Skip to main content

The Single Helix – Steve Jones ****

If you talk to fiction publishers, you’d get the impression that no one likes short stories. Short story collections, it seems, just don’t sell. Yet you would think with today’s hectic lifestyle, that they’d be ideal. You can slip one in on the tube/metro/subway. You can fit one into your lunch break. Or maybe read a couple at bedtime. And unlike working through a small section of a novel, you have the reward of completion and closure. I find the public’s reluctance to read short stories odd – I love them.
Similarly, in non-fiction, and popular science in particular, there’s a certain wariness of collections of short pieces. When they’re written by different people, this wariness can be justified, but in a book like The Single Helix, where Steve Jones has collected short pieces he wrote for a newspaper, the effect is very pleasing. Each piece is short enough to fit into that frantic lifestyle. Although there’s inevitably a slight bias towards the biological side, Jones manages to cover a whole swathe of different aspects of science, and the relationship of science to society, in these hundred brief explorations.
This reviewer once had an argument with the publishing director of a UK publisher over the nature of popular science. I believe good popular science should work as bedtime reading, while she thought it had to be hard enough that the reader should be forced to pore over it and make notes in the hope of understanding it. In this instance, it’s very much my school of popular science – each piece is light, highly readable, and informative without being hard work.
Perhaps the only criticism is that the quality of the content varies. This is almost inevitable when writing a regular column – sometimes you struggle to come up with anything of great import. In some of the pieces, there’s not an awful lot of science. Many are well provided with fascinating facts, but some have a very small scientific hook that enables Jones to go off on a bit of a rant on a personal hot topic. Occasionally, too, the brevity of the piece makes it a little frustrating. In one, for example, we’re told that “a single chimp social group in West Africa contains as much genetic diversity as the whole human population.” It would be great to know how that diversity is expressed (call me apeist, but visually chimps seem much less diverse than humans – where are the red haired chimps?)
Another example of variability of content is in tone. Mostly, Jones has a wonderfully approachable, warm style that makes what he is saying ideal for his audience. Now and again, though – most obviously when he has a dig at poor old Prince Charles – that most evil of academic sins is in evidence. Just briefly, his tone suggest that he despises the common herd, and specifically those who dare to have any form of mystical or religious belief. There’s something about academia that makes professors and the like all too aware of their own sense of superiority. To be fair to Steve Jones, he rarely does allow this to come through, but there’s just the occasional slip. That shouldn’t put you off, though (and you may even enjoy the odd sly dig) – these are delicious little written canapés of popular science, just waiting to be eagerly consumed.

Paperback:  
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