Skip to main content

Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch – Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen ****

When the whole “Science of…” or “Physics of…” business started off it all seemed pretty logical. Titles like Physics of Star Trek were eminently sensible. Star Trek may be fiction, but there’s a whole lot of science in there. Discworld, though, is a different kettle of kippers. This is fantasy – in fact such pure fantasy that the Discworld’s physical laws aren’t the same as ours.
It would see at first sight that this is a huge disadvantage – but the trio of Discworld originator Pratchett, and technical duo Stewart and Cohen turn the whole thing on its head and make it a great plus – so much so that this is the third volume in the series, and doesn’t suffer despite this.
The way the Science of Discworld books work is quite different from other members of the genre. The narrative alternates between fiction chapters, in which the magicians of Discworld merrily interfere with the workings of a toy universe they keep in little ball (it so happens to be our universe), and non-fiction chapters describing aspects of the real physical world that are brought out by the interference of the magicians. It’s a masterly conceit, and it works superbly.
This volume is largely dedicated to Darwin, both in the fiction (in which our world slips into a near alternative where Darwin is the Revd. Darwin, and writes Theology of Species, until all is stumblingly rescued by the wizards) and in the science chapters, which not only give a good explanation of evolution, and many of the ways it is misunderstood, but also include some highly enjoyable diversions, covering everything from steam engines to alternate universes.
To be honest, the book deserves five stars, were it not for an unfortunately vindictive chapter. More on that in a second. There were a couple of other minor moans (neither of which would lose the five stars, though). Pratchett fans will find the fictional parts just a little forced, as fiction always is when it’s being educational – it’s not as good as pure Pratchett by any stretch of the imagination, but is still highly entertaining. And though it’s hard to mention natural selection without criticising those who put forward intelligent design as an alternative, it wasn’t necessary to hammer this message home so unsubtly.
But the real disappointment is the chapter “secrets of life”, where, frankly, the authors come across as snotty and one-upmanish. They berate “popular science writers” for getting it wrong about evolution, portraying a wild misunderstanding of evolution that I’ve not seen in any decent popular science book written in the last 20 years. (They’re particularly hard on poor old Richard Dawkins, slightly more justified than most of their attack, but referring to something written a long time ago.) Admittedly their attack includes “popular science writers and TV journalists”, and sadly the time compression needed to get an explanation of genetics, DNA or evolution into 15 seconds does make some TV science fairly shaky, but even so there was no need for the rabid savaging. What particularly irritates is the way they give Martin Rees and two other astronomers a verbal kicking for daring to discuss a biological topic. Apart from falling into the common error of thinking the best explainers of science are specialists in an area – often they’re too close and are hopeless at explaining the topic to the general public – Pratchett, Stewart and Cohen (a fantasy writer, a mathematician and a biologist) have the cheek to do this, despite spending vast swathes of previous Science of Discworld books (and a fair amount of this one) on physics. Sauce for the goose, guys!
However, irritations with that chapter apart, this is a great book, and we’ll forgive them, even if they can’t forgive others, and say this is a must-have addition to any popular science collection. It’s rare for a popular science book to be a page turner, but this one truly is. Brilliant.
 Paperback:  
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more