fad of gardening by poisons" in the United States.

The book is most well known for its expose of the use of DDT. Carson is meticulous in her detailing of the problem. She shows how DDT and other pesticides are concentrated as they move up the food chain, meaning that even when the correct amount of poison is used, animals and humans can suffer overdoses because of the food they are eating. There is a powerful section of the book where she explains how earthworms are the "concentrators" of DDT that is used to control Dutch Elm Disease. This then destroys the robins who eat enormous quantities of worms, leading to the loss of birdsong - the silent spring of the title.

She shows how rivers and streams are destroyed by the chemicals, and describes the impact on the wider ecology. Carson even describes the "spontaneous" formation of other weedkillers, when certain chemical compounds combine in the soil and water.

However there is much more to this book than Carson's dramatic denunciation of this culture of poison. The is an intensely ecological book. By that I mean that Carson's analysis is rooted in an understanding of the webs and chains that form nature. In particular she hates the notion that humans are somehow external to the natural world. She writes eloquently;

"As man proceeds towards his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that shares it with him."

But for Carson this "announced goal" is nonsense. Humans aren't separate from nature, they are part of it, and our actions impact upon the natural world and back upon ourselves. This is why she has to spend so much time discussing the illnesses, diseases and cancers that result from the use of chemical pesticides.

But Carson's analysis isn't simply ecological in the sense that she understands the natural world, she also understands the historic and economic reason that pesticides are used in the modern world. She describes the "treadmill" of pesticides, which we might interpret as the logic of the market - that once you begin using vast quantities of chemicals, it is logically to use more and more of them, due to their decreasing impact, rather than switching to more rational alternatives. Carson locates the pesticides use and promotion within an "era dominated by industry... in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged". The pesticides that the US used in the 1950s had their roots in the nerve gases and poisons manufactured for military purposes in the First and Second World Wars. The use of Agent Orange as a weapon against the ecology of Vietnam and its people is the logical extension of this.

Carson also appears to see the problem located much more in the structures of modern society. The insect problem she describes, that requires such enormous quantities of pesticides, arose with the intensification of agriculture, in particular the practise of mono-cropping, which she describes as "agriculture as an engineer might conceive it to be".

Carson's environmental critique then, leads directly to a critique of an economic and political system that has profit as its sole goal. Its noteworthy that Carson isn't anti-science or anti-technology. She is not the environmentalist that argues for a return to a more primitive existence. Indeed her well-argued alternatives are often very technological (involving for instance the laboratory sterilisation of insects to undermine populations in the wild). It is dangerous to draw from this that Carson was some sort of Revolutionary Socialist, though her enemies often described her as a Communist. Other writers like John Bellamy Foster have shown the extent to which Carson's world view was influenced by left wing ideas - see this article for instance.

Carson was working and writing in the 1950s and 1960s so it was inevitable that a critique of the priorities of a section of American industry would be highly controversial. Indeed it is noticeable that in many places she draws parallels in her criticism of pesticides with radiation poisoning. At the time the American public was only just coming to terms with the impact of fallout and its links to cancer. So Silent Spring is also a detailed explanation of cancer and how it can result from external environmental influences. Carson clearly believed that an informed public was one that was more prepared to ask questions and protest at what was happening to them.

Carson's work may have helped kick-start the modern environmental movement, but its impact otherwise was limited. DDT and a few other very dangerous chemicals were banned. But pesticides are still used in vast quantities and still suffer from the problems and limitations outlined in Silent Spring. As the world faces even greater environmental problems in the 21st century, Carson's book is important for many reasons, but not least its attempt to locate ecological crises within the framework of a whole system. For that reason alone it deserves a read during the 50th anniversary year.

Related Reviews

Carson - Under the Sea Wind

J.S. Weiner - The Piltdown Forgery

In December 1912, Charles Dawson and Arthur Woodward announced an enormous scientific discovery to a packed lecture room. Hundreds of scientists were fascinated because the find could offer proof of Darwin's evolutionary theory and because in those days of scientific racism, some were hoping that a European proto-human might be found to counter the ancient remains that had hither-to only been found in Asia.

Piltdown Man has become synonymous with archaeological and anthropological forgery, yet the story of how the hoax was uncovered is a fascinating tale of scientific investigation. This contrasts with the way that some sections of the scientific community hailed the revelations at the time despite some serious doubts about the finds and the discoverer.

Almost as soon as the discovery was announced, it courted controversy. Some argued that the two pieces were not from the same skeleton, others muttered darker allegations. David Waterson, Professor of Anatomy for instance, "found it hard to conceive of a functional association between a jaw [bone] so similar to that of a chimpanzee and a cranium in all essentials human."

The problem was several-fold. Firstly at the beginnings of the twentieth century there were very few ways of determining an item's age. For particularly ancient finds, the best way of doing so was to date it from surrounding geography and geology, as well as other contemporary items that could be dated by other means. Today, a few hours of carbon dating would have exposed the Piltdown hoax very quickly. In 1912 things were much more complicated. Secondly since the scientists did not really know what an early human might look like the differences in the structure of the jaw-bone to that of a modern human were merely assumed to be because the bone came from an early evolutionary stage. Finally the hoaxer and gone to extreme lengths to make the find look genuine. The bones were stained in ways that were difficult to detect with contemporary instruments. The pieces were scattered and other, more unusual finds were associated with them. Finally, the principle discoverer, Charles Dawson was notoriously bad at recording his finds and keeping records.

J.S. Weiner was one of the scientists who gathered together all of the scientific proof that the Piltdown remains were a forgery and this is the classic history of the expose. Despite effectively being a documentation of a scientific investigation that is wholly negative, it contains a wealth of detail for the reader, and dare I say it, lessons for scientists from multiple disciplines today.

Most of the first half of the book is an account of the discovery and unveiling of the various finds associated with Piltdown, followed by a detailed marshaling of the evidence against an ancient age for the bones. Firstly Weiner argues that the gravels were the remains were "found" were completely "unfossiliferous" (a rather wonderful word there). Secondly he describes an ingenious dating method used before carbon-dating which dates a bone by the amount of fluorine it has absorbed since internment. This is one of the gems of science in this book and was a bit of a revelation to me. Weiner documents the expose of the various types of staining of the bones and other remains that was designed to make them appear old and finally he argues that "our scrutiny of the accounts of the digging up of the various fragment has given us no confidence that anything did come from undisturbed soil, despite Dawson's assertions."

The order of this is important. Weiner goes to great lengths to make the reader feel that he has proved the forgery scientifically. Once that has been accomplished, Weiner, in the second half of the book, sets out an argument that demolishes Charles Dawson's claims to a scientific authority.

When this book was first published in 1955 most of the principle people who had been involved had died. Nonetheless, Weiner remains careful not to point the finger to much. In fact, by starting with the science he avoids the book becoming simply a collection of allegations and gossip aimed at some of those involved. Having said that, Weiner does demonstrate that Charles Dawson in particular had a very bad reputation amongst his colleagues (amateur and professional) and a series of dubious discoveries to his name. These discoveries seem laughable today, and I cannot document them here. I would direct the interested reader to this short piece or Weiner's book.

It appears that several of Dawson's contemporaries (again, amateur and professional) never believed that the Piltdown was real. In fact one, Harry Morris, claimed to have overheard a conversation by Dawson that a fossil tooth, that was important to the identification of the bones as ancient, was "imported from France". Dawson was accused of "salting the mine", a damning allegation that matched other, contemporary criticisms of him for "plagiarism" and lack of scientific rigour.

Since Weiner and his colleagues proved the Piltdown hoax there has been much speculation about who was the perpetrator of the crime. Circumstantial evidence as well as some witness statements make it almost certain that Charles Dawson was the guilty party. Weiner points out that there may have been others involved, or a single other person who led a willing Dawson along. However Weiner also shows convincingly that this unknown other party must have been extremely knowledgeable in a variety of scientific disciplines as well as knowing Dawson's movements very well.

While there will always be a lingering doubt over Dawson's role, he died long before the truth came out. A more interesting question is why the doubts that did exist were never allowed to be part of the scientific discourse around the discovery. In some cases personal conflict was an important part. Harry Morris for instance seems to have had an ongoing feud with Dawson and while his own notes show clear belief in forgery from day one, he didn't declaim this publicly. Part of the problem was that the Piltdown theory backed up Morris' own wider theories of human history in southern England.

Weiner's book then shouldn't simply be seen as an attempt to expose a criminal, though it reads like an archaeological detective novel. Instead it is a wonderful explanation of the importance of the scientific method. The mistakes that were made by scientists in the early 1900s may have had their roots in racial beliefs, mistaken scientific knowledge, or simply a desire to be associated with a breakthrough discovery. Dawson himself exhibited what Weiner calls an "anxiety for recognition" - never a good thing for a scientist.

More importantly the final expose of the Piltdown forgery demonstrates how important it is for scientists to have a well rounded knowledge, rather than specialising too much. Bringing together archaeology, anthropology, chemistry, physics and history as well as being prepared to search through old cupboards and bookshelves, Weiner's and his colleagues exposed a sad episode in the history of science. But they may have made us all clearer on our own history in the process.

This review is of the 1955 edition of The Piltdown Forgery. The re-publication in 2003 had a new introduction and afterword by Chris Stringer which no-doubt puts the debates into a modern context. I would suggest that readers interested in reading Weiner's book try and find the edition with the Stringer pieces. This can be ordered as print-on-demand from the publisher here.

Related Reviews

Stringer - The Origin of Our Species

George Johnson - The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

Early in the 1800s, just after the French Revolution, Benjamin Thompson who was know as Count Rumford created an ingenious experiment to help demonstrate that heat was work. Having noticed that the boring of cannon generated heat;

"he submerged a cannon in water and harnessed two horses to turn the bit. The water go hotter and hotter until after two and a half hours it came to a boil 'merely by the strength of a horse, without either fire, light, combustion, or chemical decomposition."

Important though this experiment was (it helped disabuse the idea that material contained something called "caloric" that was released, creating heat) it isn't one of the ten most beautiful experiments within this book. However George Johnson uses it to illustrate the many stages that science goes through before reaching a moment of scientific breakthrough. In fact, one of the strengths of this book is the way it demonstrates that genius rarely develops in isolation. Scientists, no matter how brilliant, build on the work of others. Even if that work is incorrect it is a useful base on which to build greater understanding.

Perhaps the best chapter in this book is the first in which Johnson examines Galileo's work with an inclined plane. This simple experiment allowed the scientist to demonstrate the nature of acceleration. Here Galileo combines flashes of insight with wonderful innovation. In order to measure the rate of acceleration, he came up with bells to ring, mechanisms to pour water and possibly needed the singing of songs. Galileo was building on the work of earlier scientists, but his genius was to do so critically. Pushing aside the accepted science that had been handed down Aristotle, this work of Galileo's was according to Johnson his "strongest claim to greatness... long before his troubles with the Vatican."

Some argue it didn't actually take place but was more of a thought experiment. But in a piece of research almost as brilliant as some of the other examples of science in this book, Johnson describes the work of one Stillman Drake who painstakingly recreated tables of numbers from Galileo's mass of papers to show that the original scientist had indeed repeatedly performed the experiment, scratching out errors and playing with the numbers until he reached his final result.

