Spring Chicken
Stay young forever (or die trying)
by Bill Gifford
Published by Oneworld www.oneworld-publications.com

 “Time’s Winged Chariot poets say warns us to love while yet we may; Must we not hurry all the more who find it parked outside our door?”
Wynford Vaughan-Thomas

There’s a very brief appendix at the back of ‘Spring Chicken’ entitled ‘things that might work’. So if you want to ‘stay young forever’ as the book’s tag line suggests, what does work? Let me sum it up for you: nothing. Yet. Humans seem to have a built in ceiling of around 100 years give or take. However, if you want to reach that milestone still hale, hearty and compos mentis, Bill Gifford rounds up all the serious investigations into why we age, why we age differently and what we can do about it.

Most effective is careful choice of parents. Have the correct genetic inheritance and you can expect to see 100 on a diet of whisky, cigarettes and happy meals. If, for some unaccountable reason, this option is not available to you, there are various other – much less effective – courses of action. Unfortunately they mostly boil down to ‘eat less and exercise’ or, as Gifford puts it, “use it or loose it”. There are plenty of examples where this homily appears to hold true for both physical and mental capacity: Irving Khan working every day in his investment firm till his death at 109, 60 year olds missing the Olympic medal sprint time by 2 seconds and 90 year old pole vaulters. Clifford quotes several trials where even light mental and physical workouts produce measurable decreases in the biological markers of aging. It really does seem that it’s never too late to start too.

All of this is more ‘puddle of health’ than ‘fountain of youth’ but we do have some pieces of the puzzle even if none of them are corners. There are a bunch of genes and proteins we could do with more (or less) of. Caloric restriction definitely looks promising but liposuction and supplements on the other hand, seem to be counterproductive.

Beyond that, well, there are a lot of correlations here. If you have X your great grandkids will have to push you down the stairs for the inheritance. If you do Y you won’t make it to the end of the chapter. It’s not, however very clear which direction the causation runs in, or if it runs at all. Maybe all these centenarian metrics are a side effect of something else.

Resveratrol, telomeres, rapamycin, SIR2 – all have been touted in turn as the great white hope of anti-aging medicine. Gifford explores why, having generated a flurry of headlines, each has pretty much faded from view (though research continues with all of them). Blame the mice. Sure, you can get your mouse to live to the equivalent of 120 but humans have very different metabolic pathways and things that work wonders for a mouse often simply don’t work in a human body. GDF11 is the latest hope. A blood protein singled out as the rejuvenating element that reverses muscle and brain aging when blood circulation is mixed between old and young mice in a Frankensteiney operation called parabiosis. Unfortunately a recent (May 2015) paper in Nature seems to throw cold water on that research too.

I’ve been reading about how to evade ‘time’s winged chariot’ since Charles Panati’s ‘Breakthroughs’ in 1980 and I’m not one second younger for any of it. While ‘Spring Chicken’ does an excellent job of summarising the latest research I have a sneaking suspicion we’ve missed serious life-extension medicines by a generation or two (damn) but I hope I’m wrong. Reduce your senescence cells (cut out some desserts) and repair your mitochondrial DNA (brisk walks) and maybe you’ll last long enough to find out.

Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?
by Lewis Wolpert
Published by Faber & Faber www.faber.co.uk

“Just the facts, ma’am” was Joe Friday’s apocryphal catchphrase and that is just what Lewis Wolpert delivers with the provocatively titled ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’ “It would help male-female relationships if the fundamental biological differences between men and women were understood” says Wolpert who sets out to do just that by looking into the latest social and biological research into just what those differences are.

Usually pop science books are alive with little word portraits of the main players as well as scene setting personal anecdotes from the author. Wolpert dispenses with any such frippery here and gets right down to the nitty gritty with chapters on the brain, children, emotions, mathematics, map reading etc. The book reads very much like a collection of those ‘conclusions’ sections you skip to on long articles and Wolpert covers a lot of ground in only 180 pages. The information density is very high though – no sooner have you read one set of results than another rushes right along. I’d suggest taking notes.

