"How Life Works" by Philip Ball

This book radically transformed my understanding of cellular biology. 

I'm not a biologist but I was a science teacher and I taught that the genome programs cells; that sections of DNA unwind and are used as templates to make strands of messenger RNA which then float out into the cytoplasm and are in turn used as templates for making proteins. That's not false. But, as Ball points out, that doesn't explain how some of my body cells develop into neurons and others, which have exactly the same DNA, into skin cells and others into blood cells and others into heart, lung, liver, spleen ...

By describing recent research on protein synthesis and embryo development, Ball shows that:

• Genes rarely have a unique function. The same gene which does one thing in a fruit fly can do something totally different in a human.
• Many morphologies are the result of combinations of genes.
• Genes can be 'switched' off or on by proteins. 
• Messenger RNA molecules seem to be made up of bits of heterogeneous nuclear RNA fragmented and then stitched together.
• The cells in multicellular life forms operate differently from bacterial cells.  
• Proteins fold because some sections of the protein chain attract water, others repel it. This also means that proteins can embed themselves into a cell wall.
• Changes in gene function can be caused by signals coming from outside the nucleus or even outside the cell itself. These signals can be electrochemical (as in neuron transmission), chemical (eg hormones), or even mechanical (eg when a cell is stretched). 
• Many developments involving proteins are combinatorial. This reduces 'noise' and makes the system more robust. If one enzyme doesn't work, another may be found to do the job. Molecular promiscuity with combinatorial fuzzy logic might be the only way for genetically identical cells to work together in diverse but specialised states. This also means that protein networks can develop new functions without losing old ones, which enables evolution to happen.
• Multicellularity has only happened twice: for plants and for animals (fungi don't count). There were significant changes in the ways that genes developed and communicated after the evolution of mammals and particularly placental mammals.  
• The epigenetic landscape is composed of a variety of bifurcating river valleys down which the cell tends to progress in a process called canalization. This landscape develops as the cells grow producing "a delicate dance of contingency and inevitability” like the growth of a city. (Ch 6) The valleys in the landscape can act as 'attractors' but genetic changes can alter where these attractors are.
• Cells have an awareness of their environment. Perhaps awareness of one’s surroundings is a fundamental feature of life.
• A random mixture of two morphogens, one an activator and one an inhibitor, in which the inhibitor diffused faster than the activator, creates patches in which one or the other morphogen predominates. This is responsible for eg patterned skins, the arrangement of hair follicles or feathers, the fractal branching of lung tissue, and even fingers (and fingerprints). 

This book also explained how a living cell, which appears to flout the second law of thermodynamics which insists that in an equilibrium system randomness tends to increase, can become increasingly organised. It points out that there are systems in physics, such as phase separation and crystallisation, which are inherently organised and that life appears to use these.  

I also learned:

• How tortoise shell cats get their markings and why 2999/3000 are female. 
• Why identical twins can be different from birth.
• Why planarian flatworms are effectively immortal. 
• How a human embryo develops and how an undeveloped embryo can be found inside the brain of itself developed twin. 
• That there is a gene called Sonic hedgehog. 
• How cells can 'request' the blood system to provide them with capillaries.
• Why humans mostly have their liver on the right, and their stomach and spleen on the left.

It was hard work. The information is very condensed and I needed to concentrate and take notes. But in the end I was rewarded in spectacular fashion. This is one of those books that provokes a paradigm shift, a revolution in the way one thinks.

Other brilliant books by Philip Ball that I have read include:

• Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another 
• H2O: A Biography of Water
• The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
• The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
• Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different 

Selected quotes:

• “Looking to the genome for an account of  how life works is rather like ... looking to a dictionary to understand how literature works.” (Prologue)
• “There has never been a machine made by humankind that works as cells do.” (Prologue)
• “Life is a hierarchical process, and each level has its own rules and principles.” (Prologue)
• “The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.” (Ch 1)
• “Cells commit to fates by noticing and assessing what their neighbours are doing. It's rather like voting with a show of hands: we might sneak a look at how others are voting before deciding.” (235)
• “Life doesn't make systems that can do or construct a single thing, that produces entities ... that embody a wide range of options ... In normal circumstances, the system converges on the outcome(s) favoured by natural selection, while still maintaining enough phenotypic variability to be evolvable. Evolution does not know ... what it is going to need tomorrow - so it must keep its options open.” (Ch 7)
• “Life ... can be considered as a computation that aims to optimise the acquisition, storage, and use of ... meaningful information.” (Ch 9) 

A superb book. August 2024; 460 pages

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

"The Feather Thief" by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Yet another wonderful book lent to me by my mate Fred whose other contributions include:

• A Time of Gifts: a wonderful travel book about a man walking through Europe between the wars; beautifully written
• Dynasty: the story of the first Roman emperors by the wonderful historian Tom Holland
• The Song of Achilles  a wonderful novel by Madeline Miller
• Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner; a memoir of a man who grew up in Germany during hyper-inflation and the rise of the Nazis

This book is about a flautist called Edwin who is obsessed with tying flies. The sort of flies that trout and salmon fishermen use. Except Edwin doesn't fish. He just likes tying as an art form. He is a member of a worldwide fly-tying community. And the problem they all have is that many flies are tied using feathers from birds who are now endangered and protected. So it is illegal to hunt them or trap them or kill them or take their feathers. This means that the feathers are in increasingly short supply. The major sources are old Victorian hats. Following the law of supply and demand this makes the highly sought after feathers increasingly expensive. So Edwin decides to break into the ornithological collection of the British Museum in Tring and steal some of their specimens of rare birds. 

Despite these bizarre details, this is a true story.

As with many such tales these days ( for example, The Mighty Dead: a superb analysis of the Iliad by an author who writes like a dream) the author tells the tale of his own obsessive  journey "into the feather underground, a world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers,cokeheads and big game hunters, ex-detectives and shady dentists" to track down the obsessives of the fly-tying community, to find the thief and, if possible, to retrieve some of the stolen specimens. Thus, the narrative opens with the crime, it then goes historical as the adventures of Alfred Russel Wallace, Victorian collector extraordinary and co-founder with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, are told, shipwreck and all, and then returning to the present day for Edwin's biography, the account of the police investigation and trial, and what happened next.

It's brilliant.


Many fascinating facts of which these are a small selection:

• “Alfred Russel Wallace stood on the quarterdeck of a burning ship, seven hundred miles off the coast of Bermuda, the planks heating beneath his feet, yellow smoke curling up through the cracks.” (first line)
• At the height of the Victorian collecting craze “Hats were designed with special compartments for storing specimens gathered on a stroll.” (p 18)
• The first birds of paradise skins “brought to Europe by Magellan's crew as a gift for the king of Spain in 1522, were missing their feet. ... leading Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, to name the species ... the footless bird of paradise. Many Europeans thus believed that the birds were inhabitants of a heavenly realm, always turning towards the sun, feeding on ambrosia and never descending to earth until their death. They thought the female laid her eggs on the back of her mate, incubating them as they sawed through the clouds.” (p 25 - 26)
• “Two and a half million years [ago] ... New Guinea ... emerged from the ocean just off the northern coast of Australia. Colliding tectonic plates drove up a spine of mountains that continue to grow faster than anywhere else on earth.” (p 30)
• “The deepwater strait between Bali and Lombok, which [Wallace] realised formed a dividing line between species found upon the Australian and Asian continental shelves, now appears on maps as ‘the Wallace line’.” (p 38)
• “Before the Hermes bag or Louboutin heel, the ultimate status indicator was a dead bird.” (p 46)
• “Entire bird skins were mounted on hats so ostentatiously large that women were forced to kneel in their carriages or ride with their heads out the window.” (p 47)
• “In 1775 ... there were twenty-five plumassiers in France. By 1860 there were 120, and by 1870 the number had skyrocketed to 280. So many people were working in the feather-plucking and bird-stuffing business that trade groups spring up to protect its workers, such as the Union of Raw Feather Merchants, the Union of Feather Dyers, and even a Society for Assistance to Children Employed in the Feather Industries.” (p 48)
• “When the Titanic went down in 1912, the most valuable and highly insured merchandise in its hold was forty crates of feathers.” (p 49)
• “In 1813 John James Audubon once travelled for three straight days under a single eclipsing horde of Passenger Pigeons.” (p 49 - 50) The species went extinct in 1914
• “By the end of the century, the sixty million American bison had been hunted down to three hundred.” (p 50)
• In 1496 “Wynkyn de Worde, a Dutch emigre running a newfangled printing press in Fleet Street in London. Published a Treatise of Fishing with an Angle”
• “Why should the rightful owner need to prove to someone in possession of stolen goods that they deserve to get them back?” (p 190)
• “Edwin and the feather underground were a bunch of historical fetishists, practising a ‘candy-ass, ridiculous, parasitic activity’.” (p 200)

