Odyssey - Tom Chaffin ****

Not Homer, but a detailed description of Charles Darwin's Beagle voyage and what he got out of it, in a biographical sandwich - we get a short life of Darwin up to the Beagle, lengthy coverage of the voyage, and then a short summary of the rest of Darwin's life.

As a reader I am somewhat conflicted by this book. I recognise it as providing an in-depth look at exactly what happened on the voyage and how it changed Darwin's view of the world. As such it is very impressive and probably valuable to those with an interest in the fine detail of Darwin. But if I'm honest, a lot of it is rather dull. The reality is that while the famous voyage did sow seeds that would later blossom, very little of what happened on the voyage itself was of scientific interest, and much of what occurred was repetitive, while Tom Chaffin's enthusiasm for detail can be a little wearing.

However, I must stress how valuable the book is to get a complete picture of what fed into Darwin's understanding of the world. I have read several books on Darwin, but felt I knew him significantly better after this one. Inevitably with a historical character, some of this was gratifying - Darwin's horror of slavery, for example - other parts less so, with the inevitable biases of the time.

I also found there were aspects of the voyage that really hadn't got through to my consciousness before. One was the significance of the three Fuegians effectively kidnapped on FitzRoy's earlier voyage and returned on this Beagle outing with mixed success. The other was the lack of significance for Darwin of the Galapagos at the time - the importance of the islands in underlining the theory of evolution very much came with hindsight.

I'm glad I read the book, then, and have to recommend it - but I can't say I particularly enjoyed the experience.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

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, ...

Search This Blog