A Brief History of Everybody Who Ever Lived
by Adam Rutherford
Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson www.orionbooks.co.uk

Christopher Lee claimed to be descended from the Emperor Charlemagne. According to geneticist Adam Rutherford in “A Brief History of Everybody Who Ever Lived”, he was quite correct. Unfortunately that’s not as impressive as it sounds as you and everybody else is also descended from Charlemagne – and Charlemagne’s stable mucker-outer as well. In fact, Rutherford says “Everyone alive in the 10^th Century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today”. Over the course of history the threads of our heritage cross and re-cross like the tracks of an ice skater and it takes only three thousand years for everyone to be descended from anyone in history. This new and complex picture of human heredity is being revealed by the latest genetic investigation techniques and Rutherford does his best to untangle the how and why of what’s turning out to be less of a family tree and more of a Gordian knot.

Sometimes those skater’s tracks I mentioned cross too closely and they fall through the ice. As a cautionary tale Rutherford recounts the story of the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty that took the idea of ‘keeping it in the family’ a little too literally so that grandmothers and great-grandmothers were often the same people. Don’t get the idea that inbreeding is limited to royalty though. A quarter of the 2500 Britons in a 2015 survey classified as inbred to some degree. Mostly first cousins but parent/child, brother/sister and uncle/niece offspring were all represented (Icelanders – with their tiny genetic base – actually have an App that helps them avoid that genetic tripwire).

“Scientists discover a gene for X” is a headline you’ve probably seen a few times. Unfortunately it’s mostly fiction. At best, Rutherford informs us, scientist discover a gene which, in conjunction with other genes and the environment, might predispose people to X to some degree. A slightly less sexy headline to be sure. He’s equally happy to debunk the claims of ‘find your ancestors’ gene search companies. Sure, one of your ancestors may have come from a fishing village on the banks of the Danube a thousand years ago but a thousand years ago you had a million ancestors. They came from everywhere. The book absolutely blows away the myth of ‘pure’ bloodlines. The traits we associate with race – skin, hair, eyes – are superficial and transitory. We are a mongrel species (actually several species since we contain a pinch of Neanderthal and a dash of Denisovan among others) and to a geneticist an appellation like white or black “is no more a race than ‘long distance runner’” says Rutherford. It’s a useful and apposite lesson even if Rutherford bangs that particular drum a little too loudly in places.

To show just how recent these revelations are Rutherford includes a photo of a bet geneticists took in 2000 – just as the Human Genome project was getting going – on just how many genes the human race would turn out to have. All are vast overestimates. It requires many more genes to create the humble banana than a human being. The Human Genome project may have produced zero cures for genetic conditions but that wasn’t the point says Rutherford (yes, yes it was) but it’s provided us with a window into a vastly wider genetic world. Everything is connected to everything else, genes influence each other in subtle and complex ways, environment impacts how those genes are expressed across generations and promising early successes in finding single genes for disease such as cystic fibrosis turn out to have been fruit so low hanging it was practically on the ground.

This story of everybody who ever lived is turning out to be quite a bit more intriguing that anybody had thought. “A Brief History…” not only tells you lots of cool new stuff and shakes up what you thought you knew but it makes you think about it afterwards.

Homo Deus
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published by Penguin Random House www.penguin.co.uk

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Carl Jung

Ah, that difficult second album. Or, in this case, difficult second book. ‘Homo Deus’ extends Harair’s earlier work on humanity’s past into a history of the future. Sort of. Historians don’t necessarily make great futurologists (but then neither do futuroligists) and despite Harari’s brilliance ‘Homo Deus’ is a little like eating the best ice cream in the multiverse sprinkled with the occasional fly.

Harari is a big picture sort of guy, at his best with the grand sweep of history but he falters on smaller scales. ‘Homo Deus’ is an infuriating read for those of a Humanistic/liberal disposition (and perhaps even more so for those of the theistic bent). After careful consideration I think the problem is with his definitions. For Harari ‘religion’ is any belief or value system. Christianity and Communism differ only in the details. His caviler hijacking and re-defining of categories is tremendously irksome. I nearly spat out my tea when I read that Humanism is “the worship of man” (probably the only thing Humanists would agree it isn’t). However, just when you think he’s lost the plot entirely he’ll go and say something insightful to keep you reading. If you can get past these – fairly major – hurdles you’ll find arguments which will probably make you uncomfortable but which you might, if you’re being honest with yourself, grudgingly come to accept have some merit.