July 2018; 261 pages

"Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" by Peter Godfrey-Smith

This is a beautifully written book about the intelligence of octopi and cuttlefish which are cephalopods. “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is ... because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” (p 9) Along the way it becomes an enquiry into what it means to have a consciousness. “For some animals, there's something it feels like to be such an animal. there is a self, of some kind, that experiences what goes on.” (p 10)

It starts tracing the evolution of the nervous system. After all, even bacteria can react to stimuli and therefore may be said to have some version of sentience:

• “The bacterium will swim in a straight line as long as the chemicals it senses seem better now than those it sensed a moment ago. If not, it’s preferable to change course.” (p 17)

The crucial factor is that the bacteria can in some sense detect the actions they themselves take. This feedback loop between sensory input and action and sensory input is the beginning of self awareness. And because one bacterium can detect things that other bacteria do it is the beginning of communication and socialisation. So when cells begin to get together in multicellular organisms we have the rudimentary mechanisms for a nervous system.

• “The receptors on the surfaces of bacterial cells are sensitive to many things, and these include chemicals that bacteria themselves tend to excrete” (p 18)
• “If a chemical is both produced and sensed by a particular kind of bacteria, it can be used by those bacteria to assess how many individuals of the same kind are around.” (p 18)
• “Chemicals that are made because they'll be perceived and responded to by others ... brings us to the threshold of signalling and communication.” (p 19)

At this stage I was getting excited. After all, Andy Clark in Surfing Uncertainty, working in the world of artificial intelligence, suggests that a computationally frugal solution for intelligence involves an organism making an expectation and comparing the sensory data with the expectation so that a simple error reduction algorithm can improve the expectation. This involves a feedback loop and here we see something similar being evolved from the simplest forms of cellular life.

G-S gives an example in technology developed to aid the blind. There is a system that uses a camera to change vision into tactile sensations on the skin of a blind person. The person soon learns to experience “objects located in space” BUT “only when the wearer is able to control the camera.” (p 80)

Of course, multicellular life had to evolve before cell specialisation could start developing proper nervous systems. But this wasn't as difficult as it might at first look. It has evolved independently more than once. “The transition to a multicellular form of life occurred many times, leading once to animals, once to plants, on other occasions to fungi, various seaweeds, and less conspicuous organisms.” (p 20)

And once predation begins (probably in the Cambrian) each organism must be aware of the others which adds further urgency to the evolution of sensory-action feedback loops. “From this point on, the mind evolved in response to other minds.” (p 36)

The only thing that makes animals different is that they have greater capacity to take actions and so need to be even faster at sensing their own actions. “All living things affect their environment by making and transforming chemicals, and also by growing and sometimes by moving, but it is muscle that gives rise to rapid, coherent action on large spatial scales. It makes possible the manipulation of objects, the deliberate and rapid transformation of what is around us.” (p 82) This “interaction between perception and action” is critical. (p 83)

And the next stage for feedback loops is our own thoughts. G-S suggests that the internalization of language, “Vygotsky’s transition ... was also an important evolutionary event.” (p 152) He spends some time on inner speech:

• “When we look inside, most people find a flow of inner speech, a monologue that accompanies much of our conscious life.” (p 138)
• “Ordinary speech functions both as input and output ... We both speak and hear, and we can hear what we say. Even talking to yourself out loud can be a useful way of approaching a problem.” (p 144)
• “In speech, the creation of an efference copy enables you to compare your spoken words to an inner image of them; this can be used to work out whether the sound ‘came out right’.” (p 145)
• This then means that we can “put together sentences that we don't intend to say, sentences and fragments of language that have a purely internal role. ... We can put things in order, bring possibilities together, can list and instruct and exhort.” (p 147) This is particularly useful for Kahneman’s [ref Thinking, Fast and Slow] “System 2” thinking, the “slow, deliberate style of thinking we engage in when we encounter novel situations ... [which] tries to follow proper rules of reasoning, and tries to look at things from more than one side.” (p 147)
• This resonates with the “workspace theory of consciousness” (p 149)
• Inner speech is especially prominent when “we bring attention to bear on our own thought processes, reflect on them, and experience them as our own.” (p 152)
• “When you write something for yourself to read ... it is a communication between your present self and a future self.” (p 155)

