Richard Holmes - Falling Upwards: How we took to the Air

Richard Holmes' eclectic and slightly random history of the early days of ballooning is one of those books that is read for enjoyment rather than a detailed history of the subject. The early balloons were very limited technically and travelling in one was often a life or death matter. In fact, as a result, ballooning was a popular spectator sport and daredevil performers (frequently women in titillating outfits) often hung from the baskets, spent whole days and nights in them, or performed tricks. The Edwardian "balloon girl" Dolly Shepherd, used to hang on a trapeze at several thousands of feet in altitude before dropping under a parachute. She had many male admirers, though working class women seemed to love her as a "portent of women's rights".

A few individuals saw the potential for scientific investigations from the new flying machines, though unsurprisingly the first real application of the balloon, other than entertainment was military. Two fascinating chapters here deal with the role of the balloon in the American Civil War and during the Prussian siege of Paris (the one that preceded the Paris Commune for my socialist readers). In the former the balloon tended to be used as an observation device, and in the case of the South, a propaganda device. During the 1870 Paris Siege however the balloons took on an enormous propaganda role as they were used to take millions of letters and messages (and the occasional politician) from the besieged city.

France seems to have had a long relationship with the balloon. Poets, scientists and writers (and often combinations of all three) rode them, and fell in love with them. One, Camille Flammarion saw the future in the balloon,

Whither sales this ship? It sails with daylight, clothed,

Towards the Future, pristine and divine; towards the Good,

Towards the shining light of Science seen afar

Writing before the Franco-Prussian war and the military role of balloons, perhaps Flammarion could be forgiven for his belief that the balloon would help bring the shining future closer. Certainly his own travels made him think that the balloon took him to a different place,

This absolute silence is truly impressive; it is the prelude tot that which reigns in the interplanetary space in the midst of which other worlds revolve. The sky here has a tint which we never saw before... Planetary space is absolutely black.

The book ends with the age of exploration, and the Swedish explorer S A Andree, whose doomed trip to try to visit the North Pole relied on scientific and technological innovation over common sense. The three travelers who perished may have inspired and excited the newspaper reading public, but the detailed account in Falling Upwards left me thinking they were publicity obsessed idiots whose faith in engineering was misplaced because it ignored the realities of the natural world.

Holmes' earlier book, The Age of Wonder was a masterful history of the era when science and literature were holding out for a new world, where technology might free human kind. It explored the scientists and their circles striving to understand the cosmos. Falling Upwards covers a similar subject and period, but sadly I found it didn't really hold together as a book and came across as a series of anecdotes not worthy of the book's subtitle, however fascinating they might be.

 Related Reviews

Holmes - Age of Wonder
Verne - Five Weeks in a Balloon

Mark Everard - Breathing Space: The Natural and Unnatural History of Air

Mark Everard's new book covers a neglected topic in environmentalism. Given the importance of air to us personally, as well as wider eco-systems, this is a strange omission. Everard argues that

Despite its vast bulk, the fluidity, transboundary nature and lack of ownership of the airspace renders it not only the world's greatest 'common; but also the most commonly overlooked natural resource. An integrated approach to the recognition and wise use of this ecosystem is therefore long overdue, and needs to be instituted on a consistent international basis.

In Breathing Space, Everard sets out to do just this. He begins with a useful discussion of air itself. How scientists understand it, as well as its origins; its role in the world's eco-systems and how humans use air. Everard's approach is one that you might describe as dialectical - understanding the components of a system in terms of their wider impact upon each other. While he doesn't mention their work in his bibliography, Everard's approach has similarities to that of the scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. In particular this is noticeable when Everard discusses the way that living organisms both depend upon, and shape their environment, a topic that Levins and Lewontin devote much space to in their book The Dialectical Biologist. Everard notes that the very existence of the atmosphere as we know it today, capable of supporting life and in turn shaping wider eco-systems, is only possible because of the historic role of early life-forms in transforming the poisonous smog that blanketed Earth millions of years ago.

We continue to alter the atmosphere, most notably through the emission of fossil fuels. Everhard writes

Deposits of fossil carbon, metals, phosphorus and other substances now mined to support modern lifestyles are a product of progressive sequestration from the atmosphere and the wider biosphere over geological timescales. To release these mined substances back into the biosphere is therefore inherently dangerous, as accumulating concentrations in the air reflect earlier, more contaminated biospheric history.

Following this approach the author looks at the way that our air is being damaged, altered and polluted. Tragically there are a myriad of ways that this is happening and Everard devotes time to summarizing these. However the limitations of the book begin to become apparent when Everard discusses the way that contemporary society misuses nature and tries to find solutions.

Everard rightly notes that under capitalism nature is externalised from the economy. He approvingly quotes Nicholas Stern's words that climate change is the "greatest market failure". In other words it hasn't yet been adequately integrated into economic models. It is the sort of approach that has led to market mechanisms such as carbon trading being offered as the solution to global warming. The problem is that this approach is inherently flawed, and Everard falls into the trap of arguing, like Stern, that more such mechanisms are what is needed. He argues that "There is also a role for new economic tools, such as payments for ecosystem services (PES) that integrate formerly overlooked ecosystem services into the economy."

In New Zealand, Everard notes that the Maori have "cultural values" in their approach to land use and ownership, suggesting that the example of Ngati Porou Whanui Forests Ltd, a company which "has been established as a tribal cooperative bringing together Maori landowners and Maori agencies to benefit from market opportunities for ecosystems services" is a positive example of what can be achieved.

In this model, "Some forest areas may also be eligible for funding for carbon sequestration services" Everard notes happily. But this approach is precisely the opposite of what is needed. The further commodification of nature in this way can only serve to put nature further into the hands of those who want to make money. This is most notable when Everard discusses REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries). Everard explains that

REDD+ includes a wide range of mechanisms... These in turn could open up market mechanisms through which payments made by industrialised nations for emission offsets would reward developing countries for protecting ecosystems that are of value for many purposes

What Everard doesn't mention is that REDD+ has been roundly condemned by environmental organisations. Friends of the Earth International describe REDD as "a risky and false solution to climate change, both in theory and in practice". While the author does note that "There remain some concerns about 'putting a price tag on nature'" he argues that the Ecosystem Approach that he advocates contains enough internal safeguards to ensure that PES schemes and the like are not abused and "provide benefits to different stakeholder groups".

I am skeptical. The Ecosystem Approach certainly has its benefits over the unfettered way that capitalism degrades nature. It attempts to look at different aspects of nature as part of a wider continuum. Something that can only bring benefits. Approach questions of pollution in this way has enormous benefits. For instance, Everard points out that an approach to reducing pollution from vehicles in urban areas by replacing them with electric vehicles, might well ignore the impact on the environment of manufacturing those vehicles, or poisoning other eco-systems with the chemicals from their batteries. Instead Everard urges us to consider how our cities are designed, how we travel to and from work, and where we work in relation to living and so on. Such an approach, which challenges the inherent anti-environmental aspects to capitalist society can only be supported.

Unfortunately, trying to solve these problems by playing the system at its own game will not bring the sustainable society we need. The vested interests of the corporations and the governments that are in thrall to their wealth need to be challenged. We need a vision of a different society, where nature is integrated into the economy, but in a way that breaks from a world driven by the desire to make profit. This is not to say that changes cannot be made in the here and now. Though all the evidence is that the action needed from governments is not further markets, but investment in public transport, insulation schemes and renewable energy. Such changes, as outlined in the UK trade union One Million Climate Jobs report, can bring both real change and act as a incentive to further challenge capitalism.