Humans, Harari argues, are in danger of “losing their value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.” The broadly liberal / western system of values is just one more belief system no different from thousands of extinct predecessors in human history. It sprouts not from high-minded ideals but from a rich economic substrate. As economics jerks and judders into something unprecedented during the 21^st Century perhaps so too will our values and morals. We are destined to fall, he suggests, not to the straw men of regressive theology or intolerance but to a ‘new religion’ of Dataism replacing the moral value of people with the moral value of information alone.

‘Homo Deus’ is certainly more challenge than comfort to the currently beleaguered ideals of any flavour of liberal humanism. It may seem like I’m just adding another rock to an already floundering ship in recommending this book, so why am I? Because we got complacent.

Civilisation is on the ropes, reeling from a series of body blows dealt by a resurgence of racism, isolationism and intolerance. In a fight we thought we were slowly winning, we now see we may really loose. It’s comforting to see the other guys as fueled by fear and lead by bigots and buffoons. In the immediate sense that may even be true but further back, they are themselves, Harari points out, being driven by the sort of inexorable historical momentum that’s pushed previous societies to ruin. Harari is certainly no fool or bigot. He espouses the values of a liberal civilisation while challenging their mechanisms and mandate. You’ll find no comforting echo-chambers here, just a smart, eloquent (if faintly sneering) author writing things that will have you muttering ‘that’s ridiculous’ under your breath on the commuter train (and, at least, gaining some additional seat space thereby) as you mentally marshal counter arguments.

‘Homo Deus’ is an irritating book. Its value lies not in its predictions of a particular future history – even the author admits that’s a fool’s game – but by compelling the reader to argue. By showing that our current values are not inviolate or historically inevitable ‘Homo Deus’ challenges us – perhaps not always in the manner Harari intended – to take a wider view, see past the immediate issues, and exercise the atrophied skill of defending (or amending) our principals in the face of oppositions more relentless, far-ranging and implacable.

The Idiot Brain
by Dean Burnett
Published by Guardian Books / Faber & Faber www.faber.co.uk

Here’s a tip. If you have to tell a joke, make sure you tell it to a bunch of people together. According to Dean Burnett in ‘The Idiot Brain’, people are 30 times more likely to laugh in a group than alone so that clever quip that’s greeted with a stony silence one-on-one will have them rolling in the aisles en-mass. That we should find humour in groups we never would alone is one of the brain’s many hiccups, mishaps and glitches that Burnett sets out to explore.

We can’t really blame the brain for it’s little foibles though. It’s doing it’s best to guide us through our complex modern lives with a self-assembled patchwork of junkyard mental machinery designed for completely different uses. After all, says Burnett, the first fish to crawl out of the sea wasn’t racked with self-doubt and thinking “This is the last time I play truth or dare with Gary”. As you can tell from that line, ‘The Idiot Brain’ is not a serious and somber account but rather firmly wedged at the popular end of popular science. That’s not to say it’s shallow. Burnett is an honest to goodness neuroscientist with letters after his name and everything – but the science is snappy and couched in a folksy humour. It’s the titchiest bit forced in places but mostly evokes a genuine smile.

The book is stuffed with plenty of entertaining and informative snippets in chapters on fear, intelligence, personality and more. Sleep is a prime topic where we have more questions than answers but some intriguing hints. For instance; we don’t sleep because of exhaustion. The metabolic activity of the body drops only 5% while asleep. Even hibernating animals enter a sleep state and actually use more energy to do so.

Then there’s memory. Burnett likens it to a computer but it’s not a computer you’d want to own. It erases or alters random files, runs everything through an ego filter to inflate self importance and flashes up your stash of Care Bear erotic fan fiction at the most inopportune moments. Unfortunately we can’t turn ourselves off and on again to fix this problem. We also have a working memory so small it would have embarrassed the boys at Bletchley Park. In compensation, our long term memory is tremendously good at storing stuff though recall seems to be very context dependant. Learn something while in a scuba suit under water and you might have to go diving again to remember what it was.