It is probably a result of the nature of particular science that most of the experiments in here are physics based. Indeed of the two biological chapters, one on William Harvey's work on the heart and blood circulation seems to me to barely qualify as an experiment. The other, Pavlov's work with dog's instinctive behaviour and conditional responses is  a series of extended experiments that build up a case gradually. This chapter is particularly interesting as Pavlov's work is oft quoted but little understood.

Any book of this type is in a sense arbitrary. Who can say what a beautiful experiment is, and why it is more beautiful than another? But there is some interesting stuff here. I am not convinced that the experiments chosen (most of which are from the nineteenth and twentieth century) are more beautiful than modern science. Johnson argues that contemporary work is dominated by work with multiple scientists but I don't think this makes it any less inspiring or exciting. Beautiful experiments don't all have to involve a lone scientist hanging wires from ceilings and bolting brass instruments to tables.

More problematic is Johnson's style. Unfortunately in places brevity leads to confusion. Very occasionally Johnson's descriptions are very unclear. His one paragraph description of Fizeau's experimental calculation of the speed of light left me confused (and I'm university qualified in physics!) and I had to resort to youtube to get an inkling of what he meant.

Still this mildly diverting book will interest those who want to understand the scientific process without feeling they've got to learn too much science. Hopefully it will encourage further reading on some of these topics and possibly stimulate a few future experimenteers.

Related Reviews

Sobel - Galileo's Daughter

Steve Jones - Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England

Charles Darwin's most famous book, indeed the only one that most people would be able to name, is The Origin of the Species. It is justifiably famous, a brilliant work that stunned and shook up the scientific world when it was first published. But Darwin was far more than a one book man, and many of his other books seem obscure, but when they were published they were also sensations. Darwin wrote extensively, but today is most remembered (aside from Origin) for his five year voyage. When he returned home from that trip, which took him aboard the Beagle to the Galapagos islands and South America, he never again left England. Yet for the remainder of his life his output was prodigious and varied.

Steve Jones' book is an examination of the rest of Darwin's work. Writing on everything from Barnacles, to sex, from pollination mechanisms in plants to the humble earthwork, Darwin's books broke new scientific territory with every publication. Darwin's method was far from the random, directionless work that this varied output might seem, in fact, his life can be seen as a scientific trajectory, his early work on barnacles for instance putting in place ideas and seeds that would bear fruit in later studies.

Darwin was also a careful and innovative experimenter. In his attempts to understand the importance of the earthworm in producing the fertile soil that agriculture depends upon, his experiments involved everything from the measurement of the rate at which waste materials were buried, the speed of subsidence of ancient monuments and, perhaps unbelievably, the playing of instruments at worms. Darwin and his son noted that earthworms appear to demonstrate a level of intelligence, pulling leaves into their burrows using the thinnest ends, rather than the wider parts. Jones calls this the "first real experiment on invertebrate psychology" and notes that the importance of Darwin's work on soil has laid the foundation for the science that must now deal with the worsening condition of planetary earth, degraded and depleted by centuries of agriculture.

Jones' looks at each of Darwin's works in turn, and this makes for a varied book. Darwin never seemed to go for short titles, his work on worms is called The Formation of Vegetable Mould, though the Action of Worms, with Observations of their Habits. Jones' own writing is good enough to make such a title seem an attractive prospect for the ordinary reader.

This is not a biography, though it contains much biographical information. Rather it is an exploration of Darwin's science. One of the interesting things that comes through, is the way that Victorian science was very much a multi-disciplinary subject. Earthworms were important for agriculture. Barnacles impacted on ships and their ability to conduct trade. Darwin's studies of the impact of marriage between cousin's had enormous social implications (Parliament refused to include questions about this type of marriage in their population census, despite Darwin's hopes, because Queen Victoria had married her cousin, and it was considered that it might insult her Royalness).

Jones' brings Darwin's books and science up to date. Surprisingly, Darwin's work is often considered a standard text today, but obviously science has moved on. Most importantly, genetic science and the understanding of DNA have allowed scientists to build dramatically on Darwin's early studies. This makes for a rounded book, that looks backward as well as forward. It is also full of fascinating anecdotes and information (who knew that all the apples we eat today are the descendants of just two trees in Kazakhstan?).

Science today seems a very narrow collection of disciplines. Scientists spend their lives studying a narrow portion of even their own subjects. Steve Jones' book reminds us that true science should be about understanding the inter-relation of subjects and ideas. Darwin's genius was to lay the foundations of many areas of study. His work continues to inspire today, and Jones' book is an excellent introduction to some of the more obscure and forgotten parts of that work.

Related Reviews

Simons - Darwin Slept Here
Desmond & Moore - Darwin's Sacred Cause
Darwin - The Voyage of the Beagle

Adrian Desmond & James Moore - Darwin's Sacred Cause

Charles Darwin is one of those people whose lives inspire in all sorts of ways. His work on evolution is one part of this, his insights and his method are worth studying for the brilliance of his scientific method. But his science cannot be separated from his life and Darwin's travels, writings and activities are also fascinating in themselves. He is one of the few individuals who can inspire people to follow in his footsteps simply because he stands like some sort of colossus over science and history.

As a result of this, Darwin has had many biographers and Desmond and Moore's book at first seems like an attempt to find a new hook on which to hang yet another book about his life. The central idea of their work, is that Darwin's science and life cannot be separated from one of his great "passions", the movement to abolish slavery. From the desire to end slavery, and prove that all humans descended from the same origin, the authors argue, all the rest of Darwin's work flows.

What initially seems a convenient hook rapidly becomes a very readable and convincing biography that puts Darwin's genius in the midst of the intellectual and scientific debates of the 19th century, rather than locating the man, simply as a scientist with particularly brilliant insights.

