"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 Information" by James Gleick

I have previously read 'Chaos' by this author which is probably the definitive lay guide to Chaos Theory so I was expecting another fascinating and challenging book. I was not disappointed.

He started with Claude Shannon considering the mathematical theory of communication; he then leapt backwards to jungle drums and the redundancy necessary to send information through a very noisy channel and quickly into writing, dictionaries, Babbage's Analytical Engine, telegraphy and telephony. This brought us back to Shannon who worked with Alan Turing, we considered bits and Turing Computers.

And then the book got more difficult and more magical. Because information theory seeped into biology. Genes are messages. In a sense life is all about information transfer. Richard Dawkins entered with the 'Selfish Gene': we are just vehicles for the transmission of genetic information. If the meaning of our lives is merely to transmit information then why does that have to be in the form of DNA? Richard Dawkins also invented the concept of the meme. Shakespeare may have had no great grandchildren and thus his genetic inheritance is dead but his memes have spread around the world: memetically he is the father of us all. And thus life has an alternative meaning to the passing on of genes: it could be about passing on your memes. Life is all about information transfer.

But so is the universe. Shannon realised the correspondence between information and entropy: the forms of the mathematical formulae are the same. As the second law of thermodynamics ('entropy increases') governs the direction of time, so the universe can be interpreted in terms of information. Perhaps, Gleick speculates, the observation that the universe is particulate, made of ever smaller individual particles, is because information is particulate with the irreducible fundamental particle of information being the bit.

I got lost when we came to quantum entanglement, qubits, and teleportation. Apparently the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen paradox was true.

Then, after I had swum out of my depth, shallow water rescued me with a gallop through blogs and wikis and the sense that we are now being drowned by the information flood.

Wow! What a journey. A wonderful read.

April 2011; 426 pages
Gleick, J. 2011 The Information: A history, a theory, a flood London Fourth Estate

These are the notes I made as I travelled:

• "The Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne" (p25)
• "The persistence of writing made it possible to impose structure on what was known about the world"  (p36)
• On p53 he tells us that the writer of the first English dictionary, Cawdrey, wrote "wordes in one sentence and words in the next" on his title page but the facsimile of the title page on p52 uses 'words' only.
• The word spell "first meant to speak or to utter. Then it meant to read, slowly, letter by letter" (p53): a link with the concept of a magic spell?
• The concept of feedback, positive or negative, is quintessentially about information (p238)
• Once psychologists had cottoned onto the idea of information they could model perception as a channel carrying information from the outside world to the brain. They started measuring "the likelihood that listeners would hear a word correctly when they knew it was just one of a few alternatives" and "the effect of trying to understand two conversations at once" (p258)
• Whereas Physics works with Laws, molecular biology is understood in terms of algorithms (p299)
• Samuel Butler claimed a hen is an egg's way of making another egg (p302). Daniel Dennett in 1995 said 'A scholar is just a library's way of making another library' (p303)
• "The history of life begins with the accidental appearance of molecules complex enough to serve as building blocks - replicators. The replicator is an information carrier. It survives and spreads by copying itself. The copies must be coherent and reliable but need not be perfect; on the contrary, for evolution to proceed, errors must appear." Alexander Cairns-Smith suggested that, before DNA, "replicators appeared in sticky layers of clay crystals: complex models of silicate minerals." (p304)
• Ideas have 'spreading power', 'infectivity'. Ideas evolve.  (p311) Dawkins meets Sperry meets Gladwin's Tipping Point. The infectivity of ideas is demonstrated by fashions and by viral videos. The evolution of ideas is demonstrated by Chinese Whispers (although this also shows that idea copying is so unreliable that it would be unlikely to lead to evolution in the biological sense).
• Greogry Chaitin defines randomness in terms of algorithm length. The longer the algorithm needed to generate a sequence the more random the sequence is (and the more information the sequence contains). "Looking for patterns - seeking the order amid chaos - is what scientists do, too." (p332) "This is what science always seeks: a simple theory that accounts for a large set of facts and allows for /// prediction of events still to come. It is the famous Occam's razor." (pp332-333)
• Matter falling into a black hole contains information. (p357) Hawking radiation has zero information. (p358). "If the black hole evaporates, where does the information go? According to quantum mechanics, information may never be destroyed" because otherwise the laws of Physics are not reversible in time on a microscopic scale (p358). Hawking initially thought that the information escaped into another universe (p358) but later conceded that this does not happen (p359) although I don't quite understand how he proved this.
• Information as entropy implies that thought requires energy although the thermodynamics of computation shows that the energy is only used up during erasure: "Forgetting takes work." (p362)
• "It remains difficult to know when and how much to trust the wisdom of crowds ... to be distinguished from the madness of crowds as chronicled in 1841 by Charles Mackay, who declared that people 'go mad in herds' .... Crowds turn all too quickly into mobs, with their time-honored manifestations: manias, bubbles, lynch mobs, flash mobs, crusades, mass hysteria, herd mentality, goose-stepping, conformity, groupthink - all potnetially magnified by network effects and studied under the rubric of information cascades." (p420)
• In 2008 Google's warning system for flu based on web searches for 'flu' "discovered outbreaks a week sooner than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention" (p421)

Other great books in this area include:

• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts  
• sync by Steven Strogatz
• At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman about fitness landscapes
• How Nature Works by Per Bak about sandpiles and self organized criticality; an excellent explanation of complexity science
• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is a brilliant introduction to this whole field
• Smart swarm by Peter Miller
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes