Skip to main content

The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being - Alice Roberts *****

A few years back, I went to see my doctor. I’d been experiencing a number of apparently unrelated minor ‘symptoms’. I wanted to make sure the symptoms really were minor and unrelated, and not due to some more serious, underlying, undiagnosed condition. One of my symptoms was a recurring, dull pain in my left shoulder. I could never work out precisely where the pain was coming from, but it was, I explained, 'definitely somewhere in the shoulder region.'

My doctor smiled and said she knew exactly what my problem was, as she experienced it too! Like me, she suffered occasional bouts of acid reflux in her stomach. When acid reflux kicks in, excess gases expand the stomach wall, putting pressure on your diaphragm. One of the nerves associated with the diaphragm runs a convoluted route via the left shoulder blade and hooks up with the rest of the nervous system in the neck. So, when my acid reflux kicked in, I experienced pain signals that seemed to be coming from my shoulder, but which were actually coming from my diaphragm.

Thanks to Alice Roberts’s excellent book The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being, I now know the culprit to be one of my two phrenic nerves. It turns out the phrenic nerves’ convoluted paths through my body are a consequence of both our species’ evolutionary history, and the complex way in which the unfolding blob that was to become me developed in the womb.

Alice Roberts is my favourite TV science presenter. She has a rare talent for simplifying scientific ideas without dumbing them down. I don’t know whether she ever has to stand her ground against producers exhibiting the modern preference for simplistic explanations, but I like to think she occasionally has to insist on being allowed to use (and explain) the correct scientific terminology. In other words, to treat her audience like grown-ups.

I’m glad to report Roberts writes in very much the same style as she presents. There is plenty of scientific terminology in this book, and some of the concepts explained are complex, but the writing simplifies without surrendering to the simplistic. It’s the sort of writing that makes you feel cleverer simply for having read it. Being treated like a grown-up can have that effect on people.

The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being takes us on a head-to-toe (then back up to the arms) tour of the human body. It shows how the vestiges of our evolutionary history are written into our bones and organs. Our bodies are compromises, constrained by physics, and by our heritage: Inelegant Design, as I like to think of it, in stark contrast to the Intelligent Design our bodies would presumably exhibit, had they really been put together from scratch by an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent creator. It’s a subject that interests me very much, sneaking its way several times into my own book, On the Moor: science, history and nature on a country walk.

But The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being is not just about pointing out our design flaws. It celebrates the marvellous, frankly bonkers, way in which our bodies are constructed in the womb. It explains what we can tell about our evolutionary predecessors by looking both at their remains, and at our own bodies. It discusses conflicting hypotheses about various bodily structures, and how we now know some of these to be wrong. And it does all this with charm, intelligence, appropriate humour, and excellent line-illustrations courtesy of the author.

Originally published on the www.richardcarter.com and reproduced with permission.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Richard Carter

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

The Naked Sun (SF) - Isaac Asimov ****

In my read through of all six of Isaac Asimov's robot books, I'm on the fourth, from 1956 - the second novel featuring New York detective Elijah Baley. Again I'm struck by how much better his book writing is than that in the early robot stories. Here, Baley, who has spent his life in the confines of the walled-in city is sent to the Spacer planet of Solaria to deal with a murder, on a mission with political overtones. Asimov gives us a really interesting alternative future society where a whole planet is divided between just 20,000 people, living in vast palace-like structures, supported by hundreds of robots each.  The only in-person contact between them is with a spouse (and only to get the distasteful matter of children out of the way) or a doctor. Otherwise all contact is by remote viewing. This society is nicely thought through - while in practice it's hard to imagine humans getting to the stage of finding personal contact with others disgusting, it's an intere

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur