"Proto" by Laura Spinney

The fascinating story of how Proto-Indo-European became the ancestor of the languages, including English, Greek and Urdu, spoken by half the people in the world. 

The Yamnaya were a small group of herders on the Eurasian steppes around 3000 BC. This book brings together the linguistic, archaeological and DNA (and sometimes mythological) evidence to show how their culture, their language and their genes spread out across Europe and Asia. We learn about the Hittites and the Corded Ware people, about how Latin came to dominate Italy, about how loan words can tell us when the Roma, travelling from India to Europe, arrived in Persia and when they left. We learn about the puzzle about the constancy of the Irish gene pool. The triumph of the Yamnaya is not necessarily a story of conquest and genocide - their grave goods suggest they were essentially peaceful. The wholesale genetic replacement of indigenous populations might have been achieved because they were herders who lived with their animals and therefore had acquired a degree of immunity to epidemic diseases such as Bubonic Plague so that their germs might have done the killing for them. 

Each chapter deals with a major section of the PIE language group, such as Indo-Iranian, or Baltic and Slavic, and is preceded by a map showing the distribution of these languages. These were interesting but what was really needed was arrows to show how these languages had spread.

My favourite bits were when we were given words in different languages - some living, some dead, some reconstructed - so that we could see the similarities. The author then went on to show how these words could give us clues about the technologies of the speakers' cultures so you can make deductions about how, for example, chariots spread. 

My least favourite thing about this book was the dating. She essentially uses four methods: giving dates, quoting centuries, saying how long ago something was from the present, and stating how many years separated an event from another, already referenced, event. This leaves the reader doing sums in their head, to try to place all these things onto some common timeline. I understand that this might help the narrative flow better but I found this very confusing. The single timeline as the back of the book was too little too late.

I know that it is fashionable to pepper one's narrative with snippets of modern-day anecdotes, in which one talks about the linguist or archaeologist who made the discoveries she is about to explain, but I found these a slightly irritating distraction. 

But overall this was a fascinating and brilliant enlightenment of prehistory.

Selected quotes:

• “One view ... is that language ... was invented in the deserts of south-eastern Africa around eighty thousand years ago, perhaps by a group of children ... playing a game.” (Introduction)
• “Hotspots of linguistic diversity coincide with hot spots of biodiversity, because these regions can support a higher density of human groups speaking different languages, who don't need to stray.” (Introduction)
• “On average it takes between five hundred and a thousand years for a language to become incomprehensible to its original speakers.”  (Introduction)
• “Indo-European is ... the best documented and in many ways the best understood of all the world's language families, but it also drags the most outdated intellectual baggage behind it. It's like the star patient of a tail-coated nineteenth century doctor, hauled out woozily for public display, underwear slipping off its shoulder, feted and abused in equal measure.”  (Introduction)
• “Languages broadly reflect the cultures with which they are associated, because people tend to have more words for the things that matter to them.”  (Introduction)
• “Migration ... drives a wedge between dialects and brings them into contact with different languages.” (Introduction)
• “Genes and languages are transmitted differently.”  (Introduction)
• “Water rolled over that giant weir with the force of two hundred Niagara Falls, triggering a tsunami that surged through estuaries and lagoons and flooded an area the size of Ireland.” (Ch 1)
• “People who spoke of wheels and wagons could not have lived before 3500 BCE, when that technology was invented.” (Ch 2)
• “Most European men alive today ... carry Y chromosomes that came from the steppe.” (Ch 3)
• “Groups of Indians who speak languages descended from Sanskrit today typically carry more steppe ancestry than those who speak non-Indo-European languages. ... The traditional guardians of the holy texts, the Brahmins have more steppe ancestry than other social groups.” (Ch 6) 
• “The percentage of the Globe population defined as international migrants has remained stable since 1960, at about three per cent. Refugees ... on average ... account for ... ten per cent ... of that three per cent.” (Conclusion)
• “Richard the Lionheart ... probably could not speak English. His mother tongue was Occitan.” (Conclusion)
• “Elizabeth the First ... helped English do away with the double negative ... and replace ‘ye’ with ‘you’.” (Conclusion)
• “Migration has been a constant, ‘indigenous’ is relative. ... The most successful language the world ever knew was a hybrid trafficked by migrants. It changed as it went, and when it stopped changing, it died.”  (Conclusion)
• “The past is a lighthouse not a port. (Russian proverb)” (Conclusion)

Fascinating and enlightening.

