Skip to main content

Being Me – Pete Moore *****

Doing something really different with a popular science book is both difficult and risky. Pete Moore has largely pulled this off in this unusual and personal exploration of what it means to be human.
The book is divided into sections, each addressing a different aspect of our human nature – embodied, conscious, genetic, historic, related, material, spiritual and so on. In each, Moore gives us a view of a different part of the complex mix that is a human being. If the content had just been Moore’s thoughts, the book would not have been particularly inspiring (not a criticism of the author’s ability to think, just the limitation of one person’s view), but what makes it so successful is that each of the sections is developed around one or more interviews with people who Moore sees as embodying the particular component (though, of course, like all of us, they have the other components as well).
Mostly this works remarkably effectively. Moore gives us a mix of scientific and philosophical theory, the interviews, and his personal view, including enough detail from his viewpoint of the interviews to make them more than a sterile set of quotes. The section that works least well, emphasizing the importance of the real people featured in the book, is the one on “the conscious being” which piles in too many pages of theory and isn’t so strongly based around the interviews.
This is a very personal book. The chances are you won’t agree with everything. But that’s not a bad thing with a topic like this. The section that most raised my eyebrows in this respect was the “social being” one, where a lot of focus is put on how modern society is lacking the social thread that is part of human nature, and that this isn’t good for us. Moore contrasts this with the African concept of ubuntu, which describes an intertwining of a human being with his fellow men and the environment, which Moore suggests leads to a much better support mechanism. This may be true, but makes a doubtful example. Moore does point out the paradox of the sometimes endemic violence in the same communities, but brushes this aside. I’m not sure this is wise. If part of the requirement for ubuntu is tribalism (which seems highly likely – it’s much easier to have strong social loyalty when it’s “us versus them”), then it comes at too high a price, as Rwanda and many other strife-torn nations can testify. This isn’t an ideal contrast to the isolation of the Western individual.
Inevitably – and Moore notes this – the book can’t be comprehensive. There are plenty of defining characteristics (Moore mentions language; I would think of creativity) that aren’t covered. That doesn’t really matter, though. The fact is that Moore has managed to paint a superb picture of the human being, using a scientific perspective, but admitting that science alone isn’t enough. If you thought you had seen it all when it comes to popular science, think again.

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

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...
Post a Comment
Read more