The boo, and Darwin's life, can be split into two parts. The first centres of Darwin's upbringing. His family were rooted in the liberal anti-slavery movement. The authors show how Darwin's childhood and early adult years would have been seeped in political discussions about slavery. The accounts of the barbaric mid-Atlantic passage, the murder of slaves and life on the plantations were something that Darwin would have known well. His family were subscribers to a number of political campaigns on the question, attending meetings and supporting candidates that pushed for abolition and reform. By the time he got to university, Darwin's blood was thoroughly abolitionist. At university Darwin worked closely for some weeks with an ex-slave. The authors speculate, with some basis, on the way that their conversations would have turned to the realities of slavery. Interestingly, Darwin's notebooks and diaries contain no hint of racism or prejudice. To him, the black man teaching him to stuff animals was another man, slightly lower on the social scale, but in no way unequal. This contrasts, the author's point out, with the reality of life in the cities as viewed by many from the United States. Visitors from the other side of the Atlantic were appalled to see white and black couples parading the streets, arm in arm.

Darwin's experiences on the Beagle are well documented, as are his disagreements with his Captain over the question of slavery. Less well know, are the way that these experiences and what he saw of the reality of slavery helped steel his anti-slavery position. This might seem unsurprising, but several of Darwin's contemporaries later in life, visited the states and came to opposite, pro-slavery positions. Darwin's experience with indigenous people in South America also bore fruit later in his life, as he took up the political and scientific arguments associated with the origins of humans.

The second part of the book, and, it could be argued Darwin's life, is associated with the work that he began towards publishing his two masterpieces, the Origin of the Species and the Descent of Man. These two works are the culmination of a lifetime of study and research, and I will not repeat the science here. But the authors of this biography put them squarely at the heart of the changing debates that took place in England in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery.

During the campaign to free the slaves and end the slave trade, the notion of equality between black and white was taken as read. In the aftermath though, there was a increasing tendency to argue that the "races" were different. White people were superior, and blacks represented either a different race, or an earlier place in the development of humans. These debates were tied up with political questions justifying the existence of Empire, or the supposed lack of civilisation in Africa, for instance. They were also rooted in some of the new science that was developing, around the questions of brain size and head shapes.

Darwin placed himself in the camp of those who argued for a common ancestry for humans. But to explain this took Darwin decades of work and study. His reading was enormous, on everything from geology to the breeding of pigs and sheep. He ordered specimens from around the world and, in order to make sure that his scientific credentials were valid, he made himself a world expert on barnacles. Most interestingly, as the authors document, he engaged in the great debate about the origin of domesticated animals. In order to prove that domesticated pigs, sheep, cows and pigeons came from single origins, rather than multiple locations he needed to demonstrate that the great variety of life was possible from a single pair on animals. In order to do this, Darwin became an expert pigeon breeder. He spent time with working class breeders in their homes, to learn all he could and finally proved beyond doubt that it was possible to create enormous variations in animals from a single breeding pair.

This obscure work on pigeons was greatly important, because it undermined that argument that different "races" of humans, with their different coloured skins and different body shapes must have originated from different apes around the globe.

"After setting up his [Darwin's] target,

'The doctrine of the origin of our several domestic races from several aboriginal stocks, has been carried to an absurd extreme by some authors...

he would let pigeons lead the fight-back. The social context of Darwin's offensive has slipped away and been subsequently lost, but recovering makes sense of the project in Darin's moral world. It scientifically undermined the ethnographic drive for segregation and 'aboriginal' homelands so comforting to the 'slave holding Southerns'."

As America descended into Civil War, intellectuals on both sides grasped different aspects of the argument to polemicise in favour or against slavery. Darwin found himself part of that debate, his publications being quoted in the arguments and used against the pro-slavery side. But Darwin was propelled to his work by the growing crisis. He understood that part of winning the war, was undermining the idea that black people were suited to slavery because they were not biologically equal for Darwin "Slavery, race and evolution remained inseparable."

The book finishes with Darwin publicising his final work on human evolution. As with Origins it caused enormous debate and argument. Darwin had long since abandoned his religious beliefs, but if anything he was a stronger and harder fighter against racial ideas.

This is a rather astounding book. At times it reads like a scientific thriller, as you will Darwin to publish his book and damn those establishment figures he's concerned about upsetting. At others, it is a clear and readable introduction to the ideas at the heart of Darwin's science. Above all though, this is a masterful explanation of why at a certain particular moment in history, Darwin (and to a certain extent other scientists) were able to make the intellectual leaps that meant that evolution could become a live scientific idea. Ideas cannot be separated from the society in which they develop. The world around Darwin was changing. Slavery had been morally repugnant, and then was in danger of becoming scientifically supported. Darwin's work was a result of that world and a response to it.

As I read this book, I was reminded of biography of another, similar figure that I recently read. Karl Marx's life shares many similarities with Charles Darwin. This is not to say I am trying to claim Darwin as a Marxist - that would be laughable. But both men were engaged in a struggle to better understand the world they lived in. They were also in different ways, trying to change it. Both engaged in bitter polemics and struggles with friends and people on the other side of the world. Both were driven to despair at their work and frustration at other thinkers. Karl Marx dedicated the first volume of Das Kapital to Darwin, in part because of his great respect for The Origin of the Species. While there is no evidence that Darwin read Das Kapital, he would have understood the blood, sweet and tears that went into producing it, because it mirrored in many ways his own life's work.

Adrian Desmond and James Moore have produced a fascinating, readable and passionate look at Darwin's life and ideas. For its clarity in explaining both his thought and its origin, it should be read by everyone who wants to better understand the world we live in, and evolutionary science today.

