Infinite Life: Jules Howard ****

There's been something of a trend for 'big picture' books that trace a feature of life, the universe or whatever from billions of years ago to the present day, arguably started by Henry Gee's excellent A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth. The new book by Jules Howard follows this trend in tracing eggs back to their earliest origins and following them step by step through to (biologically) recent times.

I was a bit wary about this one. It felt in danger of being a lengthy catalogue of eggs that would only appeal to the ovoid equivalent of a trainspotter. But I had very much enjoyed Howard's Wonderdog and found it hard to believe he wouldn't have found a way to make the story of the egg much more interesting - which on the whole he has. The slight reservation here is that there are an awful lot of species described and many variants of the egg concept. But Howard's excellent storytelling skills allow him to get away with this by giving us a series of scenarios from different eras... and also because the egg is a quite remarkable thing.

We get water-based eggs, soft shelled and hard shelled eggs on land, live birth followups to the egg and a lot of material on the quite remarkable organ that is the placenta. There are fish, amphibians, dinosaurs, insects, mammals, birds and more, all busily engaged in egg production, egg care and general eggy wonder. Sometimes it's the small details that fascinate - for example, the dark machinations of the newly hatched cuckoo in kicking its rivals out of the nest.

The one thing I was a bit surprised by was a lack of consideration of the eggs of non-egg laying mammals like us. There was lots about foetuses and the placenta - and the remarkable progress of newborn marsupials to the pouch. But hardly a mention of mammalian (and within mammals, human) eggs themselves. This seemed a strange omission. If I'm going to be picky, I would also suggest that Howard sticks to biology - early on he describes the Sun in the early years of the Earth as 'just part of a constellation' - given that a constellation is just a pattern of stars in the night sky imagined by human beings, it's hard to see how the Sun could ever have been that.

If I'm going to be really picky, I'd also query the title? Why 'infinite'? There's nothing infinity related here. Overall, though, a thoroughly enjoyable exploration of eggs through the history of life. And, of course, we now know the answer to that age old question. The egg definitely came before the chicken.

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

Comments

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...

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...

Search This Blog