What Do You Think You Are? - Brian Clegg *****

I very much enjoyed Brian Clegg's book, The Universe Inside You, to which this new book forms a kind of inverted sequel. Where the earlier title used aspects of the human body to explore the universe around us, this one focuses inwards, looking at what makes the individual human the person they are.

Clegg starts with genealogy, noting that because of the way that family trees double in size with each generation, it soon fails as a way to show what we are as individuals, (the numbers involved spiral out of control and the neat tree becomes tangled), meaning only a tiny part of the tree is ever examined. After showing how we're all related to royalty, we are taken on a tour of the atoms that make us up (I love the various ways to work out how much they're worth, including getting the equivalent weight of potassium from bananas), the food that powers our bodies, the paeleological evidence for the origins of humanity as a species and the nature of life.

Perhaps the most interesting part of all is when the book goes into what consciousness is (or, rather, highlights how little we know about what consciousness is, but still shows how much more there is to 'us' than the conscious part) and pulls apart the old nature versus nurture debate with some remarkable material on genetics, environment and how the influence of our environment is mathematically chaotic.

Sometimes it's the little details here that jump out. It was notable how inaccurate GDP changes are, yet they are always scrutinised by the media as if they tell us great truths about the economy. And there's a brilliant example of the misuse of statistics where some genuine figures on immigration are used to make a totally misleading statement before explaining why they can be easily phrased to deceive.

What's great about the book overall is both Clegg's gift as a storyteller - it's just an excellent, pageturning read - and the way he threads together so many revelations about us as humans, the sort of thing that you want to share with someone else. Oh, and it's a really attractive hardback too. A worthy successor to The Universe Inside You.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Peet Morris

Please note, this title is written by the editor of the Popular Science website. Our review is still an honest opinion – and we could hardly omit the book – but do want to make the connection clear.

Comments

I Wish They'd Taught Me That - Robin Pemantle and Julian Gould ***

Subtitled 'overlooked and omitted topics in mathematics', the obvious concern is that there is a good reason these topics are overlooked and omitted. Thankfully, this is not the case, but it's fair to say that despite attempts to dress it up that way, this isn't a recreational maths book. There's a fair description in the blurb: 'the topics which every undergraduate mathematics student "should" know, but has probably never encountered... magnificent secrets that are beautiful, useful and accessible.' As someone who many years ago did a degree with a fair amount of mathematics in it, I think it probably would have appealed back then - though to be honest a lot of it has disappeared from my memory, strongly reducing the entertainment value. Here's an example. The first real page contains the sentence: 'If you are handed a real number 𝓍 ∈ ⁠ ⁠, one way to tell if 𝓍 is rational or irrational is to look at sequences of rational numbers q n ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

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 ...

Search This Blog