Recently Naomi Klein has brilliantly outlined why Capitalism is a barrier to sustainability. Mark Everard's book contains some useful information on air as an important ecosystem and a better approach to questions of environmentalism. But his solutions are ones that cannot succeed in the face of a economic system that starts from the accumulation of wealth for the sake of accumulation.

Related Reviews

Klein - This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate
Böhm and Dabhi (eds) - Upsetting the Offset, The Political Economy of Carbon Markets
Carbon Trade Watch - The Carbon Neutral Myth, Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins
Burkett - Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy

Foster, Clark & York - Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism, From Antiquity to the Present

Intelligent Design has yet to make a significant impact on politics in the United Kingdom. But it has an acceptance in the United States where the authors of this book are based. The Design movement is an attempt to reassert religious dogma in the face of scientific explanations of evolution and society, and the authors have written this book to help explain and counter-act the proponents of Intelligent Design.

The battle between Creationism and Materialism has been one that has stretched back to ancient times. Indeed, the debates have shaped modern science and society. The authors point out that

Western science itself is a product of a large part of a 2,5000-year critique of intelligent design that was tied to larger social struggles occurring over the same vast period.

Intelligent Design, they write, is a "counterrevolution against science", an attempt, in the modern context to undermine and challenge materialism. Its leading proponents are well aware of this.

Intelligent design seeks not so much to triumph over materialism in public schools and other institutions as to burn iot on the cross. Intelligent design proponents see the argument from design as part of a larger crusade against materialism that traces the problem not to Darwin but to Epicurus in antiquity. Epicurus is regarded as the archetype of materialism and the greatest single enemy of creationism. Hence, the refutation of Darwin is seen as necessary but not as the final or sufficient goal in a much larger inquisition. Indeed intelligent design criticisms embrace the entire materialist tradition extending from Epicurus... to the unholy trinity of Darwin, Marc, and Freud in modern times.

Why is this so important to the reactionaries? In the words of one key figure in the Intelligent Design movement, Benjamin Wiker,

The larger materialist package supports all kinds of things which are mortally repugnant to Christians, not only... Social Darwinism and eugenics, but also sexual libertinism, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, cloning and so on... [quoted by the authors]

Thus the Design movement wishes to challenge materialism as part of a wider reassertion of a Christian viewpoint that is inherently anti-science. The authors explain how the Design movement uses the metaphor of a "wedge", challenging at first particular aspects of science and integrating their ideas and people into wider public discourse, and ultimately "to see design theory enter into the physical sciences, but also 'psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities."

Much of this book then looks at understanding the historic development of materialist science, and the way that design was "from the beginning a response to materialist/atomistic physics". Thus the authors demolish both the failings of Design theory scientifically, but demonstrate why their approach is driven by ideology rather than a real attempt to understand the world. The authors also examine the key ideas and works of the "unholy trinity" of Darwin, Freud and Marx, who the Design movement single out as being the chief enemies. They give useful summaries of the work, particularly, at least for this reader, those of Darwin and Freud whose work is often misunderstood and caricatured by Intelligent Design proponents.

Importantly however, the authors do not simply lay out their critique of Intelligent Design and religion through simply atheism. As Marxists, they have a more nuanced critique of religion, which argues that pure-atheism isn't enough. Indeed such an approach to religion can lead to reactionary positions. For instance, when some leading atheistic thinkers label all followers of Islam as bigoted.

Marx's approach, which understood religion as offering both hope to the oppressed, as well as dulling their senses and holding back, or limiting, their movements for self emancipation, allows revolutionaries to relate to religious individuals and movements, without crudely labeling them as backward. This, as the authors point out, helped shape Marx's approach

As a materialist, Marx opted not to invest in the abstraction of God and religion. At the same time he did not attempt to disprove the supernatural existence of God, since that transcended the real, empirical world and could not be answered, or even addressed, through reason, observation, and scientific inquiry. Instead he forged a practical atheism through his scientific commitment to a historical materialist approach for understanding reality in all of its dimensions. The practical negation of God and the affirmation of humanity and science demanded an active movement for revolutionary social change, the real appropriation of the world to pursue human development - the growth and expansion of human capabilities - and freedom.

While this book is a useful critique of Intelligent Design, its real importance is in reasserting an approach to religion which is more than simply asserting that science is right. Indeed the authors conclude by pointing out that "reason, science and human freedom can only commence" when the "gods have at last been banished from the earth". That won't happen until a new world has been built, based on the interests of the majority of society and removing the real basis of religion - oppression, exploitation and inequality.

Related Reviews

Siegel - The Meek and the Militant

Jean Gimpel - The Medieval Machine

This is a superb book and a must for anyone trying to understand the dynamics of medieval history in Europe. Jean Gimpel rescues us from the idea that medieval society was simply agriculture and serfdom. Here is a Europe with industry and factories, mines and innovation. Of course, Gimpel points out, that this rested on the labour of the serfs in the fields:

"The Middle Ages produced a substantial surplus productivity, and this enabled the estate administration of Glastonbury... to invest capital in a new post-mill... Richard of Wallingford could not otherwise have invented his two astronomical instruments, the Rectangulus and the Albion, nor his famous clock, and Giovanni di Dondi could not have built his marvellous clock over a sixteen-year period."

But some of the medieval industry also produced surplus on a large scale, which is why the crown was keen to control mines and mills or give them to friendly lords and abbots.

Who controlled workplaces could also be a source of class conflict, in St Albans, for instance,

"The Abbot John (1235-60) had spent over £100 repairing all the mills on his land, and his successors were anxious to have their tenants breing their cloth and corn to the manorial mills. The tenants refused to obey... and continued to full at home, free of charge.... in 1274 Abbot Roger... had certain houses searched to confiscate the cloth. Te tenants resisted physically, then opened a fighting fund... The townsmen contested the case in the King's Court, but in vain. They had to abandon fulling by foot and bring their cloth to the abbey mills to be fulled by the machines."

Disputes like this helped to fuel discontent that made St Albans one of the centers of rural insurrection up to the Great Revolt of 1381.

But we shouldn't be misled into thinking that medieval industry was simply small scale, and localised. Take Toulouse in the second half of the 12th century which had "majestic" dams to control water levels on the river. Before these, there had been 60 floating mills, by the end of the century "city engineers therefore did away with the floating mills, built three dams barring the fast-flowing Garonne, and erected 43 water mills on its right bank." One of these dams was 400 meters long.

Other industry could be as large and capable of enormous feats. Gimbel takes us through the extraordinary scale of the mines that produced stone for the medieval cathedrals, often exported large distances - Caen stone being favoured for some Norman buildings in England, for instance. Or that England's iron industry was large enough to supply a bulk order of 50,000 horseshoes for Richard I's crusade.

Contrary to  popular belief the early medieval era was a period invention and innovation. Some of this was the work of remarkable thinkers and architects, who combined science and technology in a way that seems centuries ahead of their time. Others developments must have been the work of unknown artisans and peasants, such as the medieval innovations of harnesses that allowed horses to pull loads hundreds of times larger than in Roman times. Indeed, one interesting thing about Gimbels' book is that he acknowledges how much more dynamic the innovations of medieval Europe were over those of the more stagnant slave economies of the classical era.

