The Wolf Within - Bryan Sykes ****

There's always the whiff of snake oil in the air when a publisher puts the author's academic qualification on the front of a book. Yet Professor Bryan Sykes wears his laurels lightly - in fact I wish there had been a bit more detailed science content in what turned out to be a real curate's egg of a read.

You don't have to be a dog lover to find this book on the development of dogs from wolves interesting (in fact Sykes claims he isn't, though his wife is), but it certainly helps - and I am. Probably the most fascinating sections concentrate on wolves. We discover that real wolves are nothing like the merciless killing machines of legend - not that they don't kill, of course, but their behaviour is much more nuanced. Sykes describes a hypothetical but convincing scenario for wolves to first begin working with humans as collaborative hunters, each benefiting from the others' skills.

Sykes argues that the wolves' pack behaviour makes them ideally suited to take on the costs and benefits of working with others. We then see how with time, wolves have become the incredibly diverse species - the most varied in form of all mammal species - that are modern dogs. Along the way, we inevitably meet the remarkable Belyaev experiments, which over decades of selective breeding for cooperativeness showed that arctic foxes became more and like dogs, not only in behaviour but in appearance.

There's also plenty on the breeding of dogs, the problems that emerge from the pedigree system of breeding from a small, related stock, and the genetic implications and potential solutions for some of the inbreeding problems.

This is all handled in a very conversational style, though as mentioned above, I wish there had been a bit more in-depth science. Of itself, this light approach is a good thing, but the dark side of the curate's egg is that the book is oddly structured, with some parts thrown in with no apparent thought for the way it reads. Some of the text, particularly a long set of interviews by Sykes' wife with dog owners seems not to add anything to the message of the book.

The four star rating is for the good bits, particularly the parts on wolves, the development of dog breeds and genetics. If you are interested in dogs (or wolves), it's well worth reading for these alone.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

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, ...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog