Skip to main content

Mutants – Armand Leroi *****

A freak show. It’s not a nice term – not a nice concept, but something that has the terrible ability to fascinate at the same time as it horrifies.
This is a subject where academic detachment is inconceivable. The whole concept of being entertained by the deformed is so disgusting (and so appealing to many) that it would seem a good popular science book on the subject of human mutation is practically impossible. Yet Armand Leroi has achieved it.
It’s hard to believe that the accompanying TV series can manage this so well. However good Leroi’s intentions, TV can’t help but turn this topic into prurient viewing. And it doesn’t help that in the UK that the next programme in the broadcaster’s schedule is Big Brother – a show that is totally dependent on the voyeuristic enjoyment of the human condition and suffering of others. (A recent example of this was when the occupants of the Big Brother house had to sit on a roundabout that was spun until they vomited.) Arguably the TV version of Mutants should never have been made. But – an immense but – the book manages to walk the tightrope superbly.
Perhaps it would have been even better to emphasize this distinction without the illustrations, but that apart, the distancing brought by the printed word makes it possible to deal with this delicate topic with real humanity. What Leroi’s book is about is not the horrified delight of the peep show, nor the opportunistic exhibition of the likes of Joseph Merrick, but the biological causes of human mutation and the lessons we can learn about the way we are all put together. And it is remarkably brilliant at doing this.
Reading Leroi’s description of the minute complexities of our gradual construction in the womb, what is remarkable is not that there are mutants, but there are so few. Or at least seemingly so – for as Leroi points out we are all mutants, it’s just that some are more mutated than others.
If your idea of what mutants are is formed from watching the movie X-Men, it’s time for a radical re-think. We all know, as the portentous X-Men voiceover tells us, that mutation is an essential. Without it there would have been no evolution of the human race. But Leroi shows us both mutation’s dark side – the sad but essential cost of being able to develop in this way – and the lessons that modern biologists can learn, both from natural mutation and from the experimental modification (in animals, not humans) of genetic material. These experiments themselves can seem distastefully gruesome – but the balance of knowledge is one we have to weigh carefully.
If you had any doubt about getting this book because of the “freak factor” – and I have to confess I did – put that concern aside. Leroi is not a modern-day sideshow huckster, encouraging you in to see the two-headed calf and the bearded lady. Instead he brilliantly (and most of all, humanely and very readably) lays bare the realities of our human development. Highly recommended.

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