But medieval society did enter a period of decline and stagnation. Many of the clocks and other wondourous mechanisms could not be repaired years later as knowledge was lost. Gimbel argues that this was a result of the economic and political crises that struck Europe in the 14th century, the crash of population that followed the Black Death, the Hundred Years War and the famines of the time. These combined to produce political crisis and times when society looked inwards rather than forward. There is much truth in this, though a larger problem is the way the ruling class of the era responded to the crises, as exemplified by King Edward who rebuked the Abbot at St Albans for spending time and money building a clock and not repairing his church. As the medieval era got older, the ruling class was less keen to stimulate innovation for fear of undermining the status quo.

A second disagreement with Jean Gimbel is his epilogue which seeks to link the rise and fall of technological innovation in the medieval period with a similar rise and fall of western capitalist society. Here the analogy must surely fail, given the two economies are utterly different in their central dynamic and the crisis of the US economy is not due to malaise in society or a lack of "fascination with gadgets" but in a country that was squeezed by its economic and military competition in the Cold War.

These are however minor disagreements with a book whose central story is absolutely fascinating and a tribute to the brilliance of human achievement and innovation in a period often dismissed as a dark and stagnant time.

Related Reading

Bolton - Medieval English Economy

David Scott & Alexei Leonov - Two Sides of the Moon

I was reading this book while watching the first launch of NASA's Orion spacecraft, a vehicle that many hope will return humans to the moon, mars and elsewhere. I'm skeptical that the political and economic interests exist in the United States for this to happen. In an era were private companies are expected to lead innovation in their pursuit of profit, I suspect that NASA's funding will dwindle. Orion may well prove to be a last hurrah.

Part of my reasoning lies in this interesting book by two astronauts. David Scott who flew with the one of the US's Gemini missions, and walked on the moon with Apollo 15. Alexei Leonov was the first person to walk in space and took part in the Apollo-Soyuz link up. Had things been different Leonov may well have been the first person to walk on the moon.

The book is structured around the authors' lives. Each taking turns to tell parts of their story. Much of the fascination comes from the great differences between the two experiences, particularly their lives within their respective space programs. The Russian's were bedeviled by bureaucracy and lack of funding, which contrasts enormously with NASA's lavish initial support and a much more happy go lucky approach from the astronauts.

Leonov was a close friend of Yuri Gagarin, and their are some emotional parts to his tale, particularly in the aftermath of his friends death. He is also an accomplished painter and its notable that his accounts are often more concerned with his amazement with what he can see, while Scott's could be over-bearing in technical detail and much more matter-of-fact.

Scott was to go to the moon, and this is perhaps the highlight of the book. Forty years later and despite having seen the footage from the various Apollo missions countless times and read dozens of accounts and reports, the sheer fact that humans walked on the moon still has the capacity to stun me. Scott and James Irwin underwent extensive geological and scientific training for the lunar mission and their accounts are punctuated with genuine excitement at particular finds. Their ability to make decisions about exploration shaped by a wider understanding of geology. Something to bear in mind when discussing whether exploration should continue by robot or manned craft.

But these stories are immersed in the wider context of the space race. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Scott is very partisan about the "benefits" of capitalism, over what is labelled communism. As he puts it when describing a discussion with a senator opposed to spending money on NASA, while at a meal with President Nixon,

"The unspoken political undercurrent to our discussion was the importance of the space programme in winning the Cold War. I did not say it directly to the senator grilling us, but underlying my thinking were very fundamental questions: 'Do you want us to win this race? Do you want to live in a free society? Or do you want to live under communism?'"

Scott's enthusiasm for science and exploration vanishes here, in the interests of simply winning an undeclared war with the Soviet Union. By contrast the parts of the book, particularly those by Leonov, which detail the interaction between Russian and US spacemen and the way that their shared experiences broke down barriers are illuminating. Leonov, for instance, bemoans how the ill-discipline of American astronauts missing breakfasts in the USSR meant he had to pay for the wasted food from his own pocket.

Leonov's is a victim of the collapse of the USSR. His encounters with senior politicians and figures in the USSR help expose the reality of that system and he undergoes his own political awakening. He never got to walk on the moon, though his spaceflights were important milestones. His tales, for instance of fighting off wolves while landing in Siberia, are a fascinating insight into the less well known side of the space race, as well as the tragedies. Those fascinated simply by space flight will enjoy the insights from both astronauts into the 1960s and 1970s space race.

But the book is damaged by being over-long and in places seems to drown in its own self-importance. Introductions by Neil Armstrong and Tom Hanks add little, and David Scott has added an extremely long list of acknowledgements which seems to include everyone he ever worked with. In part this is because the book is a defense of his actions in a number of run ins he had with NASA. But ultimately it all detracts from what is otherwise a readable book.

David Quammen - Ebola: The Natural & Human History

The Ebola crisis that raged over the summer produced acres of newsprint. Much of it was sensationalist, inaccurate and confusing. Many people were concerned, not least because of irresponsible reporting. Some were quick to point out that the media only became interested when white people in rich nations started dying and Socialist Worker highlighted the way that "The Rich Could Stop Ebola in a Day".

Ebola is a horrible, virulent disease. But despite it having first identified following a 1976 outbreak, we still know very little about it. One reason for that, as Socialist Worker highlighted, is the lack of resources that have been spent on solving the problem. Another is the particular way that Ebola spreads.

David Quammen's new book concentrates on this second question. His book has its origins in a 2012 book of his, Spillover which examined the way that diseases can arrive from the animal kingdom and enter the human population. The Ebola pathogen is a zoonosis, "an animal infection that is transmissible to humans". Quammen points out that this is not uncommon - diseases like bubonic plague or rabies are zoonosis.

The reason that this is important is that identifying the "reservoir" animal which carries Ebola between outbreaks is a key part in identifying how to deal with the disease. The reservoir is unknown, though recently it has become clear that bats may well have a key role in this. Bats are extremely common in areas where Ebola outbreaks occur.  However at the time of writing, Quammen acknowledges that no bat has ever been found, despite extensive research, containing live Ebola viruses. This might mean that bats are part of a much more complex Ebola ecology (we know for instance that Ebola is particularly virulent in Gorillas) or it may be that some bats are the reservoir. More research is needed.

Ebola usually causes a horrible death.Though when the communities are in Africa we rarely hear about them, which was why I was surprised to find out from Quammen's book that 1976 was the first known case of an outbreak. I was also surprised to learn that several casualties have occurred outside of Africa long before the 2014 outbreak. England had a patient in 1976 who had contracted it due to an injury while studying the disease. A Russian researcher who had been looking at an experimental therapy derived from blood serum of horses died in 1996. Injecting live horses with Ebola must have been a particularly dangerous piece of research activity.

I was fascinated to discover that an African group, the Acholi, had, as part of their cultural knowledge, "a program of special behaviors" some of which seem specifically aimed at coping with diseases like Ebola. Including "quarantining each patient... relying on a survivor of the epidemic (if there were any) to provide care to each patient; limiting movement of people between the affected village.... not eating rotten or smoked meat; and suspending the ordinary burial practices"

Most importantly though, Quammen locates the Ebola question in the wider social context. He points out for instance, that there are other, far more dangerous diseases (malaria, or TB), others that could well evolve and cause extensive destruction (bird flu). There are others that cause localised epidemics, that are ignored in the west. All of these would benefit from proper funding, and are made worse by Africa's general poverty and the legacy of western colonialism. As Quammen points out,

"What we should remember, is that the events in West Africa (so far) tell us not just about the ugly facts of Ebola's transmisibility and lethality; they tell us also about the ugly facts of poverty, inadequate health care, political dysfunction, and desperation in three West African countries, and of neglectful disregard of those circumstances over time by the international community."

Quammen's book is not perfect, its main limitations come from its origin in a book with a slightly different emphasis. But it is an excellent introduction to Ebola. It should also encourage us to demand that our governments spend more of researching diseases like Ebola and caring for their victims.

Related Reviews

Davis - The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu
Zinsser - Rats, Lice and History
Ziegler - The Black Death

James Gleick - Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton's copious papers began to appear at auction houses in the early 20th century. By 1936 when interest had waned somewhat, a trunk went up for sale at Sotheby's containing manuscripts with some 3 million of Newton's words. John Maynard Keynes bought much of them, and helped to uncover an Isaac Newton that few had guessed at in the 2 hundred odd years since his death. The documents inside helped expose Newton "the alchemist; the heretical theologian" rather than the rational, mechanical scientist of tradition.

The great strength of James Gleick's short biography is that it helps us understand the whole Newton. Both the man who hide away from the world, jealously guarding his knowledge and discovery, almost fearing to publish, but who made enormous breakthroughs in mathematics and physics and the Newton who spent much of his life trying to work out how to turn base metal into gold; rigorously studied the Bible to convince himself that the question of the theological Trinity was a "fraud" and engaged in long protracted polemics and feuds with other great thinkers.

Indeed, Gleick's description of Newton's approach to theological questions demonstrates Newton's scientific method. Newton "compared the Scriptures in the new English translation [of the Bible] and in the ancient languages; he collected Bibles in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French. He sought out and mastered the writings of the early fathers of the church." Newton tested his ideas, searched for evidence and examined it until he could come to his own conclusions. In this case, his conclusion was heretical, without a special dispensation from the king he would never have been able to take his mathematics seat at Cambridge because Newton couldn't bring himself to take the holy orders required. When he got the dispensation, he didn't move on, rather he "perfected his heresy through decade of his life and millions of words."

Newton wanted to understand the universe, and god was part of that. As Gleick explains, "if we could decipher the prophecies and the messages, we would know a God of order, not chaos; of laws, not confusion. Newton plumbed both nature and history to find out God's plan. He rarely attended church."

Gleick's book looks at this aspect of Newton's life but doesn't neglect the more well known parts. His invention of calculus, which he hide from the world for decades, until his feud with Liebniz. His work on tides, which apparently he did from first principles, without ever seeing the sea. His discoveries in optics, and most of all, his work on gravitational attraction. Newton wrote millions of words on these topics, from his earliest years he was an obsessive list maker, note taker, writer and doodler. His brain seems to have been on fire constantly. His fame came late. But when it did, Newton seized it, protected it and fought those who challenged him. Newton ended up very rich, heirless and world renowned even if, for much of his life, words or notation did not yet exist for the ideas he was inventing and the thoughts he was having.

Yet for all its strength, this book didn't feel adequate. I enjoyed reading it, in fact this is the second time I've done so. James Gleick peppers the book with literary quotes, poetry and Newton's own words. But it is too short, and I didn't feel like I'd got to understand Newton, merely that I'd been introduced to him and his ideas and I needed a deeper, longer biography. Nevertheless this is an excellent place to start.

Related Reviews

Sobel - Galileo's Daughter
Jardine - Ingenious Pursuits

Elizabeth Kolbert - The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert begins her book on the current biodiversity crisis with a damning summary of the situation. After visiting Panama and meeting locals and scientists who report an enormous crash in the number of frogs in the rainforests, she writes

"Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world's most endangered class of animals; it's been calculated that the group's extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate. But extinction rates among many other groups are approaching amphibian levels. Its is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion."

Kolbert explores the nature of extinction, from the sudden impact that obliterated the dinosaurs and almost all life on the planet, to the more gradual dying off that takes place as environments change. The book looks at how the historical "great" extinctions, including the dinosaurs and the enormous transformations of the oceans that saw the wiping out of animals like the ammonites. But this serves merely as the backdrop to explain just how different the mass extinctions we face are today.

The scale of the biodiversity crisis lies rooted in the expansion of human society across the planet. Many of the changes, like the dying off of the amphibians in Panama, have a single reason (in that case a particular fungus), others are linked to the environmental changes that are taking place - particularly climate change, which is warming the world, changing weather patterns and making the seas more acidic. All of these, even the fungus, have a common theme - it is human society that is making them worse.

Take the question of "invasive species" - animals or plants that are alien to a particular ecology, and when introduced can thrive at the expense of localised flora and fauna. Global trade networks have facilitated the spread of animals, large and small. Such that "every year more non-indigenous species of mammals,birds, amphibians, turtles, lizards and snakes are brought into the US than the country has native species of these groups." The fungus that destroys enormous numbers of frogs in Panama is a much smaller example of this.

A bigger problem is the way that humans encourage the creation of island ecologies. The splitting up of the rainforest is an example of this. Species may not cross a patch of open land, such as a road or a cleared area, so their numbers may not be able to spread to escape a changing environment, or find enough mates to procreate. This effect is well known in nature - isolated groups of species tend to die out over time as numbers dwindle. Human society makes it worse.

Along the way, as Kolbert explores the various examples and causes of extinction, Kolbert meets many scientists and activists who are trying to save individual species or groups of them. She meets brilliant individuals desperately trying to understand what is changing in the world and why. Frequently they have very bleak outlooks. That people want to avoid animals and plants going extinct demonstrates how much people care about the planet's environment. The problem is though, a political and economic system that puts the interest of multinational corporations before the planet and the myriad of species that live on it. Until we start to challenge the unsustainable nature of capitalism, we are doomed to see many more species die out. Kolbert's book is a brilliant, but tragic introduction to the scale of the problem we have.

Related Reviews

Lynas - Sixth Degrees
Pearce - The Last Generation
Pollack - A World Without Ice
Foster - The Ecological Revolution
Foster - Marx's Ecology

Robin Dunbar - Human Evolution

Early in this book, Robin Dunbar explains the importance of an introductory work on human evolution. He writes,

"we share with the other great apes a long history, a largely common genetic heritage, a similar physiology, advanced cognitive abilities that permit cultural learning and exchange, and a gathering and hunting way of life. And yet we are not just great apes.... The substantive difference lies in our cognition, and what we can do inside our minds."

Later he concludes, with a central theme of the book, that "what underpins all this cultural activity is, of course, our big brains, and this might ultimately be said to be what distinguishes us from the other great apes."

Dunbar's ambition is excellent. To demonstrate how we have arisen from the animal kingdom, yet are also different, is very important as much of what else we can say about human society depends upon this. To do so in an introductory volume accessible to the interested reader is laudable. Yet I fear this book fails to achieve what it aims to, because the authors framework boils down to evolutionary psychology that fails to develop beyond a mechanical approach to biology.

Take one of the central themes of the book. The "social brain". Robin Dunbar explains what he means by this and some of the consequences.

"The social brain relationship manifests itself in primates as a cognitive limit on social group size and brain size. The social brain hypothesis has been given a significant boost by a recent spate of neuroimaging studies demonstrating that the absolute volume of key brain regions correlates with social network at the individual level (including the number of Facebook friends), both in humans and in monkeys."

Examining the data gives Dunbar a "predicted group size" of around 150 people. He illustrates the accuracy of this figure with various figures - neolithic villages had 150-200 people in them, the average village in the Doomesday Book had a population of 150, Christmas card distribution lists are on average 154, and Gore-Tex factory unit sizes are 150. The smallest unit in modern armies, that can function on its own, we are told, is the company with an average size of 150.

The problem is, that these cultural restricted, and somewhat arbitrary figures (154 Christmas cards??) seem extremely unlikely to be derived from brain size. Hunter-gatherer band size and medieval village populations had for instance, much more to do with availability of food. Factory unit sizes are determined by potential profits, markets and availability of labour, rather than the ability of humans to network through their social brains.

The bottom line, Dunbar says, is that that "the social brain hypothesis provides us with a precise equation for predicting social group size from brain size." Unfortunately, in doing so, it appears to me to ignore almost everything else about our interactions as a species with each other, and the natural world; in particular the changing economic relations we construct to organise our way of life.

This is not to suggest that Dunbar's book is entirely without merit. But his approach is stunningly reductionist. For instance, he concentrates very much on "time budgets" when studying and comparing different species. This is an approach that basically means breaking down an animal's (or human) time into parts and working out how much time must be spent eating, sourcing food, grooming and sleeping to achieve all the necessary rest, energy and social interaction to make the species hold together.

The problem with this approach is it leads to maths like the following

"If laughter supplemented grooming and was three times more efficient than grooming on its own, then it would have reduced this requirement to a third, or 6.2 percent and 7.8 per cent of the day respectively. This would bring us savings of 12 and 15.5 percentage points for the two species, which, combined with the 12.5 percentage points we gained from climate change, bipedalism and the expensive tissue hypothesis, would allow us to save 24.5 and 28 percentage points from the two species' time budgets."

Now there are a lot of ifs, buts and hypothesises here. But the bigger problem is that extrapolating so much from the animal kingdom and making decisions about human lives can only take you so far. We are left with a mechanical interpretation of modern humans that doesn't do what Dunbar sets out to do, i.e. understand why we are more than apes.

Secondly, some of this reads like a clever, "just so" story. With humans evolving solutions to solve a time-budget issue, but who cannot possibly have had the time-budget issue and survived. Evolution doesn't proceed because of a problem that will occur in the future, but as a response to changing circumstances in the here and now. So Neanderthals can't have learnt to cook to solve a time budget crisis, but must have found that learning to cook, changed other aspects of their life. Dunbar makes this mistake explicit, when he writes about how the gestation of human children changed.

"The compromise solution that our ancestors came up with was to reduce the length of gestation to the absolute minimum needed to produce a baby that could just survive on its own."

Early species of humans try to solve their time budget crisis

Biologically this is what happened. But the idea that this was a "compromise solution" implies that it was a choice made by humans (or at least females). This is just bad science.

In his final analysis, Robin Dunbar concludes that

"The real story of how we came to be who we are beings with the appearance of the first Homo species... From there on in, it was a constant battle with time budgets under pressure from environmental factors that were selecting for ever larger community sizes..."

The problem with this is that it narrows humans down to simple victims of circumstance. Except, earlier in the book, Dunbar has shown how even the earliest humans developed tools to change and alter their environment. Indeed, to me, this is the missing link in Dunbar's analysis. We aren't simply products of our biology interacting with our environment, but we have, through our labour, altered our environment to improve our ability to survive. Thus we have shaped the world around us, and thus helped to shape our own biology, through learning to hunt, to cook, to cut trees, to dig holes and eventually to grow food and build societies were not everyone has to spend their whole lives producing food. Thus Dunbar's book, for all its strengths in explaining our convoluted history, cannot actually explain why we are what we are, and answer his own question. It is a great disappointment.

Related Reviews

Rose - The 21st Century Brain
Finlayson - The Humans Who Went Extinct
Stringer - The Origin of Our Species

Steven Rose - The 21st-Century Brain

How does the peculiar lump of grey matter in our head think? How does it store memories? How does it enable us to breathe and swallow, to hold things, to flinch from pain? Is our brain the same as that of a monkey? Can single celled animals learn?

All these fascinating questions are addressed by Steven Rose's enormously enjoyable 21st Century Brain. Where possible he answers in a style that mixes detailed science with accessible writing. Where we don't know, Rose tells us how close we are to finding out, but most importantly he tells us how science got to where we are today. He also is quick to point out the problems with much of the historical research into the brain, and were problems remain today.

For the dialectical scientist, the brain is not simply an unchanging lump of matter. Rose is keen to emphasize that the brain, and its functionality, is part of an evolving, changing structure that has a history. This history has shaped the physical structure of the brain, but it has also shaped how individual humans think, remember and learn. Key to this is of course evolution, and in some of the most fascinating science writing I have ever read, Rose traces the likely evolutionary development that takes us from the soup of chemicals on the very early earth, through small cellular animals and to today's complex animal brains. Studying human brains "reveals their ancestry. Their basic biochemistry was essentially fixed at the dawn of evolutionary time, with the emergence of cells." Though obviously the has been enormous evolutionary development since then.

But there is a further history, the brain doesn't arrive full-formed in a new-born baby. It develops and grows, and this process is almost as fascinating and the breathtaking story of evolution. Importantly, for Rose, "nothing in biology makes sense except in the lights of its own history." The brain itself is a "marvellous product and process, the result of aeons of evolution and for each human adult decades of development." This idea of the brain as a process is a particularly important one for Rose, who sees its working as ever-changing, developing and growing, rather than a static, fixed set of structures and material.

We might think that the brain is a collection of specialist areas. With a bit that deals with seeing, a part that controls walking, and another for memory. While this is how the brain was often thought of historically, scientific evidence doesn't bear this out. As Rose says,

"One must consider the workings of the brain not merely in terms of three dimensional spatial anatomical connectivity but in the time dimension as well. Cells that fire together bind together. Once again, the message is that brain processes depend on history as well as geography".

The book deals with the development of the brain, but also its ageing process, including disease and death. The final chapters of the book look at attempts to deal with disease or memory lose. But Rose challenges those who simply see these problems as simply ones of chemistry, looking for the perfect drug or fix. Reductionist medicine, as he calls it, that "seek the explanations of many of our troubles in the presence in our brain of such malfunctioning molecules". Such medical procedures also lead to a situation where, US researchers are apparently trying to understand the neural processes involved in choosing between Coke and Pepsi.

This contrasts with Rose's understanding;

"Evolutionary history explains how we got to have the brains we posses today. Developmental history explains how individual persons emerge; social and cultural history provide the context which constrains and shapes that development; and individual life history shaped by culture, society and technology terminates in age and ultimately death."

Rose's book is a fascinating one. He wears his politics clear, raging at those that look for genes or patterns in the brain that suggest individuals are prone to violence, or crime, but don't consider those who drop bombs on Iraq as behaving wrongly.

But it is also Rose's politics that help shape his vision of the dialectic between humans, biology and society. Indeed his book finishes on a hopeful note, precisely because his vision of medical science is not one constrained by finding the correct pill or drug, but sees our biology as part of something much wider.