After a little bit of a slow start with a chapter on seasickness, Burnett races over far more mental territory than I can go into here. For example, he explains what all six of your nervous systems do, why you can remember everything about that old school friend except their name, why really smart people can do really stupid things (you know who you are), why ‘heads-up displays’ are a bad idea for pilots,… golly this is a long sentence isn’t it? Don’t worry. We’re nearly there…the rocky foundation of personality testing, why you’ve never heard of a ‘comfort salad’, how anger is good for you, why group polarization means that, ‘yes, we are all individuals’ and that ‘normal’ is more general consensus than fundamental fact.

‘The Idiot Brain’ is everything you want in a light science read – clever, funny, engaging and stuffed full of intriguing facts and the latest (occasionally clashing) theories. The information is fresh and bite-sized wrapped for even the most casual of armchair scientists but don’t worry if there’s something you don’t understand. As Burnett points out, your brain will make sure you’ll remember that you did.

A Short History of Stupid
by Bernard Keane & Helen Razer
Published by Allen & Unwin www.allenandunwin.com

Having recommended two books together a little while ago, I now find myself in the oddly karmic position of recommending half a book. Specifically I’d like to recommend chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and one appendix of ‘A Short History of Stupid’ by Bernard Keane and Helen Razer – a catalogue of forehead slappingly dumb decisions made by individuals and institutions. In truth it’s more harangue than history but engagingly so. At least Keane’s chapters are. Razer is… hmm…let’s say, an acquired taste.

Near the start she laments that she can’t kick the habit formed by an early editorial instruction to ‘put more of herself on the page’. She should try. Her heart is in the right place and she is occasionally funny but she writes like an X-rated radio shock jock and comes across as a parental-advisory-warning Ophra guest who’s personal tirades against L’Oreal adverts, ‘safe space yoga’ and Jason Russell are peppered with single entrendres and short anglo saxon words. Don’t let her dock-hand prose put you off this book though.

If Razer is examining Stupid through her own personal microscope then Keane is using a wide angle lens. Conversely, for all that he rages against Stupid as much as Razer, his is a far less haphazardly belligerent, more tightly focused antagonism. Reading like an Aussie amalgam of Noam Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens, Keane lays into the big fish of Stupid with chapters covering climate change denial, extreme paternalism and terrorism. As a political columnist he is particularly vituperative about the systematic misuse of statistics (originally termed ‘political arithmetic’ – you can see why they changed it) to confound public debate on everything from alcoholism to economic policy.

That’s not to say he goes easy on the other targets though. He is outraged that spending a trillion dollars on the ‘War on Terror’ has had the sole effect (according to US and British Intelligence) of making the overall terrorism problem worse. He is weary of ‘security theatre’ policies (usually expensive) that give the impression of increased security without adding significantly to it. He laments ‘historic ignorance’ as each new generation of “reckless, drug-abusing youth” become concerned parents of tomorrow demanding that “something must be done about gin/video games/heavy metal/waltzing/reading the Old Testament”. Seriously; the Waltz was fit only for ‘prostitutes and adulteresses’ – adulterers presumably didn’t dance – and Henry VIII banned the Bible to protect the ‘youth of the realm’.

While the book has a definite international flavour there are some specifically antipodean references – which is at least different from the usual American ones – but they are intelligible enough for the most part. I’m not sure about the ‘reverse magic pudding’ metaphor Keane uses but the Aussie examples of the misuse of science and numbers in news and politics travel well.

Why is Stupid so successful he asks? There’s money of course. As example, Keane quotes Upton Sinclair’s “it’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it”. There’s also the preservation of constitutional power, the adherents of which, (unlike financial Stupid) are often true believers. So much so that security chiefs react with genuine horror at the thought of people accessing “unfettered ideas… in their lounge rooms” (that’s certainly where I keep my unfettered ideas). Mostly though Keane thinks we simply lack the mental tools to identify and counteract Stupid. We’re good at tribalism and groupthink not evidence and logic. We see challenge as a personal attack because we tie our arguments to our ego.

As to what to do about that… Keane and Razer robustly inform us that we’re on our own there. Hopefully though, the inoculation ‘A Short History of Stupid’ provides will prime our intellectual immune systems against future afflictions.

Who Owns the Future
by Jason Lanier
Published by Penguin www.penguin.co.uk
&
Humans 3.0
by Peter Nowak
Published by Harper Collins www.harpercollins.co.uk

“What’s to become of us?
What becomes of people when their civilization breaks up? Those who have brains and courage come through all right. Those that haven’t are winnowed out.
Don’t stand there talking nonsense at me when it’s us who are being winnowed out!”

