Skip to main content

A World From Dust - Ben McFarland ***

This is, without doubt, one of the strangest popular science books I've ever read. A quote in the blurb says 'this book is very approachable for people with a minimal background in chemistry,' though given the author of this remark is a professor of geobiology, it's tempting to wonder how he knows what would be approachable to such a person. 

 Where he's definitely right, though, is when he says 'in ways that have not been attempted by earlier writers on the topic.' I have never before read a science book quite like this. The reason is that you will generally read about physics the way a physicist would look at it, or about biology as understood by a biologist. This reframes all the science it uses as seen by a chemist. The result is novel, certainly, though I'm not convinced it makes the subjects more approachable - instead, for me, it obscures the message.

 In Ben McFarland's obsessive attempt to represent any science from a chemistry viewpoint, what he writes can sometimes be confusing. At times, it even sounds worryingly like the way pseudoscience uses scientific terminology e.g. 'Energy rate density (ERD) is the ratio of watts to kilograms. As such, the ERD for a system measures the river of energy that is spread out as it flows through a system. If the river flows more quickly and more energy is processed, then the ERD increases, too.' 

 Having said all that, there is some interesting material in the book. McFarland challenges the great biologist and science communicator Steven J. Gould, who suggested that if you rewound the 'tape of life' and played it again, things would have turned out to be very different. According to McFarland, everything is so limited by chemistry, that the new history of life would seem extremely familiar. That's fair enough, though I think McFarland exaggerates Gould's point to be able to challenge it, which he does repeatedly. I don't think Gould was really suggesting that another run of the development of life would produced silicon-based lifeforms using arsenic where we would use phosphorus. Rather, Gould was suggesting that within a very basic related framework, many of the outcomes were dictated by chance in a hugely complex (and indeed chaotic) system, meaning that the results would be likely to be significantly different to lifeforms we see today.

 However, if you overlook McFarland's obsession with proving Gould wrong, his exploration of how very few elements could play the part they do in living creatures is genuinely absorbing, especially where he demonstrates the importance of size, charge and bond strengths as determiners of the possible outcomes. Much of the book focuses on how life might have developed, seen from his unique chemist's viewpoint. This isn't the best book to get a feel for the nature of biological life and the complexity that is involved - a far better read on that subject is Nick Lane's The Vital Question. Yet it's impossible to deny that McFarland's unique way of looking at things gives new insights to the reader on the topic established in the subtitle: how the periodic table shaped life.

 I personally found the approach and style irritating (and struggled with most of the fuzzy illustrations). But the book may well work for other readers, especially if they have a chemistry background. And this is a a true, brave attempt to be different in approach to popular science writing, which must be applauded.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
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 Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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