There is also an interesting argument about ageing. Why do species age at different rates: trees last hundreds of years, humans perhaps a hundred, cephalopods mostly two? The idea is that “When molecular accidents put mutations into the population ... the late-acting mutations will be cleaned out less efficiently than early-acting ones.” (p 166) “So mutations with good effects early in life and the bad effects later in life will accumulate; natural selection will favour them.” (p 167) Therefore some populations have evolved such that the bad mutations tend to affect them later in life ... and it seems like spontaneous ageing. The life-span is thus partly a matter of evolutionary chance and partly governed by the balance of reproduction and predation. When the octopus lost its hard shell it became much more susceptible to predation which meant that it had to live its life a lot quicker because, sooner or later, a sharp-toothed fish would eat it. Presumably humans are mostly prey to diseases which, sooner or later, will get them, so they are able to evolve genes which allow then to fight the diseases for a while even at the cost of dying later.

Other thoughts from this brilliant book:

• Cuttlefish sometimes deeply ignore visitors to their watery world. “Being ignored so deeply makes you wonder if you are entirely real in their watery world, as if you are one of those ghosts who does not realise they are against.” (p 118)
• “When animals did crawl onto the dry land, they took the sea with them. All the basic activities of life occur in water-filled cells bounded by membranes, tiny containers whose insides are remnants of the sea.” (p 200)

A readable and intensely thought-provoking book. March 2018; 204 pages

The author has now written a sequel: Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness

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

"Consilience" by Edward O Wilson

This far-ranging and brilliantly written book pleads the cause that science should be united with the social sciences, and the humanities, and the arts, and even ethics and religion, on the basis of the scientific method. The thesis is that biology, which accepts that is is linked to chemistry and physics, is the basis for psychology through the evolution by natural selection within the human brain of epigenetic rules, and that scientific psychology is (or should be) the basis for sociology, anthropology and economics. Wilson is predominantly a socio-biologist and presents compelling evidence for his point of view. This book thus complements, supports and is supported by Steven Pinker's brilliant book The Blank Slate.

He starts by celebrating the power of science:  "The idea of the unity of science ... has been tested in acid baths of experiment and logic and enjoyed repeated vindication. It has suffered no decisive defeats. At least not yet." (p 3). To those who fear the 'mad scientist', variously mythologised as Frankenstein, the forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden, and Icarus, the ultimate in hubris, Wilson responds: "Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings." (p 5)

He believes that the romantics led the reaction against the Enlightenment ideal of consilience, the unit of knowledge, when  Rousseau "invented the deadly abstraction of the 'general will' ... the rule of justice agreed upon by assemblies of free people whose interest is only to serve the welfare of the society and of each person in it ... Those who do not conform to the general will ... are deviants subject to necessary force by the assembly. There is no other way to achieve a truly egalitarian democracy." (p 14) but he points out that  "The Enlightenment ... was less a determined swift river than a lacework of deltaic streams working their way along twisted channels" (p 21) and reminds us that "What counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment." (p 22) "Reductionism, given its unbroken strong of successes ... may seem today the obvious best way to have constructed knowledge of the physical world." (p 31) "The cutting edge of science is reductionism ... It is the research strategy employed to find points of entry into otherwise impenetrably complex systems." (p 58) The present situation is one in which the "natural sciences have expanded to reach the borders of the social sciences and humanities" (p 71)

Wilson is at one with Dennett is his claims that "Mind is a stream of conscious and subconscious experience. It is at root the coded representation of sensory impressions and the memory and imaginations of sensory impressions." (p 119) and that "Consciousness consists of the parallel processing of" networks of neurons. These "create scenarios that flow back and forth through time. The scenarios are a virtual reality." (p 120) He thus denies the Cartesian theatre: "Who or what within the brain monitors all this activity? No one. Nothing. The scenarios are not seen by some other part of the brain. They just are. ... There is no single stream of consciousness in which all information is brought together by an executive ego. There are instead multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to conscious thought and then phase out. ... The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity." (p 120)

I think therefore I am? Wilson questions the identity of the Self, seeing it as an actor improvising: "The self, an actor in a perpetually changing drama, lacks full command of its actions." (p 131) Free will is an illusion: "We make decisions for reasons we can sense only vaguely, and seldom if ever understand fully. Ignorance of this kind is conceived by the conscious mind as uncertainty to be resolved; hence freedom of choice is ensured. An omniscient mind with total commitment to pure reason and fixed goals would lack free will." (p 131): this implies that an omniscient God could not have free will; this is a fascinating theological restriction on God that I need to think about.