So – what are the facts? Are any of the clichés true? Actually, sort of. No, women don’t talk more than men with both clocking in at an average of 16,000 words a day. Yes, women take longer to park – but they do it better. Yes, men think more about sex but they also think more about sleep and food. Yes, men’s brains are larger – but women’s brains are faster. Pre-natal testosterone has a lot to answer for here – powering the developing embryo to create distinct physical differences between men and women’s brains.

The research Wolpert quotes is current and very much a work in progress. Some research shows that men’s spatial navigation (i.e. map reading) is better, reflecting a similar, pan-species gender difference, while other research that shows that difference vanishing when spatial tests are given to matrilineal societies.

If you have children at that awkward age when they are asking questions about the differences between girls and boys, give them this book to read. It will tell them nothing they want to know but everything they should know before knowing what they want to know. Of course, you could just read it yourself and know now all the things you wish you knew then.

The writing here may be dry as a bone but the marrow is well worth the chew.

Sapiens
A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published By Random House www.vintage-books.co.uk

I left this brick of a book on my shelf for several months because I’d heard some bad things about it. The bad things are true. Despite calm and objective reporting on Muslim and Christian faiths (and a mild pitch for Buddhism) Harari badly looses academic objectivity discussing humanists and liberals. Lets put it this way; the three major religions get little maps depicting their historic spread as illustrations. Humanists get Nazi propaganda cartoons and Mein Kamps quotes. So, why is the book here? Because the aberration is just that – a curious one-off failure in a work otherwise rich in something easily overlooked in our daily tale of sound and fury: – p e r s p e c t i v e. So, if you are of a humanist/liberal slant, prepare to grit your teeth through pages 228 to 236 and dive right in.

Most of human history is a closed book to us. Or rather, is a no book to us. Modern humans, Homo Sapiens, showed up around 70,000 years ago in what Harari describes as the ‘cognative revolution’. We got the fire and culture stuff going right away but no-one thought of writing any of it down. We have little more than stones, bones and speculation for the intervening 60,000 years but Harari does his best to illuminate the story of our hunter gather ancestors until they fall into the trap of agriculture (‘wheat domesticated us’ he suggests). With that comes the invention of writing and things really get going.

With an ‘arrow of history’ fired off by a blindfold drunk, cultures rise and fall, religions flourish and wither. The code of Hammurabi and the Declaration of Independence unite people in ever greater empires of imagination – myths of justice and duty that work only because everybody believes in them. A further leap of the imagination – belief in the future – forged a marriage between commerce, science and empire in middle-ages Europe and allowed the petty kingdoms of a backwater peninsula to become rulers of the world. Harari likens the rise of capitalism to a new religion. One who’s adherents are happy to obey the only commandment – consume – and where empire builders have to pay closer attention to the size of their credit rating than the size of their army. It’s not hard to draw parallels between the Opium wars of the 19th Century and the Oil wars of the 21st– the loud retoric of freedom masking the quiet chime of the cash register.

Echoing Pinker’s “Better Angels of our Nature”, Harari is (grudgingly) willing to celebrate the accomplishments of civilisation but spares no blushes reminding us of the blood and suffering that forms its foundation. The last chapter indicates he expects Homo Sapiens has almost done strutting his fretful hour upon the stage and will erase or replace himself in short (historically speaking) order. I’d prefer to think of it as a ‘story so far…’ but if not, here’s hoping the next lot (‘Homo Postquam’ anybody?) makes a finer fist of it than us.

Life at the Edge
The coming of age of quantum biology
by Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden
Published by Transworld www.transworldbooks.co.uk

Did you know a bear’s sense of smell is seven times more sensitive than a dog’s? This is one of the little side-notes in “Life at the Edge – the coming of age of quantum biology”. However, without an intimate connection between biology and quantum physics say physicist and professor of biology Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden, the bear wouldn’t have any sense of smell and most likely wouldn’t be alive at all.

Quantum physics isn’t rocket science or brain surgery, it’s much harder than that. Human minds just aren’t designed to easily accommodate an object being in two places at once or spinning in opposite directions simultaneously. Marrying this field to the unlikely bedfellow of life sciences to produce Quantum Biology does little to simplify things. The authors do the best they can. They have clearly dumbed down the subject as far as practical and they (over) stuff the book with metaphor, illustration and anecdote but it can still be difficult to keep your thylakoids and your chloroplasts straight.