Related Reviews

Levins & Lewontin - The Dialectical Biologist

Richard Levins & Richard Lewontin - The Dialectical Biologist

At first glance, some might think this is an extremely odd title for a book. After all, dialectics is essentially a philosophical term and biology is, well, science. But the author's purpose in bringing together these essays is more to argue that a dialectical approach to science, both in terms of scientific research and practice, as well as understanding the position of science in society, benefits immensely from a dialectical method. Indeed, science, they argue, is better when practiced dialectically.

So what does that mean? Firstly the authors begin from a radical position. "We believe that science, in all its sense, is a social process that both causes and is caused by social organisation." This is very different to the majority of other scientists, who often, as the authors argue, separate out specific points of science from wider contexts, social and indeed scientific. Some of the problems with this approach are outlined in this quote from the authors, pointing out the dangers in looking at only on aspect of an organisms biology:

"The mammalian ear is obviously an organ of hearing, but it has other properties as well. For acoustic reasons it is a thin organ with a large surface area, the blood vessels cannot be deep, so heat is very readily lost. In fact, desert mammals often have extraordinarily large ears that serve as organs of temperature regulation. In this case a physical by-product of the evolution of an organ had properties that themselves became the objects of [evolutionary] selection under the special conditions of the desert."

By only looking at one aspect of a scientific question, one can miss wider questions. A similar problem can occur when trying to understand organisms outside of wider environments. While this approach can be useful, isolating particular aspects of behaviour or biology to illuminate others,

"it eventually becomes an obstacle to further understanding; the division of the world into mutually exclusive categories may be logically satisfying, but in scientific activity no nontrivial classifications seem to be really mutually exclusive. Eventually their interpenetration becomes a primary concern of further research."

So, in terms of understanding organisms in the wider world;

"'Environment' cannot be understood merely as surroundings, not matter how dynamically. It is also way of life; the activity of the organism sets the stage for its own evolution."

The benefit of this book is the authors root such statements in clear examples, so,

"To understand the evolution of the sea lion from a primitive carnivore ancestor, we must support that at first the water was only a marginal habitat... A slight evolution of the animal to meet these demands made the aquatic environment a more significant part of the energetic expenditure of the proto-sea lion, so a shift in selective forces operated instantaneously on the shape of its limbs. Each change in the animal made the environment more aquatic, and each induced change in the environment led to further evolution of the animal."

The dialectical interaction between different aspects of the natural world here is merely one aspect of the book. Other sections look at the way that science within capitalist society is shaped by and shapes wider economic questions which in turn shape scientific and research needs. There is a particularly useful chapter here on agriculture.

Though is book is dated in parts, due to the data for some chapters stemming from the 1970s or 80s. The general political arguments hold sway and it should remain required reading for those interested in science and society. Interestingly the authors display an excellent sense of humour and the inclusion of work by Isidore Nabi, a fake scientist created to expose problems of mechanical scientific approaches are a welcome break from the more difficult chapters.

Related Reviews

Molyneux - The Point Is To Change It
Carson - Silent Spring

Richard Holmes - The Age of Wonder

The end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th saw an explosion in scientific and technological development. It is during this period that the foundation for modern science was laid.

Richard Holmes' book is an extraordinarily enjoyable and informative exploration of this time. He tells the story of the "Age of Wonder" through the interlocking lives of several great scientists. Framing the story is the life of Joseph Banks, who in 1796 arrived in Tahiti, a young biologist setting out to explore those "utopian" islands. What Banks found there, apart from the love and passions of a young man, helped put start him on a lifetime of encouraging exploration and science wherever he could.

Banks was one of the most important presidents of the Royal Society. During his time, he encouraged many young scientists, finding funding, introducing them to each other and sharing knowledge, expertise and on occasion equipment. Through Banks, we are introduced to many of the other great scientists of the time. Humphry Davy who radically transformed safety in coalmines and made many discoveries in the fields of chemistry and physics. William and Caroline Herschel who transformed astronomy, not simply through their discoveries, but also through their methods of systematic observation, their invention and manufacture of new equipment and their scientific theories. Holmes also tells us about the technological "fads" that followed on the back of new discoveries - the first balloon flyers and the sudden thirst for African exploration.

But this is more than the story of inventions and scientific endeavor. Holmes interweaves the stories of these scientists with changing cultural and social ideas. Here, for instance, he shows how William Hershel's "nebulae hypothesis" for the formation of stars, was developed further by Pierre Laplace. Laplace extended this hypothesis to the formation of the solar system in a 1799 book.

"In effect he reasoned that the sun had slowly condensed out of a nebulous cloud of stardust, and then spun off our entire planetary system, just as in a thousand other star systems. THere was no special act of Creation. In this way he was able to give a purely materialist account of the creation of the earth, the moon and all the planets. No divine intervention or Genesis was required, nor was it visible anywhere else in the universe."

Science was challenging some of society's most fundamental ideas. Sometimes the scientific revolution was allied with, or came close to political revolution. Humphry Davy told an audience at one of his amazingly popular lectures, after demonstrating primitive electrical experiments, that they witnessing;

"a new influence... which has enabled man to produce from combinations of dead matter effects which were formerly occasioned only animal organs".

This was revolutionary science, but Davy stopped short of political revolutionary conclusions;

"The guardians of civilization and of refinement, the most powerful and respected members of society, are daily growing more attentive to the realities of life, and, giving up many of the unnecessary enjoyments in consequence of the desire to be useful, are becoming the friends and protectors of the labouring part of the community."

Despite his revolutionary science, Davy wanted no significant change from the status quo, "the unequal division of property and of labour...are the sources of power in civilized life, and its moving causes, and even its very soul". Not for the Royal Society would their be any taste of the French Revolution, for this was a period when science was being bent towards the pursuit of industry, and if the scientists thought that would bring a better and more rational society, that that was good. Davy's lamp undoubtedly saved the lives of thousands of miners across Europe. It also helped the mine owners continue to exploit their workers in the most appalling of conditions.

But this is not a just a tale of science and industry. The book is littered with quotations from poets and authors. Davy's enthusiasm for electricity, helped inspire Mary Shelley to write her most famous novel. But other scientists, like Herschel, inspired the other Shelley. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley explores "Herschel's new cosmology and Davy's chemistry";

Then see those million worlds which burn and roll
Around us; their inhabitants beheld
My sphere'ed light wane in wide heaven

There is much in this wonderful book to inspire further thought and reading. I was particularly struck by the brother and sister astronomers, William and Caroline Herschel. The later became the first woman paid to study science, their lives are fascinating and their discoveries immense. I hope to read more, particularly about Caroline who had to struggle against her own upbringing, as well as a society that didn't take kindly to women playing male roles.

If I have one criticism, it is that Richard Holmes doesn't locate the changing scientific world more clearly in a changing economic and social world. Capitalism was spreading rapidly through the world as demonstrated by the chapter on African exploration. It needed science and technology to further the accumulation of capital, to both understand the world, and tame it. The explosion of scientific and technological development in the period covered by this book has its roots in the scientific revolution that began with Newton and the early scientists. But a maturer capitalism needed a more systematic and professional science that could solve its technological problems and help the bosses make more money.

Nonetheless, this is a minor absence in a book that deserves to be widely read, by those who are interested in the biography and history of early scientists, as well as those trying to understand the origins of the modern world. Highly recommended.

