Science

This is the first post in an occasional series about rediscovering old science books. Twins, Lawrence Wright posits, pose a threat to the established order. People have long been scared of, and intrigued by, them. The doppelganger holds a special place in the gothic canon, whilst some cultures have even seen men cutting off a testicle in the hope it would eliminate the possibility of twin-bearing. Conversely, twins have been held up in voodoo ceremonies as objects of worship or been the subject of televised wonder and investigation. Whether the sentiment is positive or negative, we see them as an aberration and have tended to hold such specimens at arm’s

It’s refreshing to hear an eminent scientist like Professor Steve Jones concede that their discipline has delivered less than it promised, and to hear him voice scepticism about the pace of technological development. Society’s reverence for the digital, the technological or the scientific often reaches unnerving degrees; so it’s instructive to hear someone at the vanguard of progress caution that it is ‘always a big mistake’ for technology to run ahead of human understanding. I’d be interested to know what he thinks should be done about this problem. But, what is it about certain people’s attitude to religious faith? I reproduce Jones’ answer to JP O’Malley’s final question in full:

Remember the ‘Plant a Tree in ’73’ campaign? Forty years on, has anyone inquired into what happened to all those trees and how many are still alive? Since then, planting amenity trees has grown into an industry, and turns out to have its down sides. One is that little trees are imported in industrial quantities from other countries, as if they were cars or tins of paint, and inevitably bring with them foreign pests and diseases which destroy established trees. Globalisation of tree diseases has overtaken climate change and too many deer to become the number one threat to the world’s trees and forests. This book, by a scientific journalist,

The weight of bacteria that each of us carries around is equal to that of our brain, a kilogram of the creatures, billions of them, ten times as many in the gut alone as the number of human cells in the body. There may be 10,000 distinct kinds, with a different community on the forehead from that on the sole. There are fewer kinds in the mouth or stomach than at the back of the knee, which has a more diverse population than any other part. This is surprising and interesting, and we would like to know more about this teeming personal nature reserve. The intestinal appendix, Steve Jones explains,

Had he not died 12 years ago, Douglas Adams would have been 61 yesterday. Google produced a doodle in his memory, and the Guardian published an interesting piece which declared that Adams remains the king of comedy SF, before going on to argue that he was unique, pretty much the only writer in that genre. Take a bow Mr Adams; you’re top of a league of one. But, in a way, Adams was, or very nearly was, unique. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels are comedies of ideas flavoured with lashings of silliness: the restaurant at the end of the universe and Marvin the Paranoid Android, a robot beset

In his latest book The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond analyses the behavioral differences between human beings in tribal stateless-societies and those living in bureaucratic nation states. Diamond says that if states only came into existence 5,400 years ago, and agriculture in the last 11,000, human beings have been wandering nomads for most of history. Therefore, if modern nations are relatively new concepts, we have much to learn from traditional cultures. Drawing on his experience of 50 years of field research in New Guinea, Diamond attempts to prove his thesis with a mixture of personal anecdotes and academic research. He claims the way people in traditional societies raise their children, spend their leisure

In Aesop’s fable of the Dog and the Wolf, the latter declares that it is better to starve free than be a fat slave, but the fact is that, without man, there would be no dog at all. When people eventually began to form permanent settlements, a new food source appeared: waste. Wolf packs, less fearful of man than others, less aggressive too, took advantage, and turned themselves into dogs. Natural selection works in mysterious ways. Years ago, before the gender police were on the prowl, this book’s top title would have been Man’s Best Friend, for the ‘genius’ that it describes is the dog’s talent for inter- action with

Following in the footsteps of the great tradition of paleontologists like Stephen Jay Gould, and evolutionary biologists such as Ernst Mayr, Neil Shubin, professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, has spent a considerable part of his career discovering fossils around various parts of the world. These have changed the way we think about many of the key transitions in evolution. He famously discovered tiktaalik roseae, a 375 million years old fossil fish, in Canada in 2004. This discovery provided valuable data in helping us understand how fish evolved into land animals.  In his latest book, The Universe Within, Shubin shows how the

2.30pm, Tuesday, the bookshop of the Natural History Museum. Horrible Science: Blood, Bones and Body Bits is being leafed through by one of its typical readers. In other words he’s 45, six-foot-three and has a full beard. One of the greatest joys of parenthood is the excuse it gives you to abandon ‘proper’, grown-up science books, and get stuck into those aimed at your child. I’m at the museum with my 3-year-old son, who has just shrieked ecstatically at the huge dinosaur in the main hall, and is now eagerly sizing up a T-rex sticker book. One of his Christmas presents was Big Questions from Little People Answered by Some

Faustus to Helen of Troy from Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies: Come Helen, come give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena. I will be Paris, and for love of thee, Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked, And I will combat with weak Menelaus, And wear thy colours on my plumed crest. Yea I will wound Achilles in the heel,

In a promotional video clip, Sebastian Faulks describes his new novel, A Possible Life, as like ‘a symphony in five movements… or an album in which the tracks are separate but the whole thing adds up to more than the sum of its parts.’ The idea of the musical novel – held together by themes, motifs and echoes rather than a linear plot – has been discussed or attempted by authors from Flaubert to Kundera. So what has Faulks, with his bestseller know-how, brought to this fragile form? We are given five separate stories with a large historical and geographical range. Their centres include Geoffrey Talbot, a prep-school languages master

Everybody knows that the heart pumps blood around the body, and that a man called William Harvey somehow discovered this fact. Before Harvey, people thought that blood moved around the body in a sluggish fashion. But then Harvey — who was born 14 years after Shakespeare — noticed that, actually, blood shoots out of the heart with great force, travels through the arteries, and then makes its way back to the heart through the veins. To find this out, in an age before X-rays, sonograms or heart monitors, you would, if you think about it, have had to be a pretty gruesome sort of person. As soon as I started

Like the dyslexic Faustus who sold his soul to Santa, the life of John Dee was a black comedy of errors. His vain and vulgar efforts to harness the occult for material ends often rendered him ridiculous. But there is a darker tale in Dee’s work for the Tudor state: a story of dodgy dossiers, fear-mongering and greed. During the Tudor period no clear distinction was made between science and magic. John Dee’s study at Cambridge of arithmetic, geometry and astronomy enabled him to become a navigational consultant, who worked with England’s greatest explorers. But it also helped him measure the rays of celestial virtue that emanated from the stars

In December 2005, a passenger on an early-morning flight from Dallas to Las Vegas fell asleep. Woken by a steward when the plane touched down, the man wearily disembarked and took a connecting flight to San Francisco. It was only there that he realised he’d forgotten an item of hand luggage on the first flight. Despite heroic attempts to retrieve it, the item was never seen again. This is a pity. The item was the head of Philip K. Dick. Not his real head, of course. That had been cremated, along with the rest of the science fiction writer, in 1982, shortly before the release of Blade Runner, the film