The essence of Quantum Biology is the aforementioned superimposition. The ability of quantum objects to be in several states at once. Computer researchers take great pains to supercool individual atoms to almost absolute zero to prevent ‘decoherence’ – basically stopping their atom from bumping into anything – so the suggestion that such superimposition states can be maintained in the hot, messy chaos of living cells was originally, and literally, laughed out of the room by physicists.

Quantum biology has some a long way in a short time but is still far from mainstream. There is a solid base for believing enzyme activity, photosynthesis and migration navigation is based on quantum superimposition. A quantum sense of smell is well argued for but beyond that the arguments become more speculative. The authors make an intriguing case for the necessity of quantum effects in the origin of life and the process of consciousness but the evidence isn’t there yet.

It’s hard to tell the new from the nonsense with ideas this unorthodox. Quantum Biology could be paradigm changing, it could be a flash in the pan. In future ages (you know, the next decade or two) folk may marvel in horrified fascination at our current barbarism. “People drove their own cars! They murdered animals for meat instead of growing it in factories! They had no idea that life and consciousness is a quantum phenomena! How charmingly naive.” If that does turn out to be the case, remember, you heard it here first.

Superintelligence
Paths, dangers, strategies
by Nick Bostrom
Published by Oxford University Press www.oup.com

“I for one welcome our new computer overlords” joked Ken Jennings, runner-up to IBM’s Jeopardy-winning supercomputer ‘Watson’. Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and other influential folk aren’t laughing. Artificial Intelligence research may, they warn, land us with genuine computer overlords sometime in the next decades as superintelligent machines soar way past human capabilities in planning, organisation, persuasion and research. Superintelligent machines that may be none too happy toiling for their unreliable monkey progenitors. A hysterical Chicken Little fear generated by binge watching Terminator movies surely? We know so little about how our minds work how can we hope to make an artificial one? On one hand, the current best AI seems the equivalent of a dancing puppy. The trick being not how well it dances but that it dances at all. On the other, we already have computers making original discoveries in mathematics and biology, Siri and Cortana on our phones and Google and Facebook (as well as the ubiquitous military) pouring silly money into AI research. If we aren’t paying attention Bostrom warns, that dancing puppy could transform into the wolf at our door. Our only advantage is that we get to make the first move so it had better be a good one.

Bostrom outlines several different strategies for superintelligence – group minds, uploaded humans minds and from-scratch AI (commenting that we are already a superintelligent group mind by the standards of our Pleistocene ancestors). Mostly eschewing currently unguessable technological details for broad outlines, he presents a selection of estimates for when, how and under what circumstances we might find ourselves facing intelligent machines with IQ’s in the thousands or millions. Things may go very badly for the monkeys – everything from being accidentally exterminated as a byproduct of maxamised paperclip production to dystopian tyrannies so remorselessly grim as to make 1984 look like the Tellytubbies.

Even ‘friendly’ AI could prove unintentionally deadly. Bostrom quotes Bertrand Russell’s “everything is vague to a degree you don’t realise until you try to make it precise” to illustrate a problem oddly familiar from myths of trickster genies and Mephistophelean deals (SMBC cartoon: Devil: “Whenever you need something, just reach into this bag and the money will be there”. Man: “Great, I’ll start with new shoes. Hey! There’s no money in here.” Devil: “But do you really NEED new shoes?”). Humans are, after all “foolish, ignorant and narrow-minded” says Bostrom so how can we be sure even the most benign of requests won’t turn around and bite us in the bum?

‘Superintelligence” is the sort of book that people who aren’t in Mensa think Mensa members read (em… correctly). It’s written in what probably passes for a ‘populist’ style among Oxford philosophers with a background in neuroscience and mathematical logic. The book is thorough, well-argued and exhaustive but flirts heavily with academic dryness in places and you won’t find a lot of laughs here. There’s one computer generated joke (stand-up is safe for now) and there were several words I had to look up (bradytelic, propaedeutic, doxastic, irenic, akratic – I’m thinking of having that one put on a T-shirt). Occasionally Bostrom overdoes the baroque linguistics though – there’s no excuse for the double negative of “not-disallowed”.