Related Reviews

Darwin - Voyage of the Beagle
Simons - Darwin Slept Here
Rediker - The Slave Ship - A Human History

Gunnar Brulin & Malin Klingzell-Brulin - Food for Thought: On Food, Power and Human Rights

Swedish journalists and trade unionists Gunnar Brulin and Malin Klingzell-Brulin have here attempted to produce a book that helps us understand the networks of companies, industries and individuals that are behind the food that we see on our plate. Based in Sweden, and working in conjunction with the Food Workers' Union, they trace some of the strands backwards from Swedish shops to the many different parts of the world were workers are producing food, and more often than not organising to protect and improve their conditions.

We meet for instance, the workers of Coca-Cola in the Philippines, who are fighting the increased casualisation in their industry. The women who work for Nestle in Brazil, who are fighting an epidemic of Repetitive Strain Injuries caused by bad working practices. The authors travel to interview tea workers in India and trade unionists everywhere fighting to establish workplace recognition and building networks.

Anyone who has been involved in the union movement for any length of time will recognise the situations described here. We may never have been to the developing world, but many of us understand the difficulties getting a union off the ground, enthusing people to come to meetings, sitting in long debates with management, distributing leaflets outside factory gates. Partly based on their links with the International Union of Food Workers, the authors paint a picture of the importance of international solidarity, of workers who work for a Transnational Corporation understanding what their colleagues do and need half a globe away.

In many ways this is exciting, though the book is too short for us to learn much about many of the places and people we are introduced too. The story also shows the links between the climate crisis, the financial crises and the food crises. A system which means that 800 million people go to bed hungry every day. Further, the authors, or the union leaders that they interview are very radical, talking of sustainable industries and agriculture, dignity, democracy and empowerment. They challenge the company priorities, though there is an occasional tip of the hat to a business that is seen as more progressive than another - Coca Cola over it's rival Pepsi, which doesn't work with the unions at all.

But the problem for me is that there is little sense of a workers movement fighting for change here. There is organising, and the occasional mention of a strike or protest. But much emphasis is placed on working with the bosses in the interest of everyone. Coca Cola is mentioned because its management seem to have recognised the need to work with the trade unions. Is this why there is barely any mention of the death of trade unionists working for the company in South America? Rather we are told who easy it is for western trade unionists to raise questions of an ethical nature with their management.

This is a well produced book, that highlights the reality of the struggles that take place behind the food that we eat. Whether its coffee, chicken, pork or prawns this is the modern food system. The reality is that western food is built on a pyramid of casual, underpaid labour, that occasional relies on children, that frequently sacks trade unionists and that needs to be fought every inch of the way. As the authors detail well in the appendices, there are a tiny number of undemocratic, powerful and rich corporations controlling almost all the world's food.

If we're to have decent jobs, healthy and sustainable food than we'll need fighting trade unions. When this happens, it is clear that everywhere workers take an interest in the bigger picture. Brulin and Brulin show that this is beginning to happen but the bureaucratic approach taken by the cosy Scandinavian union's described here will not blunt the teeth of the capitalist tiger. We need much more than this.

E.E.Evans-Pritchard - The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People

The Nuer of the Southern Sudan live in the country that borders the Nile river and other tributary rivers. Their life revolves around their cattle, which form both a major source of their food and a mainstay of their social interactions. They are also fishermen and farmers planting crops of millet on small islands that rise above the wider marsh.

Evans-Pritchard's book was first published in 1940 and is considered a classic of social anthropology. It is the first in a series of extensive studies of the Nuer made by the author. The very first chapter deals with his first visits to the area and the difficulties he has in positioning himself for these studies.

From Evans-Pritchard's descriptions, the Nuer in the 1930s seemed to practice a life that must have been very similar to that of the first agriculturalists. In fact their modes of organising society seem to be almost a bridge between what might be called a hunter-gatherer society and full, permanent agriculture.

This is particularly interesting because of the lack of class in their different communities. Class society could only come about when agricultural arrived as it was only then that there could be a surplus of food to support non-productive members of the population. But this was not immediate; there would have been plenty of transitory societies where agricultural was increasingly dominant but were the old, egalitarian, aspects hand not been lost.

This is described in great detail in this study. As the blurb on the back puts it, the Nuer's "economic life is related to the absence of chieftainship and to their democratic sentiment."

This is not to say that the Nuer lived a life in perfect Utopia. Food shortages were common, war, feuds, adultery and occasional murder are part of their society. But this was based on very different attitudes to the world around them, and each other.

In part this is reflected in their attitudes to leadership. There are leaders, but they are not permanent ones whose every word must be obeyed. Evans-Pritchard describes the tut a "chief man of his family and joint family" who "takes the most prominent part in settling the affairs of these groups, but he cannot ... be said to have political authority... A joint family decide on the advice of their tut to change camp... but other joint families decide not to move till another day. Leadership in a local community consists of an influential man deciding to do something and the people of other hamlets following suit at their convenience."

Much of this book is spent in great, perhaps labourious, detail exploring the particular lines of kinship, the particular way that feuds and social relations are followed through. Most of this is only going to be of interest to the student of anthropology, though for the lay reader, nuggets continually shine through. I was struck by the authors explanation of the way that the Nuer have an entirely different conception of time. For them there are more spacings of time in the morning, when they are busiest looking after cattle than in the afternoon. Because of the lack of written records their history never grows beyond a few memorable generations. Evans-Pritchard points out that for the Nuer, the "distance between the beginning of the world and the present day remains unalterable" and was shown the tree under which humans came into being.