Vivian Leigh – Gone With The Wind

Over the last ten years I’ve watched the newspaper industry dissolve around me like a sugar cube in hot coffee. Photographers, travel agents, video rental and record store owners are in the same boat and people who drive for a living may be climbing aboard over the next decade. MIT researcher Andrew McAfee estimates that new technology is destroying old jobs faster than creating new ones and ‘Wired’ predicts three quarters of human jobs will be replaced by machines this century (as I write this, Foxcon – the company that makes iPhones – just replaced 60,000 workers with robots). So what is to become of us?

This is the question that Peter Nowak and Jason Lanier separately raise and try to answer in ‘Humans 3.0’ and ‘Who Owns the Future’ respectively. Nowak has been an award winning tech columnist and blogger for 15 years. Lanier is a middle aged musician, hacker & researcher who sold start-ups to Google while shooting the breeze with Marvin Minsky and William Gibson.

It would be easy to caricature these two takes on an impending information dystopia as youthful optimism versus grizzled experience so I will. That’s far from the whole story of course but Nowak is definitely more bullish (almost Pollyanna-ish) about future prospects. Lanier seems to have a deeper grasp of the issues, but it’s always easier to seem wise delivering bad news.

Despite what Lanier refers to as his ‘counterculture hair’ (he looks more likely to share a spliff than a socio-economic theory) he is very much in favour of big business – there’s some things you just can’t Kickstart – and against ‘free’ information. Free information services (what he refers to as ‘Siren Servers’) trapped us in a downward spiral where humans have become “essential but worthless”. We’re breaking down the old levees he says – the barriers put up by industry and unions – without building new ones. Those barriers may have seemed like protectionism to people trying to get a start (and they were) but they were also safeguards. The free internet is a fine place he says, as long as you don’t get sick or old or have a family. It’s not just the little people who suffer either. Concentrating information with an “all for us and nothing for others” philosophy may make individual billionaires but shrinks the overall economy.

Nowark recognises the same problems as Lanier – such as half the population of his home city of Toronto being in insecure, benefitless ‘precariously employment’ – but mostly as a brief precursor to proposed solutions. He stakes his money on ‘combinatorial development’ – the ability of individuals to constantly combine the possibilities supplied by new technology in every increasing variety. Our problems, he suggests, will come not from a lack of solutions but a failure to imagine them. Take Kodak and Instgram for instance. Kodak is almost gone but Instgram – an 18 month old startup – sold to Facebook for a billion dollars. That’s technological entrepreneurship!

Entrepreneurship is something Nowak is keen on. Replace ‘technological entrepreneur’ with ‘small business entrepreneur’ and he would sound a bit like an 80’s Thatcherite when singing the praise of Israel’s venture capital and startup tradition and Canada’s shift to a ‘culture of individualism and self-betterment’. Fully a third of new businesses in Canada are expected to succeed he writes but doesn’t address the two thirds who fail, loosing their shirts – or somebody’s shirts – in the process. Never mind says Nowak, “Inequality looks as though it will reach a natural limit before self-correcting mechanisms take effect” but doesn’t offer any hint of what that ‘natural limit’ might be. Nor does he seem to realise that historically the ‘self-correcting’ mechanism has taken the form of a blood-thirsty (and probably shirtless) mob storming the Winter Palace.

In contrast, Lanier’s solution is systemic – a two way internet where the value Google et al extracts from your personal data is paid for rather than appropriated with a micro payment winding its way back to you whenever some big data server crunches your numbers for profit. Paid information and symmetrical commercial rights where nothing is free but everything is affordable is necessary to stop the current erosion of the middle class he warns. Take Kodak and Instgram for instance. Kodak employed 140,000 people at its peak and while Instgram might have sold for a billion dollars they employed just 13. Not 13 thousand, 13 individuals. Nowak’s ‘plucky entrepreneurs’ who add thousands of jobs to the market are fine, suggests Lanier, but the technology they leverage is costing millions of middle class job. That’s bad for everybody because ultimately that’s where customers come from.

Nowak’s up-beat prose is peppered with pop culture references and repeated phrases like ‘it’s happening now’ and ‘whopping’. The breathless gee-whizzery makes ‘Humans 3.0’ feel shallow but there’s a lot of solid journalism. We hear from a variety of folk working right at the coalface of technological and social change from Microsoft think-tanks and Ashley Madison’s CEO to privacy campaigners and Buddhist app makers. Lanier’s style has more depth but while his two-way internet is by far the more radical solution I don’t know how workable it might be. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that, for the ordinary Joe, those micro payments would be pretty darn micro. Still, it’s a work in progress as he readily admits.

