After some initial bombardment with Rutherfordian stamp collecting, Dunn captures the imagination by telling us genuinely interesting stories both about individual studies and about the more general relationships between species populations and their environment. That sounds rather dry, but it really isn't. There are many examples, but to pick one out, I was fascinated by the idea that attempts to stop species crossing borders will result in greater evolution of new species in those regions where access is restricted. This is because the mixing from crossing borders effectively waters down the gene pool so any local mutations are less likely to dominate.
One essential message in this book is how significant the small things are - bacteria, viruses etc. When thinking of both biology and ecology, most of us tzend to focus on the big things, from trees to mammals. But both in numbers and ability to quickly mutate, those small things dominate. And that message about the impact of stopping species crossing borders has a particular resonance when we stop thinking of invasive species as only being deer or parrots (say) and think as well of bacteria and viruses - a message firmly brought home by the pandemic.
Dunn is very good at pointing out the way that human interactions with the environment causes problems, while he also introduces some solutions. Admittedly, here he does tend slightly to the Luddite end of environmentalism - he seems very sceptical, for example, about about carbon capture other than through natural means - but the point that we rarely consider the full consequences of our actions is key, typified in an example he gives of the Mississippi River bursting its banks in his family hometown of Greenville, Mississippi. Unlike some environmentalists, Dunn doesn't live in a fantasy world where we can somehow go back to nature and abandon civilisation. He accepts the benefits that have ensued from trying to tame the river - but also emphasises how much we need consider the further consequences of our actions, rather than stick with business as usual and then be surprised when things go catastrophically wrong.
That I'm so positive about the book is despite my hackles rising as soon as I saw the cover and the subtitle that starts 'What the laws of biology...' In his introduction, Dunn points out that physicists raise an eyebrow at the concept of biology having natural laws in the same way that physics does. I strongly agree with the physicists - these just aren't laws in the same sense. I'm not saying the things Dunn calls laws aren't important, but they are rarely universal and precise. Even something as fundamental as evolution by natural selection is not a law, it's just the logical consequence of circumstances - so it irritated me every time the term 'law' was used. But I managed to overlook this with gritted teeth.
There were also one two slight historical oddities, such as a reference to year zero (there wasn't one), or this blooper on Newton 'It is often said that Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. But this wrong. Newton's great contribution was not the the discovery of gravity but the discovery of the cause of gravity.' This is rubbish, I'm afraid. It's not so much the apple part (although that didn't happen), but Newton specifically said that he had no hypothesis for the cause of gravity. (He did in fact have one, but it was wrong.) Newton described how to predict the impact of gravity, not its cause.
Even so, I'm giving this book five stars because it makes the reader think, and because there are some truly fascinating ideas about the way species interact with their environment. These may be bread and butter stuff to ecologists (though Dunn makes the point that they too tend to think of the big species and ignore microbes), but the concepts have rarely been presented well to the general public. A useful and timely book.
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Review by Brian Clegg
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