Private property played a different role for the Nuer. To them, cattle were everything, they enabled someone to get married, to atone for crimes to help a family member setup home. But the accumulation of cattle was meaningless. Once a Nuer male had enough cattle he would marry again or pass them on. Nuer would, it is true, get more than they needed of certain things, such as good fishing spears. But these would be taken from them by people who needed them and no crime was ascribed. Strict protocols governed the Nuer's life. "I have never heard of a Nuer stealing a cow from a fellow tribesman merely because he wanted one" points out Evans-Pritchard. Though the Nuer were perfectly happy to steal from a neighboring tribe.

One thing that struck me about the descriptions of Nuer life was the lack of discussion about the role of women. All the examples quoted above were based on the authors conversations with men, and it is clear from examples in the book to do with marriage, that women had a subordinate role in Nuer society. It is possible that this topic is covered in more detail in the later volumes of Evans-Pritchard's work. Clear divisions of labour existed in Nuer life. But often these were not based on sex, but on age groups. Age groups played a much more important role in Nuer society, though the examples of Age-Sets given in the final chapter here, are all about men. It would be illuminating to read further on this question.

I could write much more, but I would rather encourage people to read further. In summary, what Evans-Pritchard's detailed studies show, is that people who have different modes of production have different social organisation which consequently shapes different ideas in peoples heads. Trying to get the heads around these ideas, is very difficult for those who view from outside. This is why it is so wrong to described pre-capitalist, or even pre-class modes of production as "primative". They're anything but. It is for this reason that the author spends so much time looking at the details of inter-tribal relations and the like. But for most of us, we can simply delight in reading about a different way of organising society, not because we want to return to such a way of living, but because it shows that human-nature is not fixed and may well change again.

Related Reviews

Evans-Pritchard - Kinship and Family amongst the Nuer
Burke-Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance

Chris Stringer - The Origin of Our Species

Trying to understand the development of the earliest humans is an extremely difficult task. What evidence there is, is limited to a  few fossilised bones from a handful of sites scattered across the world. Most of the other evidence comes from the DNA extracted from those bones, or a the stone tools that seem to have been produced in vast quantities by these early humans.

Chris Stringer's new book is probably one of the best introductions to the subject that I have read. His account is determindely materialistic. It is rooted in the evidence we have, and an understanding of the wider environmental conditions hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is also approachable, though I did find some of the sections on DNA needed re-reading at times, but they are rewarding if the reader perseveres. Rarely does a writer actually explain how the DNA is obtained and how it is studied.

Stringer has a long pedigree in terms of the academic study of ancient humans. He was one of the first scientists to argue for an Out of Africa hypothesis for modern humans. The idea that our species, Homo Sapiens, spread outwards from Africa, following earlier migrations by earlier species of humans. According to this theory, which it seems, is now fairly common currency the origin of Homo Sapiens was a fairly recent one and our immediate ancestors only left Africa around 100,000 years ago. Surprisingly it took some 65,000 more years before they reached Europe. Spreading initially eastwards, through the modern Middle East and into Asia.

Of course, with limited evidence controversry reigns. Stringer doesn't shy from giving both sides of a debate, though he never fails to give his point of view, backing it up with his own examples and evidence. Take the discussion about why the Neanderthals died out and were replaced by modern humans. Stringer cites the work of colleagues like Clive Finlayson, who argue that the Neanderthals were on a long decline and that their last homes, in Gibralter, were the last places they survived. The existence of their species ended by a changing climate to which they couldnt adapt.

Stringer's argument doesn't dismiss this, but builds on it. He argues that in some places modern humans may have pushed the Neanderthals out, in others the Neanderthals may have died out unable to adapt to a changing world. Modern humans may or may not have been present, but it seems unlikely that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens were always in competition, particularly given evidence that they may have exchanged ideas and interbred. This seems to me a more realistic answer. Trying to reduce the end of a intelligent species like our human ancestors, simply to climatic changes doesn't feel right. A more complex interaction with a changing world, with different groups struggling to adapt and one being better than the other seems much more logical.

Stringer also touches on other debates and discussions. How did language develop? Where did geographical differences in human bodies come from and when? How did changes in our bodies relate to changes in our behaviour and brains and vice versa? Many of these questions have surprisinly detailed answers given the lack of archaeological data. Chris Stringer has produced an excellent introduction to the subject. It is an excellent starting point for the debates and discussions around early human evolution.

Related Reviews

Finlayson - The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived

J. Samuel Walker - Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective

For a few brief years following the 1979 incident at the Three Mile Island plant, it was known as the world's worst nuclear accident. The far greater disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 soon rightly took that accolade. Three Mile Island has however gone down in infamy. J. Samuel Walker's account of the event is an attempt both to describe the accident as part of the history of nuclear power and to try to separate the real story from the myths.

In the public perception TMI lead to large releases of radiation into the surrounding atmosphere. While there were some releases both controlled, as the technicians struggled to stabilise the damaged reactor, and uncontrolled. The amounts released were not as great as many thought. Walker's summary of health studies afterwards errs on the side of those that argue there were few, if any humans injured or made sick by the accident in the short or long term. That said, one thing the book does make clear is that at TMI the United States came close to a situation which could have had very severe consequences for the population surrounding the plant.

The clean-up operation after the accident took many years and cost huge amounts of money. Money that by and large came from central government, not the private nuclear industry. But the most important consequences are not as easily quantifiable. Walker documents the dip in public support for further plants - a dip that when exacerbated by the Chernobyl disaster, pretty much screwed the US nuclear industry completely.

In addition the existing nuclear agencies were roundly condemned. Several of these proved lacking in their hour-to-hour handling of the situation. Walker documents the clash of managerial styles between the company running the plant and the national bodies setup to regulate the industry. The was frequent disagreement over interpretation of what was happening in the reactor and this, combined with aggressive media interest, meant representatives frequently contradicted each other and gave differing accounts of what was going on.

