Science

The problem with a futuristic thesis — particularly when summarised by a futuristic title — is that it is likely to be thrown back at you in the future. This is the problem that Francis Fukuyama has faced ever since he published his daring and now much derided book, The End of History and the Last Man, in 1992. In it, Fukuyama argued that history had been buried beneath the rubble of the former Berlin Wall and that the teleological process was now at an end: ‘What we may be witnessing… is the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form

The best books by good writers — and Philip Ball is a very good writer indeed — are sometimes the ones that don’t quite work. This brilliant study of how occultists and scientists alike have attempted to see the invisible is very much that kind of fascinating failure. Its subject is just too large — and, well, it is just too hard to see its edges clearly. Ball begins with pseudo-medieval recipes for invisibility: Take a black cat and a new pot, a mirror, a lighter, coal and tinder. Gather water from a fountain at the strike of midnight… put the boiled cat on a new dish… then put the

‘This book is an attempt to understand the world as it is, not as it ought to be.’ So writes Nicholas Wade, the British-born science editor of The New York Times, in his new book A Troublesome Inheritance. For some time the post-War view of human nature as being largely culturally-formed has been under attack just as surely as the biblical explanation of mankind’s creation began to face pressure in the early 19th century. What Steven Pinker called the blank slate view of our species, whereby humans are products of social conditions and therefore possible to mould and to perfect through reform, has been undermined by scientific discoveries in various areas. But

Kate Colquhoun sets herself a number of significant challenges in her compelling new book, Did She Kill Him? Like Kate Summerscale before her, Colquhoun mines the rich seam of legal archives to give her readers the fascinating tale of a Victorian courtroom drama: that of Florence Maybrick, accused, in 1889, of murdering her husband. Colquhoun achieves expertly all the things one could hope to expect in such a historical account. She paints a picture not only of a woman on trial, but of the complicated world of late 19th-century England. We get a sense of a woman’s changing place in the world, we see Liverpool society on display, we learn

When we think of David and Goliath, we think of a young man, not very big, who has a fight with a terrifying opponent, and wins. We think of David as puny and Goliath as towering and strong — not to mention heavily armed. We see David’s victory as something that happened against all odds. The story of David and Goliath is, as Malcolm Gladwell puts it, ‘a metaphor for improbable victory’. Well, that’s how we think about it, anyway. But the thing is, apparently, we’ve got it all wrong. Gladwell, one of the most influential non-fiction writers in the world, often asks his reader to take a closer look

His publishers describe this ‘ground-breaking book on evolution’ by ‘the most celebrated living heir to Darwin’ as ‘the summa work of Edward O. Wilson’s legendary career’. As emeritus professor of biology at Harvard, Wilson, now 84, is revered across the world as the doyen of Darwinists. And in announcing that he will offer a new answer to those three cosmic questions scrawled in the corner of a Gauguin painting — ‘Where have we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?’ — he leads us to expect some profound new insight into how a billion years of evolution have made us a species unique on earth. Wilson introduces his

This is a book about the clash of faith and reason over the truth or otherwise of a catastrophic, world-shaping flood — and it doesn’t once mention climate change. The debate here is much less stale. David Montgomery is a prize-winning geology professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and he recounts the history of his discipline from Aristotle to plate tectonics, showing how geological thinking has always been shaped by the great narrative of Noah’s flood. It is a grand tale, and told with verve and excitement. Montgomery also entertainingly surveys the archaeological and literary evidence for ancient Middle Eastern floods — each of which has been acclaimed, in