He revisits the nature-nurture debate, accepting that culture affects us but claiming that culture is an amalgam of the evolution of epigenetic rules which are prescribed by genes. "We know that virtually all of human behaviour is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact." (p 138) "Culture is reconstructed each generation collectively in the minds of individuals ... culture can grow indefinitely large ... But the fundamental biasing influence of the epigenetic rules, being genetic and ineradicable, stays constant." (p 139). This creates an unchangeable human nature. He has a great example showing how nature and nurture interact in the arrowleaf plant which has arrowhead leaves on land, lily-pad leaves in shallow water, grass-like ribbon leaves in deep water. Similarly, humans genetically predisposed to be fat can be thin with a significant dieting regime and "Later-borns, who identify least with the roles and beliefs of their parents, tend to become more innovative and accepting of political and scientific revolutions than do first-borns. As a result they have, on average, contributed more than first-borns have to cultural change throughout history." (p 152)

Culture itself evolves and Wilson suggests that this is because cultural evolution can facilitate survival faster than genetic evolution, thus enabling faster adaptation to environmental change and potentially explaining the success of our species. "The more successful epigenetic rules have spread through the population along with the genes that prescribe the rules. As a consequence the human species has evolved genetically by natural selection in behaviour. ... Certain cultural norms also survive and reproduce better than competing norms ... Culture allows a rapid adjustment to changes in the environment through finely tuned adaptations." (p 140) Culture exists in other species: "Wild chimps regularly invent and use tools. And the particular kinds of artifacts they invent, just as in human culture, are often limited to local populations." (p 145). 

He casts a new light on rationality itself! "I suggest that rational choice is the casting about among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules." (p 199) But epigenetic rules ("rules of thumb that allow organisms to find rapid solutions to problems encountered in the environment") (p 213) are "typically emotion driven" (p 214) so "Rational calculation is based on surges of competing emotions." (p 227)#

He is fascinating on a wide range of topics including pre-verbal communication which is probably "our primate heritage" and includes:

• "a male pheromone concentrated in perspiration and fresh urine. Perceived variously as musk or sandalwood, it changes sexual attraction and warmth of mood during social contacts." (p 174)
• Touching: strangers: arms only; other parts of body for more familiar acquaintances; more familiarity with opposite sex (p 174)
• "Dilation of the pupils": greater in women (p 174)
• "Pushing the tongue out and spitting are aggressive displays of rejection; flicking the tongue around the lips is a social invitation, used most commonly during flirtation" (p 174)
• Close eyes & wrinkle nose: rejection (p 174)
• "Opening the mouth while pulling down the corners of the mouth to expose the lower teeth is to threaten with contempt." (p 175)

"The optimum sexual instinct of men ... is to be assertive and ruttish, while that of women is to be coy and selective. Men are expected to be more drawn than women to pornography and prostitution. And in courtship, men are expected to stress exclusive sexual access and guarantees of paternity, while women consistently emphasize commitment of resources and material security." (p 187)

The theory of the family: "The basic assumption is evolution by natural selection" (p 214)
"Families are basically unstable, but the least so in those controlling high-quality resources. Dynasties ... arise in territories permanently rich in resources." (p 215)
"The closer the genetic relationships of the family members .. the higher the degree of cooperation." (p 215)
"The closer the genetic relationship of the family members, the lower the frequency of sexual conflict." (p 215)
"Breeding males invest less in offspring when paternity is uncertain. If the family consists of a single conjugal pair, and one of the parents is lost, the opposite-sex offspring compete with the surviving parent for breeder status. When the father dies, for example, a still fecund mother is likely to enter into conflict with a son over the status of a mate he may newly acquire, and a son is likely to discourage his mother from establishing a new sexual relationship." (p 215)
"Stepfamilies are less stable than biologically intact families." (p 215)
"Reproduction within a family ... is increasingly shared when there is an improvement in the alternative option for subordinate members to disperse and start families of their own. Such forbearance is greatest of all when the members are genetically very close and when the cooperating individuals are siblings rather than parents and offspring." (p 215)

