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 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, ...

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...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog