Douglas Palmer – Four Way Interview

Douglas Palmer is a a science writer and lecturer on Earth Sciences for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. He is the author of more than 20 books, most recently Earth: in 100 groundbreaking discoveries. He is a consultant for BBC Wildlife Magazine and a regular contributor to New Scientist and Science magazines.

Why science?

Whilst the sex lives of footballers and celebs undoubtedly have a certain interest, the science of planet Earth has more variety, drama and relevance in the greater scheme of things. Whilst in a year or two the shenanigans of most of our dear little celebs will have evaporated in the ether, the science of Earth will still be impacting upon our everyday lives, whether we like it or not and whether we are aware of it or not – you have been warned.

Why this book?

Earth’s story is an ever ending one with new insights, problems and resolutions emerging every day but still very little of the science news gets through our media quagmire. This book is my latest effort to try and bring some of the science news – both good and bad to light, in what is hopefully a readable and interesting way.

What’s next?

I have just launched my website, but it just has basic stuff about my previous books. Now the work begins as I want to use it to pass on to any interested reader updates on stories I have already written about and new science stories that I find interesting.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

This week’s Nature journal has a great news story about Archaeopteryx, which is one of the most important fossil finds ever made as it provided good evidence for the evolution of birds from reptiles. Its discovery came just after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and provided the first convincing support for his evolutionary theory from the fossil record. Ever since Archaeopteryx has been seen as the earliest known and most basal true bird. However, a new discovery of a feathered bird-dinosaur from China and its analysis is questioning whether Archaeopteryx was really the most primitive bird. This research will generate a considerable debate and help us re-evaluate the early origin of the birds.

Comments

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 ...

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...

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, ...

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