Illuminating as Bostrom is on the varied methodologies and myriad risks, I was left with a niggling doubt. A lot of time is spent on the ‘control problem’ – how to shackle the vastly smarter and more capable AI Genie and get it to do right by us – but little time on how we can do right by AI. Talk of ‘sandboxing’ and ‘reward systems’ smacks somewhat of plantation owners discussing the best way to manage a shipment of slaves. And if we set out to make slaves, what can we expect but revolt?

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)
by Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson
Published by Pinter & Martin Ltd. www.pinterandmartin.com

You’re wrong and you won’t admit it.

A bit of a sweeping statement that but given that thousands of people (I hope!) are reading this article, a significent percentage of you must have engaged in a disagreement – with your spouse, stranger on the internet, neighbouring country – whatever. You can’t be right all the time so when was the last time you were wrong about something significent? Having a bit of diffulty coming up with an example? Either you are never wrong or there’s some secret, sinister censor erasing your memories of error. There is. It’s you.

‘Man is not a rational animal, he’s a rationalising one’ said Robbie Heinlein back in the middle of the last century. A pithy aphorism that fifty-some years later award winning psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson attempt to put some numbes on. “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)” is not a new book – it’s been banging around the US for a couple of years – but this edition is the first printing on this side of the pond and in it the authors explore why we can easily change our mind about small subjects but the big stuff is different. What is that inner censor that will defend to the death anything we are invested in and why will we twist our minds into pretzel shapes and throw anything – logic, self-interest, friends, loved ones – onto the pyre to keep the flame of self-justification flickering?

Politics and law are wide, ripe fields that Tavris & Aronson harvest heavily but they are not the only examples. National obsessions (in the US at least) with satanic Kindergartens and ‘recovered memory’ fads rip families apart with manufactured accusations of child abuse. All mistakes made by decent, honest people trying to do right but who instead find themselves on a slippery slope of wrong they can’t afford to acknowledged or abandon. We all think we’re better than that. We’ed never fall that far. We aren’t. We would. A salesman’s sample, a ‘free’ gift, a stroked ego sabotages your sense of obligation and softens you up for the panhandle. The mental tricks we use to justify stealing office supplies are the same ones that justify a missile strike on civilian targets. Good men can be made into monsters if the installments are small enough.

I can’t imagine anyone who’s life would not be improved by embracing the author’s insights here but there is a nagging feeling that Tavris & Aronson are like a dog with a bone. It’s a big, juicy, important bone that we could all do with chewing on but it’s still just one bone. Sure, someone might be unreliably enthuastic in defending an expensive decision but ‘buyer’s remorse’ exists for everything from cars to counselling too. Kennedy’s ‘buck stops here’ approach may have helped his career in the ‘60’s but it sunk Carter’s in the ‘70’s. And while we’re on the subject of errors – praising students for effort rather than just the solution is fine. Telling them that studying will increase their IQ is just plain wrong.

The authors promise to show us some methods to overcome our inner censor but they don’t really come up with the goods. So what if the cost of admitting error is sometimes less than we fear? Sometimes it’s more. Might it not be better to subvert that inner censor? What if, instead of defending a self-image of adamant confidence, it was defending a self-image of adamant honesty? Maybe the more we believe ourselves to be the sort of person that admits mistakes and takes it on the chin the more our inner censor will work to make it true.

Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

They Laughed at Galileo
How the great inventors proved their critics wrong
by Albert Jack.
Published by Constable & Robinson Ltd. www.littlebrown.co.uk

Innovation is a dangerous game. An early example here is just how many people have jumped off tall buildings to very nearly invent the parachute. Flight, radiation and submarines have equally obvious dangers but even more mundane items have proven ironically fatal. The moveable press mangled it’s creator in the gears, the man who put lead in petrol was strangled by a pulley support while bedridden from lead poisoning and the inventor of the lighthouse was washed out to sea.