Related Reviews

 Jardine - Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution

Matthew Brzezinski - Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Rivalries that Ignited the Space Race

This is a very readable, interesting and entertaining introduction to the earliest years of the Space Race. It concentrates on Russia' development of rocket technology and the run up to the launches of the first two man made objects to orbit the Earth in late 1957.

What makes the story interesting is less the technical aspects to this enormous scientific breakthrough, but the political and social contexts of the early years of the Cold War. What is clear from Brzezinski's book is that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States had any particular interest in reaching space. A few scientists and engineers, such as the former German scientist (and Nazi) Werner von Braun, did. But they were a minority within the rocket programmes and certainly did not have much influence on the politicians and political decision makers.

Russia's missile program arose as a result of their inability to compete with the military advancements of the United States. Following on from the doctrine of the Second World War, the US was banking on growing its military might based on air power. Hundreds of massive bombers could threaten the Soviet Union with nuclear annihilation through their long range. Key military and political figures in Washington hyped up the idea of the Soviet Union having a comparable air force and the US engaged in a bomber arms race faced with the threat of nuclear attack.

But this was built on lies. The USSR didn't have the bomber fleets and had no ability to build on a comparable level with the US. They could and did begin to develop nuclear missiles. These they felt would enable them to threaten the US at a much reduced cost. Khrushchev in particular needed the financial leeway to offer some improvements and reforms to Russia's population.

When Sputnik was launched, it terrified the American people and shocked the US government to the core. In hindsight, its clear that President Eisenhower came close to losing his position as the media and people sought a scapegoat for the new threat to the country. Indeed, his handling of the crisis, is a textbook example of how not to deal with the press.

By banking on bombers, the US had starved their missile programmes of cash. This meant their technology was far behind that of the Russians, even through they had the best German scientists and the majority of the Nazi rocket technology. One fascinating aspect to this, is how the US military were desperate to avoid von Braun and his colleagues even thinking about going to space - they tasked someone with the job of checking they didn't fuel the final stages of test rockets so that the scientists couldn't orbit something "accidentally".

Sputnik was laucnhed as a propaganda tool. It almost didn't happen, because as was the case in the US, those holding the purse strings were only interested in the military potential for rockets. The resultant propaganda coup (and the follow up when they launched a dog on the second rocket) stunned the Russian leadership as much as the Americans, though Khrushchev recovered faster.

The book finishes rather abruptly, with the US finally getting a much smaller satellite into space. Brzezinski implies that once the US had got over its shock, it rapidly set about the scientific and civilian conquest of space, while the Russian's languished with the death of their key rocket scientist. I felt this was a little limited, particularly given that once they had reached the moon, the US clearly decided it had won the space race and give up on serious manned space exploration. Because the US was engaged in a Cold War confrontation with Russia, money for its space programme dried up rapidly when that competition was won. The success of the US moon shots must be contrasted with the complete abandonment of the field from the mid 1970s onward. But this is a minor criticism of a very useful and interesting book on the history of the early space race which locates it in the midst of military and economic competition, rather than the desire to understand the universe.

Related Reviews

Scott & Leonov - Two Sides of the Moon

E.E.Evans-Pritchard - Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer

Before reading this review, I would encourage you to read my review of Evans-Pritchard's earlier book The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. 

Evans-Pritchard's works on the Nuer people are classics of anthropology and even though they were written over 70 years ago, they are still of fundamental importance in understanding human relations in pre and early class societies. He described communities where private property played a fundamentally different role in human society, where collective organisation dominated in a way that seems completely alien to us today and where political organisation was not about the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority but rather about the common interests of wider society.

In this second volume Evans-Pritchard develops some of these themes and looks at further aspects of Nuer society. In particular he examines the complex social organisation around marriage and kinship, relationships between human beings, that have very important ramifications for wider Nuer society.

For the Nuer relationships between family groups are the most fundamental aspects of society. These family groups however are very different from the family that we know from modern capitalism. Far from a couple having a number of children, there is a wider grouping of individuals who are seen as being the family. In her extremely useful introduction, the anthropologist Wendy James comments that there is:

"A vivid Nuer image for this... that of the beast with four legs - right hindleg, father's brother; left hindleg, mother's brother; right foreleg, father's sister; left foreleg, mother's sister".

Lineage in Nuer society is not through Patriarchal lines; as Wendy James comments:

"Lineage continuity thus depends not on the male fertility of a given community but on its economic and political ability to transfer bridewealth and marry wives to the names of its members (including some women and some deceased men) and to recruit new persons through adoption and other means."

This means that it can be difficult to comprehend family relationships amongst the Nuer for those of us used to our version of the family. Children for instance have different names depending on whether they are living with their father or mother.

Sex features widely in this book. To understand the Nuer is to understand how they reproduce the next generation of their community. This involves complex exchanges of wealth (cattle) and even more complex and ever changing social relationships, that I will come onto.

But the Nuer also have very interesting attitudes to sex. Before discussing Nuer marriage, Pritchard looks in detail at the concept of "incest" amongst the Nuer. Incest here is more of a cultural taboo on sexual and marital relationships between certain people.

It is more important to the Nuer because it spreads "marriages of members of any local group and [creates] innumerable links through women between persons in many different communities." Notably, incest taboos do not necessary preclude sex but are barriers to marriage.

If this challenges the notion that this might be related to any future offspring, the reader should note that to the Nuer a marriage isn't considered complete until the first child is born.

Relationships amongst the Nuer are further complicated, because when a woman marries a man, she is also considered to have married that man's brothers. Thus, "when a man dies... there is no question of the widow being remarried to one of his brothers, for the brothers already count as her husbands. The dead man's lineage have a right to inherit his wife because she is their wife, the wife of their cattle."

Readers must be careful not to interpret statements like this as meaning that the Nuer saw women as property to be exchanged who have no freedom. From a sexual point of view women in Nuer society seemed to have had a great deal of freedom. Pritchard points out that by the time a girl is 15 or 16 she has at least one lover and probably one each in the neighbouring villages. He goes on to say that "I doubt whether any girl in Nuerland goes to her husband a virgin". When it comes to marriage, proposals will be sometimes initiated by the young woman, and no reputation in Nuer society is more shameful than that of a wife beater.

And sex is not the taboo that we might think it is - "adultery in their eyes is an illegal but not an immoral act." Pritchard comments that he was struck by the frequency of adultery and the infrequency of quarrels "or even talk about it."

Women in Nuer society sometimes seem to have little choice, but the reality different:

"So long as a girl is married to a man with cattle she has fairly free choice of a mate. Much depends on whether the girl's family approve of the man's family. In theory, the parents choose their daughter's husband and only formally ask her consent, which she should give in duty to her parents, for marriage is not her business but the business of her menfolk. In fact, it is very difficult for parents to force their daughter to marry a man she dislikes, and strong-minded girls stand up against family pressure on this issue."

But Pritchard puts economics at the core of his explanation of Nuer society. This is the exchange of cattle that is central to the marriage process. This has extremely strict rules and both sets of parents will spend long periods in negotiations. "The usual payment [of cattle] is from 20 to 30... the bridewealth cannot fall to less than 16 beasts. On the other hand, it cannot rise to more than the bridegroom and his people possess or are prepared to give."