One of the ways that this was most felt was in the discussion about whether to evacuate the surrounding population. Evacuation plans were limited and the area contained many schools, hospitals and several prisons. At the height of the crisis when evacuation was on the agenda as a serious option most of those responsible wanted to avoid it, condemning those who supported the call. The factors determining their opposition to evacuation were linked to political and economic consquences as well as the risk of injury during any panic.

Walker notes one such example. A key figure in the Presidential staff assigned to the TMI question, Jessica Matthews, concluded that "evacuation was not advisable", basing her judgement "primarily on the pitfalls and costs of conducting a large-scale evacuation, and secondarily on the harmful effect it would have on the nuclear industry."

With quotes like this, it is not hard to conclude that many of those taking decisions in the immediate wake of the TMI accident were not doing so primarily based on the interests of the population surrounding the reactor complex.

This is not to say that individuals, primarily those technicians at TMI did not work very hard in a potentially fatal situation to avoid serious catastrophe. Walker tries to avoid describing heroics, so we learn few of the names of individuals who clearly risked their lives trying to prevent a core meltdown. However much of the post-accident analysis concluded that it was individual error that was the biggest single factor in the developing problem.

In summary for instance, Walker says that TMI, along with Chernobyl were accidents "due largely to operator errors that exacerbated design flaws or mechanical malfunctions. In both cases, technicians overrode safety systems that could have prevented or mitigated the damage."

However phrasing the problem like this implies that the mistakes lay simply with the technicians. In the case of TMI, Walker also explains early on that once the accident took place it proved very difficult for experts on the ground to understand what was happening. Alarms that represented different problems all had the same sound and banks of flashing warning lights did not help technicians prioritise. Key information such as the level of coolant in the reactor was simply not available. The lack of this piece of information led to one of the key mistakes made as officials turned off cooling mechanisms and precisely the moment they were needed.

As one of the investigations into the accident at TMI later concluded was that those trying to anticipate problems and prevent accidents in nuclear reactors was preoccupied "with the safety of the equipment, resulting in the down-playing of the importance of the human element in nuclear power generation."

Walkers' book is a interesting social history as well as a technical one. He notes for instance that most families did not evacuate themselves, preferring to believe that the accident was not as serious as they imagined, despite some dramatic press reports. But the reasons people gave for not evacuating are interesting in themselves. "[I]n households in which no family members evacuated, 65% cited their conviction that 'whatever happens is in God's hands' as a reason for not leaving their homes." Though the same report also showed that 71% of "respondents" said that they did not evacuate because they were waiting for an evacuation order.

Walker is attempting to give a balanced account of the accident. Despite his sponsorship by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission he does manage to be nonpartisan in his approach. As a result however those who have positions opposed to, or in favour of nuclear power are likely to read this book to find information that will only bolster their own positions. Those who argue for nuclear power and its safety will argue that from TMI, "lessons have been learnt" and "designs improved" meaning it could not be repeated.

As a convinced opponent of nuclear power, my own conclusions are the opposite. What TMI proves is that nuclear accidents cannot be avoided altogether. When something does go wrong through human error or technical failure the consequences have the potential to be enormous. That is not to say that all reactors will ultimately fail, nor that all accidents will inevitably lead to death and destruction on a vast scale, but that the potential remains in a way that doesn't exist with other forms of power generation.

The more recent tragedy at Fukushima has only underlined the inherent problems of nuclear power. This is a source of power that is not needed either to generate electricity or to combat climate change. The alternatives exist, yet the obsession with nuclear energy from governments around the world remains. At times, Walker's detailed, moment-by-monent account of events at Three Mile Island is both fascinating and nerve-wracking. But it should also give food for thought for those who continue to advocate this extremely dangerous way to boil water.

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Richard Fortey - Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution

I used to think that the trilobite was merely one of those instantly recognisable fossils, sort of like an elongated and flattened woodlouse. The sum total of my knowledge of trilobites was, in the style of a foot note to a child's introduction to fossils, that they were distant relations of the modern horseshoe crab. Growing up in Birmingham, I'd never seen a horseshoe crab, though on visits to Dudley Zoo, I should have become more acquainted with its older ancestor. Trilobites are found in vast numbers in quarries around that Midland town, and the 'Dudley Locust' as it was known, features on the town's crest.

Richard Fortey's book on trilobites is full of such facts. However it is much more than the sort of history that rests everything on a collection of similar pieces of information. The trilobite forms an important moment in the evolution of life on Earth, and its very success has enabled scientists like Fortey to contribute enormously to our understanding of the history of the planet.

The tale is also the tale of Fortey's own career. From his early discovery of a trilobite as a young boy looking for fossils, "other boys discovered girls, I discovered trilobites" to exhibitions as wide-spread as Spitsbergen, Canada and China, his studies of the thousands of trilobite species have led him to be one of those few individuals lucky enough to be pursuing a career in a childhood passion. But Fortey's own interests are much wider than trilobites. Alongside detailed explanations of natural history and planetary geology, his book is peppered with literary quotes and poems. All this makes for a readable and fascinating account.

So why are these animals so important. Its not their size. Few of the species seem to have grown more than a foot or so, many of them were a few centimetres in size. Their sheer numbers are stunning. Some of the pictures in the book of enormous quantities of fossils and pieces of fossil, piled on top of each other, are testament to the numbers of trilobites that must have existed on sea bottoms and in the depths of the water. Trilobites were amazingly successful. They came into being when the continents themselves were part of earlier arrangements - before the Pangean super-continent, stretching back millions of years. They lasted for 300 million or so years, far longer than our own species.