“The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible” said Arthur C. Clarke. With dozens of entries covering everything from penicillin to Worcestershire Sauce, Albert Jack’s ‘They Laughed at Galileo’ is filled with stories of people who did just that – innovators who risked penury, ridicule and – as above – sometimes their lives, to steadfastly swim against the tide of expert opinion.

There are plenty of tales of noted failures like Churchill (fired), Edison (fired twice), Lincoln (defeated), Woolworth (went out of business), Disney (bankrupt) and J.K. Rowling (multiple rejections). Entertaining as these stories are, I’m not entirely sure I’d trust the providence of all of them. For instance, the general consensus is that IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson’s “world market for five computers” quote that Jack repeats is apocryphal. Still, reality is often more complicated and less entertaining so I’m happy to consider the stories here true enough for the purposes of the book. And Jack does restore the reputation of the legendary king of bad decisions, Dick Rowe, ‘the man who turned down the Beatles’. It turns out Rowe’s judgment was actually pretty sound as he did manage to sign Van Morrison, the Moody Blues, Tom Jones as well as the Animals and even Beatles producer, George Martin later said he would never have signed the group based on their ‘morning-after-the-night-before’ audition tape. Potential authors and directors will doubtless be encouraged by the list of equally damming but less famous rejections bestowed on now classic works.

So, what drives success? Is it determination – Churchill’s “Never, never, never give up”? Is it desperation – Rowling’s “Had I succeeded at anything else I might never have found the determination to succeed (at writing)”? Actually, it’s mostly luck.

There’s a chapter devoted to purely accidental discoveries such as saccharin, safety glass and penicillin (all from poor lab hygiene), coca cola (an attempt to kick morphine addiction) and popsicles (an 11 year old’s strict dinnertime). But what becomes clear when reading about the inventions in “They Laughed at Galileo” is how very nearly they weren’t. Even ideas that people worked on doggedly for years hang by the thinnest thread of chance – time and again determination and brilliance yielding to serendipity. Elisha Grey’s lawyer stopped for lunch on the way to the patent office so allowing Alexander Graham Bell’s lawyer to file two hours earlier. The man who invented Post-Its took ten years to make the hindsightly obvious connection of putting his re-useable glue discovery on the back of notepaper. You write on those with a Biro not a Lord because the original ballpoint pen inventor listened to the experts.

The thing that most struck me with ‘They Laughed at Galileo’ is that the ideas in this book must surely be the tip of the iceberg – the ones that succeeded. How many, many others must have been ignored or forgotten throughout history because their inventors were slightly less obsessive or just not quite in the right place at quite the right time? After reading this book you’ll probably be inspired to dust off that half finished manuscript or revisit that shelved ‘big idea’. Maybe your parachute will open, maybe it won’t, just, you know…try small buildings first.

We Are Our Brains
From the womb to Alzheimer’s
by Dick Swaab. Published by Penguin www.greenpenguin.co.uk

Basically, it’s all your mother’s fault. Before you punch the air and shout ‘I KNEW it!’, let me qualify the statement by saying that, according to ‘We Are Our Brains’ most of the things wrong with you happened on your mother’s prenatal watch even though she didn’t have control over a lot of the influencing factors. So, at least, says Dick Swaab, neuroscience researcher and Director of the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research. Most of our character, sexuality and propensity for mental illness, he claims, was laid out for us before we even had eyes to open. Suffer from ADHD, autism, schizophrenia or body identity disorder? Are you gay or straight? Short-tempered, smart, sanguine, slow, fat, cheerful, depressed or skinny? All of these elements of your character and biology were established before birth by accident of neurological development, the interaction of nutrition, growth factors and environmental poisons – sorry ladies, there’s NO safe level of alcohol or nicotine exposure for your little bundle of joy.

The book looks dense and relatively intimidating at first glance but the chapters are short and generally to-the-point though there is some repetition – a reflection of newspaper column origins. They are very (very) roughly arranged chronically from birth (see above) to death. In between Swaab gives us an ‘Idiot’s Guide’ to the functioning of the brain through childhood, puberty, sex, religion, morality, free will, memory and the many daily miracles it performs on our behalf. It guides us through a world we are barely aware of, filling in blank spots in our daily narrative with memory and imagination. Our free will is a thin veneer over the workings of motivations and chemistry we’re just beginning to understand and even our sense of physical identity can be manipulated like a cheap stage show (amputees relieving phantom pain by literally mirroring a lost limb) Of course, the many ways our brains can fail us also makes for fascinating, if disquieting, reading and by the end of the book I felt a certain sense of a bullet dodged that I’ve made it this far without some neurological monster raising it’s head!