Maybe Larry, Sergey and Mark can stop chasing the same shrinking pool of advertisers and lead the phase change in the economy Lanier thinks we need. We might have to wait till the Baby Boomers, Generation X and even the Facebook Generation are dead and gone but Lanier is convinced we can adjust even if it takes a century. Nowak is equally confident but on a shorter time scale. We’ve faced challenges like these before, he says and innovated our way, not just out of danger but to pastures greener than we had previously imagined. Nowak’s relentless optimism could definitely do with some of Lanier’s more grounded perspective but a leavening of can-do problem solving wouldn’t hurt Lanier’s sober analysis either.

For Lanier it’s all about the system, for Nowak it’s all about the individual but both authors would probably agree that if we use our heads rather than sticking them in the sand, maybe no one need be winnowed at all.

00:00 Time Reborn
by Lee Smolin
Published by Penguin www.greenpenguin.co.uk

Lee Smolin’s main job is annoying physicists. Oh sure, he has a day job as founder of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics but he seems to spend most of his time preaching his crazy ideas. You see, Smolin believes that our perception of the flow of time is real, there’s no multiverse and quantum theory is, at best, just a rough guess. This may not seem very outrageous to the average punter but to physicists it’s tantamount to heresy and this book is the latest of his theses to be nailed to the door of public opinion.

To some extent ‘Time Reborn’ is the easy reader version of his earlier book, the all but impenetrable ‘The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time’ wherein he argues that laws of nature evolved, Newtonian or quantum experimental results can’t be scaled up to explain the universe and that we need a more comprehensive (and comprehensible) explanation than the approximations of quantum theory. He uses Ptolemy’s astronomy as an example. With all its epicycles it was wholly incorrect but was still a ‘good enough’ theory. It sufficed to explain and predict the movement of the planets for two thousand years till Newton finally superseded it with something much more accurate. That still wasn’t entirely the whole story and Newtonian gravity was supplanted by Einstein’s curved space 250 years later. It’s now time for another de-throning suggests Smolin. Perhaps quantum theory with it’s half spin states, superimposition and wave/particle duality is so hard to understand because it’s simply isn’t true. Despite its successes says Smolin, it is just “an algorithm for predicting the probabilities for different experimental outcomes” and, like Einstein before him, this sort of half-baked, incomplete, though staggeringly useful theory, just isn’t good enough. What is an electron actually doing when it jumps from one energy state to another? How exactly do widely separated particles communicate instantaneously? Could all those quantum cats and spooky actions be our modern epicycles – absurdities generated by our misapprehension of how the universe truly works?

If quantum isn’t the full story, what is? Smolin namechecks some alternatives with cool sounding sci-fi names like ‘loop quantum gravity’ and ‘spin foam models’ that might have been scooped straight from one of the better Dr. Who scripts. The problem is, that for all their seductively tantalising inferences, they are really just outlines, suggestions, hints. None are full or working alternatives to the current paradigm. Smolin admits this pretty much from the get-go but their strength, he suggests, lies in the fact that they are testable with actual doable experiments and observations. A feat he claims our current cosmological models can’t match.

Though ‘Time Reborn’ has passages of brilliance and insight and clever challenges to the quantum status quo it’s not without significant flaws. Smolin’s writing is generally pedestrian and can be hard to follow with occasional paragraphs descending almost to the level of computer-generated gobbledegook. A guide to style and a stronger editing hand are sorely needed. Some parts of his argument are simply not convincing even to the layman (i.e. me). For instance, one of the supporting arguments for a distinct arrow of time is that the Universe is not in thermal equilibrium but why should it be? It’s a big universe and 13 billion years is hardly an eye blink in its potential lifespan. Maybe it needs 13 trillion years. He also tries to tie-in economic theory and psychology to our understanding of physics which I find a bit of a stretch.

Despite this I have huge sympathy for Smolin’s position. All that quantum stuff works but I have a hard time believing that it works the way ‘just-shut-up-and-do-the-math’ physicists say it does. We need something better. The ideas in ‘Time Reborn’ may or may not be that something but it’s a good place to start.