Economists tend to use "folk psychology" (p 223) Their "principle of rational choice" assumes "narrow self-interest" but people are also "variously altruistic, loyal, spiteful, and masochistic." (p 224)

"The arts are not solely shaped by errant genius out of historical circumstances and idiosyncratic personal experience. The roots of that inspiration date back in deep history to the genetic origins of the human brain, and are permanent." (p 242)

"Either ethical precepts, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience or else they are human inventions." (p 265) But if ethical rules "increased the survival and reproductive success of those who conformed" then epigenetic ethical rules could have evolved. (p 275)

"Rarely do you see an argument that opens with the simple statement: This is my starting point and it could be wrong." (p 268)

Pascal's wager: I might as well believe: if I am right I get eternity in heaven, if I am wrong I lose nothing. This could be turned around: "If fear and hope and reason dictate that you must accept the faith, do so, but treat this world as if there is none other." (p 274)

The naturalistic fallacy (to go from is to ought) is itself a fallacy: "To translate is into ought makes sense if we attend to the objective meaning of ethical precepts ... they are no more than principles of the social contract hardened into rules and dictates, the behavioral codes that members of a society fervently wish others to follow and are willing to accept themselves for the common good." (p 278)

"One hunter considers breaking away from the others to look for an antelope on his own. If successful he will gain a large quantity of meat and hide ... But he knows from experience that his chances of success alone are very low ... In addition ... he will suffer animosity from the others for lessening their own prospects." (p 281) therefore those humans who cooperate have greater reproductive success and cooperation evolves. Therefore the prisoner's dilemma can be solved if "Honor does exist among thieves" (p 281)

"I found it hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago." (p 4)

At then end he offers two warnings. 

First: we are destroying our environment. "At best an environmental bottleneck is coming in the twenty-first century." (p 320) "Economic miracles ... occur most often when countries consume not only their own material resources, including oil, timber, water, and agricultural produce, but those of other countries as well." (p 325) Life is becoming increasingly fragile:
"The more knowledge people acquire, the more they are able to increase their numbers and to alter the environment, whereupon the more they need new knowledge just to stay alive." (p 302)
"Greed demands an explanation." (p 302)

Secondly, we are about to become in charge of our own evolution.
"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. ... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become. Our childhood having ended, we will hear the true voice of Mephistopheles." (p 309)

This is an amazing book. July 2016; 333 pages 

"Deep Time" by Henry Gee

This is a book about palaeontology, the study of fossils. That makes it sound very dry and dusty. By Henry Gee knows how to tell a good story and every chapter is full of reminiscences, such as when he was hunting for human remains with the Leakeys, his student work experience classifying fish fossils in the Natural History Museum or and who went to which pub during the disputes that introduced cladistics to palaeontology.

I also adored his chapter headings which show evidence of a wide range of reading far beyond I would have expected from a fossil hunter. But I guess you need a decent stash of books for the long dark desert nights:

• Chapter 1 is called Nothing Besides Remains, quoting Ozymandias but adding a nice double meaning
• Chapter Two: Hunting Unicorns, refers to a essay by Jorge Luis Borges about Kafka
• Chapter 3: There are More Things, quotes Hamlet's remark to Horatio
• And Chapter 7: Are We Not Men? is from a work by H.G.Wells

Gee's main thrust is to consider palaeontology as a science. He points out that fossils represent a few brief glimpses of bones out of millions of years of evolution. He reminds us that evolution is not purposeful nor is it a progression and that if we try to understand evolution from the point of view of creating adaptations that we see in the modern world we are assuming that the environmental conditions millions of years ago that led to the creation of a species were the same as now. So, for example, feathered birds might have had an evolutionary advantage millions of years ago for reasons we cannot now guess and it might have been entirely an accident that they are also useful skin coverings for an animal that flies.

From Gee's point of view the brilliant thing about cladistics is that it doesn't assume any heritage or ancestral linkages. It simply groups fossils by their features into 'sister-groups' and uses the Principle of Parsimony to derive the best possible tree diagram summarising relationships between the individuals.

Gee makes his arguments thoroughly; sometimes I thought points were repeated more than they needed to be. He also explains cladistics on a very simple level and I would like to have known a little more about these techniques, especially since cladistics can be used to explore the relationships (and thus possibly infer the ancestry) of Chaucerian manuscripts and of languages.

But on the whole this was a thoroughly enjoyable Science book about an area of Science I had not previously believed could be so much fun.