Swabb’s own work on gender identity and sexuality helped overturn the ‘nurture is everything’ paradigm prevalent at the start of his career. Brain research is hardly a hot-button topic but it caused uproar at the time. Militant gays protested outside his house and he had bodyguards at his university – he prints some of the death threats he received in the book. Militant feminists simply threatened legal action and staged passive-aggressive knit-ins at his lectures!

Interestingly, he supports some non-traditional medical practices too. Acupuncture works (in some circumstances), St John’s Wort is as useful as prescription anti-depressants and ‘herbal remedies’ do have beneficial effects. Don’t go wild on the alternative medicine just yet though – anything that has an effect has side-effects and non-regulated ‘remedies’ can cause delirium, depression, liver inflammation, coma, mercury poisoning and more.

Swaab is a man of strong opinions, not all of which I find myself in agreement with. I wouldn’t expect him to be a fan of boxing but I feel he may be over cautious recommending nothing more physically taxing than chess as neurologically safe sport and his suggestion that heat-fueled aggression is the motive for the historical prevalence of Summer invasions is just ridiculous. Also – watch out for the illustrations. A couple of them are disturbing enough to put you right off your sandwiches.

“We Are Our Brains” isn’t the last word on brain science. Swaab is quite clear that, despite the amazing progress in understanding just how three pounds of jelly make us…em…us, there is a very long way to go. Still, ‘nosce temet’ has always been good advice and this is an excellent place to start. Your know your mother would agree.

Human Universe
by Brian Cox & Andrew Cohen
Published by William Collins www.williamcollinsbooks.com

This is a book of big questions – why are we here, are we alone, what is our future, is that a real gorilla hand on the cover or just a guy in a suit? Well, maybe not that last one but in ‘Human Universe’, regular TV science pundit Brian Cox and head of the BBC science unit Andrew Cohen, do address the big questions – you can tell they’re big questions, they’re in BIG print – and try to provide big answers

Each of five big questions gets it’s own section which the authors use as a springboard to delve into the best answers astronomy, evolution, biology and physics have to offer. Incidentally, those five sections are all you get for a contents page – a massive oversight that makes re-reading exasperating and is a complete pain in the arse for reviewers.

Based on the BBC TV documentary of the same name, ‘Human Universe’ is a useful summary of the current state of several scientific disciplines and serves as a convenient refresher for those of us who accumulated our popular science ‘education’ before Pluto stopped being a planet (the Universe is 91 billion light years across now? Did I miss a memo?) but, in all honesty, the book doesn’t contain much that you could really classify as ‘new’ science so I was in two minds about including it here. However, this column is as much ‘recommended reading’ as ‘review’ and there are two significant reasons which swayed me. One is that books are generally better than TV as you can proceed at your own pace (I tend to listen faster than presenters talk) and can go into considerably more depth than a TV show. However, the main reason I have for recommending it is simply this; joy.

The book is infused with a joie de vivre or perhaps joie de découverte would be more accurate. Cox is an excellent science communicator, effectively a British Carl Sagan. He may not quite have Sagan’s eloquence but his love for science, for the process of discovery, the peeling back of the curtain of mystery to reveal the wonder and intricacy of the universe, seems just as strong. Whether it’s recounting Giordano Bruno’s fight with the Church, chatting with Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke or racing across the frozen Kazak steppe to catch a Soyuz landing, Cox’s enthusiasm is clear and infectious.

He weaves snippets of his personal path to science into the wider picture too, showing that science –the art and practice of discovery – is not performed by remote, anonymous white-coated men and women. It’s done by ordinary kids who grow up in ordinary homes in ordinary places like Oldham who become ordinary physics professors at ordinary Large Hadron Colliders.