Note that this is very different from a dowry. This is wealth given to a family to compensate for the loss of a daughter. This exchange is a fundamental part of Nuer society, as Pritchard explains:

"Nuer can be very generous in this matter and if a son-in-law is respectful and industrious they will not break the union because he takes along time to pay the final cows, for marriage is not simply handing over a girl in exchange for cattle but is the creation of a series of new social relationships which, once formed, are not easily or lightly severed, especially when the union is completed by the birth of a child."

While the marriage rules and conventions seem complex, the Nuer are relatively relaxed in other aspects of family life. Pritchard explains that:

"Nuer do not attach great importance to physiological paternity. Men prefer to beget their own sons, but it is not ignominious to nurture children begotten by others. Nuer pay little regard to the manner of begetting so long as the legal fatherhood of the child is well established."

Nor do the Nuer necessarily worry too much about the sex of individuals in a marriage. Pritchard says that it is possible for a Nuer marriage to take place between two women. One of whom takes on the social position of the husband. Such marriages "are by no means uncommon... and they must be regarded as a form of simple legal marriage for the woman-husband marries her wife in exactly the same was as a man marries a woman. When the marriage rites have been completed the husband gets a male kinsman or friend or neighbour... to beget children by her wife. When the daughters of the marriage are married he will receive for each a 'cow of the begetting'."

For the Nuer there is a clear sexual division of labour. But the woman plays a key part in production. It is her work, milking the cattle and as dairymaid and cook that is crucial to the family. The man is considered "helpless" without a wife and thus marriage is the only way a man can have a home of his own. This means that Nuer women have a central and important role in the political and economic life of the community.

Labour for the Nuer is a very different thing to the work we see under capitalism. No one in a Nuer village would starve unless everyone was starving, children are nursed and looked after by the extended group, not simply their mothers and while the family produces much of what it needs, collective work is common. Activities such as hunting are communal, as are things like garden clearance. In these tasks "hospitality is provided for friends and kin, who accept the invitation to take part in the work because they are friends and kin. The owner of the homestead does not supervise the work and each does as much or as little as he chooses."

These social, cultural and economic differences point to a fundamentally different dynamic between people than the atomised, hierarchical, sexist society that characterises capitalism. Life for the Nuer was not however a Utopia. There was violence, jealously, conflict, as well as hunger and disease. However the different approach to life, arising as it does from a different mode of production, means that people solved those problems differently. Given the enormous material advances that modern capitalism has given us, we should know from studies of people like the Nuer that the barriers to us living in fundamentally different ways in the future are not down to human nature, but are social.

Related Reviews

Evans-Pritchard - The Nuer
Burke-Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance

Dava Sobel - Galileo's Daughter

Despite the title, this is very much a book about the life and times of the great Renaissance thinker

Galileo Galilei. That said, it is very much illuminated by the detail within the letters of Galileo's eldest daughter who, together with her sister, he sent to a convent at a very young age. When old enough, she took the name Suor Maria Celeste and lived her life out in the convent, a life of prayer, solitude and long hours of work. In fact the book might be seen as being two linked works. One on the life of Galileo, the other on life within an order of nuns in the 17th century.

By sending her to the convent, Galileo was in no way punishing the young girl. Born out of wedlock and before Galileo's fame had brought him limited financial security, this was one way that the young girls could have a more secure future. Though to modern eyes, their life remained one of poverty and difficulties, brought about by the convent's reliance on the generosity of others.

However the meat of the biography is Galileo himself. His trials and tribulations are illuminated by the collection of letters that were sent to him by Suor Maria Celeste. Her letters are filled with the support of a young woman for her aged father, discussing his financial (and spiritural) needs and returning mended clothes and foodstuffs that she had prepared for him. Galileo's own letters haven't survived, perhaps having been destroyed after his death by someone fearful that a keeping the letters of a victim of the inquisition might bring ill fortune upon themselves. But from Celeste's responses we can see that Galileo himself responded in kind. Sending money to alleviate temporary hardships in the convent, discussing his work and theories and ultimately the problems he faced with the church hierarchy.

Dava Sobel is excellent however and drawing out the dynamics of Galileo's arguments with senior figures in the Church. Few who select this book would not know that Galileo had faced criticism for defending the work of Copernicus, whose books, arguing that the Earth was not the centre of the universe and instead circled the Sun, had been banned by the Catholic Church. In an earlier brush with the Church's inquisition in 1616, Galileo had been instructed that he could not believe Copernicus' ideas, only hold them as a theory. At his later trial Galileo had emphasised this, saying "I do not hold this opinion of Copernicus, and I have not held it after being ordered by injunction to abandon it".

Some have argued that Galileo was an early example of someone who fought against the irrationality of Catholic Doctrine, fighting it with science and reason. The truth, as Sobel explains, is much more complex. Galileo was a convinced Christian, but he understood that the problem was with those who argued the literal interpretation of the Bible as opposed to those who thought that God's word was more complex.

Sobel points out, that Galileo had once heard the Vatican librarian Cesare Cardinal Baronio say that "the Bible was a book about how one goes to Heaven - not how Heaven goes." The problem for the Church, and indeed Galileo was that the Bible itself was mostly silent on the issues of the day. Galileo had seen the four major satellites of Jupiter with his telescope, but the Bible never mentioned them, as he wrote:

"Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely."

Indeed, one of the problems for Galileo was that his Church, in dismissing the arguments of Copernicus and those beginning to follow him, was in danger of embarrassing itself in the face of wider revelations. As Sobel notes, Galileo sought more evidence to support Copernicus, not to damage the Church, but to correct it - "For if the Holy Fathers banned Copernicus as rumour predicted they might do at any moment, then the Church would endure ridicule when a new generation of telescopes, probably manned by infidels, eventually uncovered the conclusive evidence of the Sun-centred system."

As Galileo publishes the greatest of his books on the nature of the universe he works hard to ensure it is acceptable to the Church. It is checked by a number of senior figures and he tries hard to avoid further damage. The book is in the form of a dialogue, so Galileo avoids having himself argue the Copernican position, though he cleverly frames the debate in a way that encourages the reader to a particular conclusion. When the storm of criticism hits, Sobel makes it clear that Galileo himself was stunned by the allegations against him, and clearly thought that it was an enormous misunderstanding that would be clarified when he was able to explain himself. After all, Galileo was a new type of philosopher. His writings were based on observational evidence and experimental data. They were linked to God's reality, even if they ran counter to doctrine.

Sadly for Galileo and his daughter, despite the former close friendship of Pope Urban, the Church needed to be seen to defend doctrine firmly and Galileo was a sad victim of the reassertion of the Aristotelian view of the universe. Galileo died an old man, blinded and housebound, forbidden to discuss matters pertaining to his book (though he clearly flouted these rules and continued his scientific work). His daughter deceased him by several years, a victim of disease in a period when Medicine had barely escaped its links with mystical understandings of human health. To the end she remained a loyal daughter and despite her religious position her support for her father never wavered  Her end was eased when Galileo was finally allowed to return to his home near her, and their mutual company was clearly a great help to both of them.

Sobel's book then is more than a biography, as it demonstrates the way that as the scientific revolution was beginning, new ideas, even those dealing with outer space, challenged the political status quo. By refusing to accept Copernicus and banning Galileo's book, the Church wasn't simply dismissing theories that ran contrary to the Bible, it was also reasserting the ideology that gave it so much power and wealth. For Pope Urban, this was far more important than old ties of friendship, or experimental evidence.

Related Reviews

Johnson - The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

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