Skip to main content

Tree Stories - Stefano Mancuso (Trans. Gregory Conti) ***

It's always interesting to see something new in popular science, and without doubt plants (and, in this case, trees) tend not to get enough of a slice of the biology market (I don't really count 'nature' as popular science as there's very little science in it). So I had considerable hopes for Tree Stories. But in practice, although there are some genuinely interesting little snippets of information around the way that trees interact with each other through their root networks, the book was problematic. One issue I had was that each 'story' - each chapter in effect - is continuous, without any section breaks. There is no substructure it just goes on and on, which was quite wearing. Worse, though, was that despite this book being labelled popular science, the science content was extremely thin on the ground.

Take the opening story. It comes across as a typical literary tale in which nothing much happens. Two academics become acquaintances after battling over secondhand book purchases. They share an interest in a book on 'liberty trees' - planted across both revolutionary France and post independence America. The book portrays the trees as a network and Stefano Mancuso points out in an actual forest the tree roots form a connective network and tells us that the trees are a superorganism like ants or bees. This is just throwing a thin sprinkle of facts into a self-indulgent story. It's not popular science. How does this network form? No idea. In a superorganism the individual insects are highly specialised - how do the trees specialise? No mention of this. In a superorganism, the individual insects can't survive alone - surely this isn't really true of trees? Is a forest not more like Facebook than a superorganism? Don't know. This is not science.

The second essay on plants, and particularly trees, in cities was much more effective - there was less of a memoir feel and a bit more science content, though it’s odd that with Mancuso's obsession with tree networks, he pretty much ignores the way IT networks are reducing the importance of cities as places to live. The story gives a strong argument for the wider greening of our urban spaces, particularly in the face of climate change. This is mostly about urban planning rather than any underlying scientific principles, but at least it’s interesting.

Most of the rest of the chapters are more like the second with at least a spot of scientific content, though it's often just a few words. So, for example, in a piece on the wood used in famous ancient violins like a Stradivarius there are maybe two lines on why a particular wood might be unusually good in the role. But the rest is atmospheric woffle. And there's a purely anti-scientific statement that blind testing showing these violins aren't better wasn't right in Mancuso's opinion - the only scientific test mentioned gets dismissed out of hand where it's clearly a case where only double blinding could give useful information.

I've no objection to this sort of book (though it's not one I would usually read), but it just doesn't do what it says on the tin.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more