June 2025; 275 pages

Published by William Collins in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

 

"The Gold Bug Variations" by Richard Powers

 

A librarian, Jan O'Deigh, and Franklin Todd, a computer technician, try to discover the story behind Frank's colleague, Stuart Ressler, who used to be a scientist on the cutting-edge of research into the mechanism by which DNA (its double helix structure recently discovered by Watson and Crick) controls genetic inheritance. As they learn about the Stuart's love affair, they themselves fall in love.

There are three narratives: Jan's present-day narrative, told in the first person; Jan's memories of the previous year when she and the now absent Frank tried to uncover Stuart's story, also told by Jan; Stuart's story from 1957, told from his perspective but in the third-person.

There are a lot of thematic correspondences:

• The Gold Bug: a short story by Edgar Allen Poe about cryptography. Ressler's task is to decoding in the sense that he is trying understand which of the 64 possible combinations of triplets of RNA correspond to which of the twenty amino acids that build up proteins.
• The Goldberg variations: a suite of musical pieces by Bach whose structure seems to mirror the combinations of the bases in the RNA triplets.
• The fact the Jan is a librarian and DNA is, in a sense, a giant reference book of how to build proteins.
• The fact that Frank and Stuart work with computers and computer programs are, in a sense, similar to DNA
• The fact that Stuart gets cancer (not a spoiler, we learn this early): cancer is caused by inaccurate replications of DNA
• Love as the drive towards reproduction and the problems this may have for some people
• The fact that the story is about the love affairs bonding two pairs of people, as in DNA the bases are paired: A with T and C with G, unless there is an error in replication, symbolised in the book by infidelity.

It is the interplay of themes that is, one senses, most important for the novelist and he extends this to the idea that the text is also a coded message that the reader is deciphering into ideas; word-play is often used to show what might happen to the thoughts generated when the code is changed slightly: "Can all this babel come from the same idiot idiolect?" (Ch 12)

Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter plays with similar ideas.

It is a fascinating book but it is long. If there is an excursion which can provide further illustration of the theme, the author does not hesitate to explore it. Thus, one character discovers that his daughter is colour-blind and, since he isn't, disowns her: classic red-green colour-blindness in carried on the X chromosome so that, for a girl to have it, she must inherit it from both her mother (where it could be recessive) and her father (where it couldn't). A computer malfunction has life-or-death consequences. But there are other aspects which seem less related to the theme. Do we need to know the profession of Jan's ex-partner? Do we need to learn about an obscure Flemish painter (Frank's dissertation is on art history)? These trees sometimes seemed to get in the way of my seeing the wood.

And Powers has a very long-winded style. One sentence is rarely enough: "She is a natural history, a sovereign kingdom, a theory about her environment, a virtuoso pedal-point performance. She follows a curve, a cadence, an animal locomotion he cannot help but lose himself to. Jeanette Ross is her own phylum." (Ch 11) It's certainly a virtuouso performance but I often felt that a little more precision, a little more succinctness, a little less prolixity ... it's catching!

This is an author who expects a lot of his readers: "A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor's cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler's area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering's side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. On Ressler's side: the formal gardens of Versailles." (Ch 10) It's not just the need to have some sort of understanding of biuochemistry and thermodynamics and French history; you also need to be able to decipher sufficient of the unusual words (osmotic, entropic, arboreal, mimeograph, ruminant etc) to have the motivation to keep reading. On the other hand, the richness of the vocabulary and the ecstatic juxtaposition of so many ideas make reading this book a rewarding experience, even though it slows you up. But perhaps there's a happy medium, combining verbal and mental pyrotechnics with more conciseness, making the book an exhilarating romp up a hillside rather than an arduous slog up a mountain.

