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
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more