The Evolution of Everything
By Matt Ridley
Published by Fourth Estate www.4thestate.co.uk

The theory of evolution has been one of the most powerful scientific ideas for over 100 years but Darwin was piped at the post by an earlier publication. You probably think I mean Alfred Russel Wallace. I don’t. The first suggestion of ‘survival of the fittest’ came from Sicilian philosopher Empedocles more than 2000 years ago. Empedocles got the basics right but without any supporting scientific framework his was an idea whose time certainly had not come. “You can’t stop discovery happening,” says Matt Ridley, but “you can’t hurry it much either”. That the theory of evolution had itself to evolve is an interesting premise but Ridley takes it much further than that in ‘The Evolution of Everything’ and applies what he calls the ‘general’ theory of evolution to almost the whole of human experience (there’s a list on the book cover). Humans, he suggests, prefer a nice, simple cause and effect story so we attribute historical change to the gods or great men – leaders, inventors, and generals. This, insists Ridley, is a completely topsy-turvy view of the world.

There are echoes of James’ Burke’s ‘Connections’ and even Asimov’s fictional ‘psychohistory’ in ‘The Evolution of Everything’ as Ridley sets out to show that much of human culture is a chaotic, emergent ‘bottom-up’ phenomenon rather than a planned and imposed top-down achievement. “The flywheel of history is incremental change through trial and error with innovations driven by recombination” says Ridley. The great men are not driving the waves of change, just riding the highest. Overall, Ridley argues well for the idea though more so in some fields than others. Language, religion and culture are a good fit and it’s certainly plausible we’d have relativity without Einstein and light bulbs without Edison but I’m not sure the world would look much the same without at least some innovating individuals. I’m also not convinced that private health care would take the form he describes even without the Bond-villianish machinations that created socialised medicine (the paragraph on the Friendly Societies V the Combine reads like a pitch for a low budget British period drama. I’d pay to see the movie).

However, Ridley’s ‘general theory of evolution’ isn’t just descriptive but proscriptive too. He argues that not only are all the phenomena he examines emergent properties rather than imposed plans but that where plans are imposed they invariably distort the evolutionary order with stultifying if not downright disastrous results. If this sounds a little like right-wing, liberal, lassie-fair, economics well… labels, are slippery things. “People of the same trade seldom meet together…but the conversation ends in conspiracy against the public” is Adam Smith not Karl Marx.

Ridley has some solid examples to back up his ‘emergent order’ ideas – perhaps most intriguingly in the area of finance. For example; forty percent of Kenya’s GDP flows through the form of M-Pesa – a private currency based on phone credit – and his observation that inflation in the hundred years before the founding of the US Federal reserve was 8% but 2300% in the century after is suggestive. Governments don’t like private currency (Bitcoin’s creator isn’t shy, he’s scared) but they could be fighting a loosing battle. Bitcoin itself may be too limited to replace national currencies but the block-chain software it relies on could allow all sorts of groups to create their own mediums of exchange.‘The Evolution of Everything’ may not be wholly original (I’m sure Ridley would be the first to admit an evolutionary progression) or wholly convincing in every case but the central idea here; that authority or chaos are not our only alternatives and that order self-generates – often in spite of expert’s best predictions – out of most human enterprise is a powerful one. As powerful as Darwin’s big idea? Hmmm …ask me again in 100 years. Or 2000.

Suspicious Minds
by Rob Brotherton
Published by Bloomsbury www.bloomsbury.com

Twenty years ago I had a colleague who liked to tease the CIA. All his emails had a footer containing a selection of security-sensitive trigger words. The intention was to cause any email reading computers in the Pentagon’s basement to flag the mail and force some poor intern to slog through his otherwise mundane chat. After a year of this, a nice young lady moved into the flat under his and struck up conversations which came round to politics suspiciously often. Or so he said. Maybe he was paranoid. You’ll notice that I’m not repeating any of those trigger words. In these less innocent times, my visitor might not be a nice young lady. Perhaps I’m being paranoid too. If so, we are in, not just good company, but a lot of company. Presidents from Washington to Obama have spoken of the ‘hidden hand’ behind politics and something like 30% of people buy into vaccine conspiracies, faked moon landings, Lady Di assassinations or government alien cover-ups. Well over half the US population believe Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone. It would seem, says psychologist Rob Brotherton in ‘Suspicious Minds’, that conspiracies are not just the province of the tinfoil hat brigade and that we are all conspiracy theorists at least some of the time.