Its this longevity that in part explains tribolite importance. Mapping out the places that their fossils are found can help identify the locations of ancient seabeds and coastlines. The very movement of the Earth's plates, and hence the continents, around the globe are marked by were fossils of trilobites can be found.

A trilobite fossil, yesterday.

There's much more too. Despite the 540 million or so years since they lived, trilobites were not primitive creatures. Their hard shells demonstrate eons of evolution themselves. Able to curl up and protect themselves from predators, or on occasion produce spears and tridents to help get their food, scientists have identified trilobites that roamed the surface, swam in the Cambrian oceans and lived under the mud.

A few lucky scientists have made careers from bridging the boundaries of their disciplines. Most trilobites could see, growing crystals of calcite that focused light onto sensitive cells. The very notion of an animal with eyes partially made from the same substance as rocks or shells is stunning, and Fortey devotes a fascinating chapter to the evolutionary and biological questions that this throws up.

The trilobite is a humble creature. Fortey says that he has given up hope that there remains a remote ocean-valley holding a still living colony of these creatures. It seems, sadly, that despite the animal's success, it was unable to survive the changing environment. However, the insight that we can gain from its life into sciences as varied as plate-tectonics, genetics and evolution, surely gives this animal an importance far beyond its own humble life. Richard Fortey's wonderful book is a brilliant insight into all of these subjects and far beyond.

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Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

In this challenging book "string theorist" Brian Greene has attempted to being together the most recent understanding of this complex branch of theoretical physics together with the context that it was developed in. He starts, as any explanation of modern physics must, with the inadequacies of our own experience of the universe. We can, to borrow Greene's analogy, understand why a ball might bounce, but we cannot use the same set of ideas to explain what happens when a star enters a black hole, or what happens to particles travelling close to the speed of light.

So Greene begins with a detailed explanation of the big picture. Starting with Newtonian physics, he quickly moves through the developments that led Einstein to his Special theory of Relativity and thence onto the General Theory. Having efficiently and clearly covered this ground, Greene turns to the other end of the scale and teaches the reader Quantum Mechanics in a few chapters. These sections of the book are some of the best, most accessible and well written. Greene is given to the over use of metaphor, something that is always a problem when discussing theoretical physics, but sometimes the metaphor's are culturally limited and difficult to understand ("It's as if you were playing The Price is Right and Bob Parker gives you ten billion billion dollars and challenges you to purchase products that will cost... all but 189 of the dollars").

Having reached general relativity and quantum mechanics physicists were then challenged with finding the link between them. Or rather a theory that could include both. Both work extremely well on the macro and micro levels, but though general relativity should theoretically work on a quantum level, the equations break down. String Theory is an attempt to link the two together and get us closer to a Grand Theory of Everything.

Now String Theory is a way of looking at the building blocks of the universe as being small loops of vibrating string. The different vibrations represent different energies and hence, because mass and energy are linked, different types of particles. All well and good. Explanations beyond this become complex and difficult and you really need to find a good book to explain it further.

The question is, has Brian Greene written that book? I have to say that I don't think so. Its been immensely popular, and even if it has slightly dated in the decade or so since first publication, it pretty much covers the basic areas covered by modern string theory. But does it explain it well?

Firstly I struggled to work out who the book was aimed at. Certainly not string theorists themselves (many of whom are name-checked here). It is designed as an introduction to the topic. What about scientifically literate readers such as myself? Well I have a degree in Maths and Physics and some of the sections in here were baffling to me, despite repeated readings. In places I felt I needed more (perhaps more equations and numbers would have helped). The biggest problem was I felt, that without a fairly detailed grasp of the equations themselves, no amount of metaphor can explain the concept of dimensions folded in on themselves, or other equally complex ideas. Certainly I felt that without some grounding in science, many readers would have great trouble understanding what was being written about.

There are of course some fascinating parts to the book and it is worth reading just to get a general idea of what is happening. Its clear that string theorists believe that they are, or at least were, on the cusp of further great insights into the universe. Greene avoids saying to definitely that he thinks string theory will lead directly to the Grand Theory, though he clearly thinks its our best chance. Towards the end of the book, he concludes that "[c]enturies from now, superstring theory... may have developed so far beyond our current formulation that it might be unrecognizable even to today's leading researchers". This is probably fair. Even if string theory is found to be a dead end in some respects, it will have at least helped break the reliance on a particular way of looking at the universe.

My final gripe though is that Greene leaves much of the work shrouded in fog. Time and again we are told of a scientist or a researcher developing some insight, making a breakthrough or clearing something up. Yet we're not told how this work progresses. I presume its through some form of computer modelling, yet this is rarely mentioned. It can't all be sitting there with a blank page staring at equations. Take these lines, for instance:

"What about the other forces of the standard model? How do their intrinsic strengths vary with distance? In 1973, Gross and Frank Wilczek at Peinceton, and, independently, David Politzer at Harvard, studied this question and found a surprising answer". 

Yet nothing is explained about their study. How did they do it? Later, Greene continues, the scientists "argued that this difference is actually due to the different effect that the haze of microscopic quantum activity has on each force. Their calculations showed that if this haze is penetrated by examining the forces..."

Yet this haze is a metaphor. No instruments exist that can peer that closely into quantum relations. What is the mechanism for this penetration? How exactly did the scientists proceed in their examination? The reader remains in the dark.

Sadly I feel that this book was a missed opportunity. For the layman, most of it will be incomprehensible. Some will finish it and be tempted to dismiss the whole subject as a dark art. Even for a physics student used to the rarefied ways that scientists can talk, some of this will be difficult. Sadly the book falls between two audiences and will, I suspect only be enjoyed by a small number of readers which is a great tragedy.

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