• Selected quotes:
• "Ressler's definition of chance: the die is random, but we keep on rolling until we hot necessity." (Ch 1)
• "Those few months were the only ones of my life that I experienced firsthand." (Ch 1)
• "The angel-files in each half-stair must somehow be capable of latching on to their proper mates out of angelic bouillabaisse." (Ch 4)
• "It had succumbed to creeping graffiti fungus, the surreal, urgently illegible signatures of the buried." (Ch 4)
• "We are the by-product of the mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us." (Ch 5)
• "News confuses significant with novel." (Ch 7)
• "Her curves tend toward a topographical fullness he associates with varsity cheerleaders and nursing mothers." (Ch 7)
• "Even level-headed women are programmed to spread themselves through every available backwater of the gene pool. At thirty, though, lust is no longer the giddy-maker it once was." (Ch 7)
• "The innovations that daily made a liar of Ecclesiastes. Recent sighting of the W particle. Stone Age tribe hitherto escaping detection. Pioneer 10, passing Neptune on its way to being the first artificial thing to quit the solar system." (Ch 14)
• "Organisms are only the necessary evil, the way DNA has hit upon to make more DNA." (Ch 15)
• "The male model of parenthood: everything between ejaculation and tossing the football with the twelve-year-old is trivial." (Ch 17)
• "There are a lot more ways to fall off the tightrope than to inch forward." (Ch 19)
• "Genetic engineering is full of attempts to replace a dense, diversified, heterogeneous assortment of strains with one superior one. Something about us is in love with whittling down: we want the one solution that will drive out all the others." (Ch 19)
• "I recently saw French literature defined as English literature without the Bard." (Ch 20)
• "The first article of scientific skepticism: meaning always reveals pattern, but pattern does not necessarily imply meaning." (Ch 20)
• "Part of me dearly wants to pay taxes. I love schools, sidewalks, museums, research funding, food relief. You simply cannot get a better return on investment." (Ch 21)
• "Ultimately, the Goldbergs are about the paradox of variation, preserved divergence, the transition effect inherent in terraced unfolding, the change in nature attendant upon a change in degree. How necessity might arise out of chance. How difference might arise out of more of the same." (Ch 28)

Gosh, this was hard work to read. But so worthwhile. I suspect that the verbal dexterity and the unquestionable polymathic brilliance of the author will mean that this book lingers in my memory long after easier but more trivial books have been forgotten.

August 2023; 675 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Double Helix" by James D Watson

The classic account of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA for which Watson and Francis Crick won a Nobel Prize. This account is a real warts-and-all account of scientific discovery. Watson regularly admits he doesn't understand the maths for some of the work, and that he is a poor experimenter who blew up a Chemistry lab by heating Benzene using a Bunsen burner. He seems to spend most of his time thinking about pretty girls which is a feature he has in common with almost all of the other young men researching science. His sexist and misogynist attitudes make for difficult reading nowadays even if, in the epilogue to this memoir, he concedes that the by then dead Rosalind Franklin was a superb experimenter whom he greatly undervalued and that her behaviour, which he regularly considers unacceptable, might possibly have been a consequence of the difficulty facing women trying to be first class research scientists in those days.

Watson and Crick are neither supposed to be working on DNA (indeed Crick's boss Bragg has angrily told himk to concentrate on finishing his thesis and Watson is misusing the his funding which is for a different problem at a different Uni in another country!) but they keep tinkering with models. Nothing seems to be working. They (and everyone else except, it seems, Franklin) are convinced that the structure is helical but is in one, two, three, four or five strands twisted together. They and the rival groups working on the same problem are convinced that the backbone of sugars and phosphates is in the inside. But when Franklin's photo B clearly reveals helicity Watson starts to develop a two-strand model, which allows replication, and starts to think of the strands as held together by the bases. He assumes the bases are paired and that Adenine is held to Adenine by hydrogen bonds, as are Thymine to Thymine, Cytosine to Cytosine and Guanine to Guanine. Then a chemist friend tells him that the structures he is using are of the wrong isomers. Using the right isomers means that this like-to-like pairing (AA, CC, TT and GG) makes the essential double helix buckle; it would no longer be fundamentally crystalline. Furthermore there would be no reason why experimental results showed, as they did, that there was always the same amount of adenine and thymine and of cytosine as guanine, even though the ratios of A to C or T to G might vary. "Suddenly I became aware that an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical shape to a guanine-cytosine pair held together by at least two hydrogen bonds." A double helix structure in which the ladder steps are A-T or C-G explained why the proportions of A and T are always the same as well as explaining the X-ray crystallography data. And a quest as exciting as any Hollywood blockbuster is complete.

Other moments:
"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that ... a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." (C 2)
After Crick had so upset his boss he had been ordered to stop work on DNA: "News of the upset confirmed the fact that Francis might move faster if occasionally he closed his mouth."
On getting a textbook for a Christmas present. "The remnants of Christianity were indeed useful."
On discovering a co-worker in his room with a girl: "The presence of popsies does not inevitably lead to a scientific future."

Lively and entertaining. February 2019; 128 pages