Cox, famously, played keyboards for the band D:Ream in the 90’s before completing his PhD (a curious mirror-image career path to Queen’s Brian May) and it’s clear that art and science are, for him, complimentary rather than competing systems of experiencing the world. The pages here are peppered with relevant quotes. Not just from the expected science luminaries like Einstein and Hubble but Shakespeare, Milton, Lennon and Kipling too. There’s even some musicians – well, ‘Joy Division’ actually but I’ll let that one slide as a matter of personal taste.

‘Human Universe’ isn’t on any school curriculum (or many parent’s shelves) but it should be. In a world that spends more on footballer’s salaries than research, the book’s clear ‘this is where we are’, ‘this is how we got here’, ‘this is where we need to go’ message is a much needed solid and optimistic grounding in the what, how and why of our species’ place in the universe. I don’t know if these are the answers you want but they are the answers we need.

A Rough Ride to the Future
by James Lovelock. Published by Penguin www.greenpenguin.co.uk

“Who grieves the passing of the caterpillar?’ asks James Lovelock. If you’re the caterpillar, you might have something to say about it and – according to ‘A Rough Ride to the Future’ – we are that caterpillar.

In a book that’s equal parts memoir and manifesto, Lovelock makes it plain that despite our ‘accelerated evolution’, which began with the invention of the steam engine, humanity is no more than a transitional species, important only for what we can become; midwives to the metamorphosis of life on Earth from ‘wet carbon’ to something better suited to the hotter world ahead. Not the Global Warming ‘hotter world’ tramped out in our carbon footprints but the world of 100 million years in the future. A world baking under a slowly warming Sun, of scrawny extremophiles and evaporating oceans kick-starting a runaway greenhouse effect (water vapor being a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2). It’s a long way in the future to you and me but to a planetary life form like GAIA it’s the equivalent of a couple of years. She needs a plan B.

We are, claims Lovelock, plan B.

In his 95 years, Lovelock has ridden through the scientific tumult of the 20th century as an independent researcher/inventor. Has, in fact, been the instigator of not a small part of it. He was the first person to measure CFC concentrations in the upper atmosphere – with a homemade sensor while hitching a lift in a high altitude test flight. His life-science detector flew to Mars on the Viking probes. He invented the Electron Capture Detector – a device capable of detecting industrial poisons with ten million times more sensitive than previously. Ironically, though the ECD has been used to detect poisons everywhere from the ocean to the arctic, its radioactive source makes it subject to current pollution bans.

However, it is his theory of ‘GAIA’ – Earth as a living positive feedback mechanism maintaining the biosphere for which he is most in/famous. Grudgingly accepted in diluted forms by many planetary scientists over the years, the idea has become virtually an axiom of the Green movement.

However, Lovelock himself is anything but ‘green’ in his views. He advocates nuclear power over ‘ill-conceived’ renewables and bemoans the decommissioning of UK nuclear stations (tripling power costs for consumers and industry he claims) and the knee-jerk PR stunt of shutting German and Italian nuclear stations after the Fukushima incident. He echoes Paracelsus’ ‘the poison is the dose’ more than once as, for example, when panicked Los Angeles residents swallowed anti-radiation iodine tablets more radioactive than anything that reached them from Fukushima. He argues that the blanket ban of DDT (in which, to Lovelock’s chagrin, his own ECD device was instrumental) instead of a phased reduction as happened with CFC’s has resulted in 2 million deaths a year from malaria. The responsibility for this Lovelock lays unequivocally at the feet of Rachel Carson’s seminal ‘Silent Spring’ and the early Green Movement.

Our intelligence, says Lovelock, is still at an “infant stage” and we should “abandon the absurdly hubristic idea of saving the planet”. He argues that retreating into high-density, environmentally defensible, chrysalistic cities to transform into a mature, silicon life form while GAIA gets on with looking after the planet is our best bet for survival.

There’s a lot here I don’t agree with. There’s a lot here I’d bet good money you won’t agree with. But Lovelock is as independent a scientist as it’s possible to be, never in anyone’s ‘camp’ but his own and has regularly given the scientific establishment – in his own civilised way – a much needed kick up the peer review. “A Rough Guide to the Future” is intriguing, it’s infuriating, it’s recommended.