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

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Search This Blog