One of the problems Brotherton tries to tease out is what exact a conspiracy theory is. After all, individuals, businesses and governments certainly do conspire and prudent paranoia is the brain’s early warning system. Sometimes people really are out to get you, cartels and terrorist plots are real things and governments are certainly no strangers to intrigue. ‘Operation Northwood’ proposed by the US joint chiefs of staff planned to blow up US and refugee ships and blame it on the newly Communist Cuba in the 1960’s. That plan was scuppered by Kennedy but you can’t keep a good idea down and who knows what subsequent administrations thought of it…

… which brings us to just how easy it is to start a good conspiracy theory. You can play the ‘Paranoid Style’ game at home with a few friends. Everybody pick one historical figure and try to find evidence they were part of worldwide plot by vampires (or aliens) to control the world. It’s surprisingly easy. History, says the game’s inventor Rob McDougall, “is full of information that can be made to seem significant”.

A hundred million years of evolution has made us very good at finding significance. Our brains are primed for paranoia. We see intent everywhere – in the rustle of the long grass and the glance of a rival – but sometimes we’re just too good at it. We filter the noise until we get a signal, even if there is no signal there to start with.

For example, ‘Proportionality Bias’ means we expect a big effect to have a big cause. A lone nutter’s bullet can’t possibly sway world events so we look for a deeper meaning. ‘Confirmation Bias’ allows us to examine all the evidence but see only what we want to see while the ‘Information Illusion’ – where we don’t know how much we don’t know – allows us to mistake our shallow knowledge for deep understanding. Brotherton gives us a couple of crafty tests including a number sequence trap I fell right into and a complete-the-drawing illustration that highlights the difference between knowing ‘how to work a bicycle’ and ‘how a bicycle works’. According to Brotherton, half of people get this last one wrong (or 1/3 of the Mensans I tried it on).

Brotherton’s clever prose and engaging story of popular paranoia provides plenty of suggestions for the appeal of conspiracy theories. It would be possible to come away with that idea that conspiracy is just real life with the contrast turned up. But of course, that might be just what they want you to think.

Intelligence
by Stuart Ritchie
Published by John Murray Learning www.allthatmattersbooks.com

‘Smart guy’ is usually synonymous with ‘bad guy’ in popular culture unless they’re Doc Brown buffoons or Doc House jerks. Barring the odd Hawking or Einstein there seems to be a general social antipathy to intelligence which is somehow seen as threatening unless it’s hobbled with humor or defeat. The cultural conditioning starts early – even the Mr. Men’s, Mr. Clever is shown as an arrogant snob constantly taken down a peg by the ordinary Joe. “IQ tests just tell you how good you are at doing IQ tests. They don’t measure anything real like emotional intelligence” is a conversation many of us have had. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a few handy facts to counter the rote antagonism and political correctness? Well you’re in luck! ‘Intelligence’ by Stuart Ritchie, Cognitive Epidemiology researcher at the University of Edinburgh, is just what you need.

‘Intelligence’ actually looks for all the world like a ‘Mr. Man’ book. So much so that I thought at first the cover designers were poking fun at the content. However, it turns out that it’s one of 30 books in the similarly designed ‘All That Matters’ series. Like it’s stable mates, ‘Intelligence’ condenses the current research on the subject into a short and very readable book. Sort of the ‘Cliff Notes’ for IQ.

In six clear chapters the author delves into intelligence – what it is, what it isn’t, why some people have more of it that others and a little on what to do about that. The answers are: biological, emotional & genetic respectively for the first three. That last one is a stickler though. We know of a couple of genes that can cause impairment if they are knocked out, but we don’t know which ones confer intelligence. It appears to be a cumulative effort – lots of small input from a whole bunch of genes. Education helps a bit but whether that’s a reverse correlation of smart people simple being in school longer is open to debate.

After a brief introduction of the development of the very idea of general Intelligence or ‘g’, Ritchie covers the chequered (and occasionally downright dark) history of intelligence testing and throws in some diverting sample questions. For goodness sake don’t do the ‘think of alternative uses for a brick’ one though – you’ll be there all night.

Ritchie manages to shoehorn a lot into a small book. He debunks the Mozart effect and its brain-training ilk. He outlines the drawbacks and benefits of intelligence and what parents can do to help develop it (not much) and explores it’s correlations with jobs, health and mortality as well as touching on IQ differences in gender and, more controversially, race.

He also covers the Flynn Effect – the intriguing finding that IQ scores worldwide have been increasing at a steady rate of 3 points per decade (faster in developing countries). Notwithstanding the evidence of reality TV, the rise is quite well established across a broad range of tests and geographical locations. The effect seems at odds with what we know about history though. Run the curve backwards and pretty soon everybody’s great-to-the-X grandparents would not only have been too dumb to tie their shoelaces, they’d probably have tried to eat them. Clearly this was (mostly) not the case though I’m not sure that the ‘just-so’ explanation of education giving us all – in James Flynn’s phrase – ‘scientific spectacles’ is wholly convincing.

Inevitably there are a lot of things not covered but it would be churlish to harp on the absences in so brief an overview. Richie does list a selection of further reading books and papers on the subject (along with some anti-IQ books for balance) so there’s plenty of opportunity to explore the subject further. On it’s own, ‘Intelligence’ is a short, sharp, myth-busting guide to smarts for the good guys.

The Unknown Universe
by Stuart Clarke
Published by Head of Zeus www.headofzeus.com

Did you know that comets are formed by human wickedness ignited by the anger of god and the resulting poisonous rain is responsible for pestilence, sudden death and Frenchmen? No? Well the theory was a strong contender when its author, Georg Busch (surprisingly not the ex-president but, an astronomer from Erfurt in Germany), suggested it in the 16th Century. He might have made some mistakes but we’ve moved on since then to bigger, better and much more well-researched mistakes.

The publishers missed a chance to subtitle this book ‘in praise of the last decimal place’ since that’s pretty much the story of astronomy and cosmology that Stuart Clark, author, New Scientist consultant and all round astronomy-bod, tells in ‘The Unknown Universe’. He cites plenty of examples where astronomers produce a perfectly good theory that explains almost everything only to have the next generation dig into that ‘almost’ and upset the whole apple cart. Sometimes they put the apples into a much bigger cart, sometimes they replace it wholesale with an orange cart, sometimes its a catamaran of bananas and sometimes I overstretch the metaphor. But from redshift to relativity, from the CMB to dark matter, ‘almost’ is where the new discoveries lie.

In one way ‘The Unknown Universe’ is quite annoying in so much as it does exactly what it says on the tin. The structure of each chapter is pretty much the same. Clark gives a quick rundown of what we currently know via a potted history of how we figured it out then highlights where this doesn’t quite add up. Then nothing. It’s not like I should expect anything else. It says it right there on the dust jacket – “what we don’t know about time and space” – but I still felt as though somebody had torn the last pages from my book of who-done-it short stories. The frustration it engenders is, I suspect, a pale shadow of that felt by actual working astronomers as one thing ‘The Unknown Universe’ makes clear is how the whole ‘figuring-it-out’ thing is very much an ongoing struggle.

Mixed in with stories of how to see extrasolar dust rings with grape jelly, cardboard and spit and the unacknowledged contributions of unofficial female astronomers (the ‘librarians of space’) is quite a bit of cutting edge controversy. Greenhouse climate models may be ignoring the asymmetric affect of UV radiation on the Jet Stream. We may be able to dispense with Dark Energy if we abandon the almost axiomatic isotropic principal – the idea that the universe is the same in every direction- doing away with the need to postulate an expansion field (and the idea of a single age for the Universe). Dark Matter might join it as right now the European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder gravity wave probe is getting ready to test Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). By the time you read this, Dark Matter might have gone the way of the aether and you can’t get more cutting edge than that.

I have a certain sympathy with the Busch’s of the world. The people left holding the wrong end of the theoretical stick, often the wrong stick altogether. With the scientific ground shifting so calamitously it can be hard figuring out where to stand. I admit, upon reading one or two of the outré theories Clark puts forth, my first through was ‘nonsense!’ My second thought was ‘why do I think that?’ I don’t have the depth of expertise to sensibly comment on the science behind them, certainly not after reading one brief chapter or paragraph. Is it possible I’ve internalised existing paradigms to the extent that even though my career or reputation don’t depend on them (and imagine if they did?) a knee-jerk conservatism automatically disparages interloping proposals? It’s easy to mistake repetition for truth and for your mind to close without you even noticing. I suggest jamming ‘The Unknown Universe’ in there to keep it open a crack.