Freaks of Nature – Mark S. Blumberg ***

This is an interesting book to set alongside Armand Leroi’s remarkable book Mutants. As a pure reading experience, Mutants is without doubt streets ahead. Leroi’s style is much more readable and engaging, where Blumberg tends to the pompous and resorts to academic pronouncement. However he does have a good criticism of the dependence of Mutants on a genetic basis for unusual physical formation in animals and humans. After all, as Blumberg points out, human beings have produced quite dramatic variants through environmental pressures – head and foot binding, for instance. Development is as important to the production of freaks of nature as is the genetic material and its flaws.

That said, Mutants is, not surprisingly, about, well, mutants – so it’s hardly surprising that this is the main thrust of Leroi’s story. But the distinction does give Blumberg a broader canvas to work with. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is Blumberg’s stress on the way animals develop over and above pure genetic shaping of evolution. It gives some interesting insights into the nature of species and variation. We see just what a delicate process the development process is – and how those who have not formed along normal lines have developed mechanisms to cope.

The blurb on the back calls this book ‘beautifully written’ and calls Blumberg a ‘scientist-writer who can sweep us along’ – I’m afraid I couldn’t warm to this book, but do recognize it has an important message for those who see everything as written in the genes.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

Vector - Robyn Arianrhod ****

This is a remarkable book for the right audience (more on that in a moment), but one that's hard to classify. It's part history of science/maths, part popular maths and even has a smidgen of textbook about it, as it has more full-on mathematical content that a typical title for the general public usually has. What Robyn Arianrhod does in painstaking detail is to record the development of the concept of vectors, vector calculus and their big cousin tensors. These are mathematical tools that would become crucial for physics, not to mention more recently, for example, in the more exotic aspects of computing. Let's get the audience thing out of the way. Early on in the book we get a sentence beginning ‘You likely first learned integral calculus by…’ The assumption is very much that the reader already knows the basics of maths at least to A-level (level to start an undergraduate degree in a 'hard' science or maths) and has no problem with practical use of calculus. Altho

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Search This Blog