Nature Fast and Nature Slow - Nicholas Money ****

This is a lovely concept, a cosmic zoom of biology, where the zoom is not in space but in time. Each chapter looks at biological actions that occur in a particularly timeframe, starting with those that occur in a fraction of a second and running up to billions of years.

The first chapter, 'Ballistics', is absolutely fascinating as we start with the intensely quick mechanisms used by, for example, jellyfish to fire tiny poison darts into prey (or people), or by ferns to blast out spores, events taking place in a matter of thousandths of seconds. I can just imagine a TV show where these actions are displayed in elegant, ultra-slow motion.

This chapter is great, but also illustrates a recurrent problem in the book: Nicholas Money gives us too many examples. A good number of the chapters open with a story, but then present the reader with a whole sequence of fact statements - this does this; that does that - which are exhausting to read. We could do with the writing to slow down a bit, show us fewer examples but explain in more detail. So, for example, we are told that 'mushroom spores employed a "surface tension catapult", powered by the motion of water droplets, to fling themselves from their gills.' I'd have loved to have read more on exactly what this means, but the next sentence is off on a different topic.

As we move up through the different timescales, the mid section starts to feel a bit samey, but the book comes alive again towards the end - I particularly enjoyed the final chapter 'Beginnings' where we are looking back billions of years to the origins of life on Earth. Although Money can verge on purple prose occasionally, he benefited from a looser narrative approach without overloading us with different examples.

What certainly comes through is Money's personality and interest in the topic. On the one hand this introduces a rather dated scientist's downer on philosophy - you can almost see the author's lip curl when he talks about philosophers, being scathing, for example, of Nagel's 'What Is it Like to be a Bat?' essay and its implications. On the other hand, Money's honesty in his impressions of other scientists and their theories is impressively candid, such as his assessment of researchers who claimed plants had emotion-like responses: 'These clowns were gullible at best, foolish in their dismissal of control experiments and besotted with fantasies about the inner emotional lives of the botanical world.'

Although there were aspects of the book that didn't entirely work for me, overall I enjoyed it and thought it a really interesting and different take on the subject of biology.

Hardback:

Bookshop.org

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...

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...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

Search This Blog