This is described as the definitive biography of Charles Darwin - and I really can't argue. It's a condensation of the original two-volume edition, but still a chunky 500+ pages before getting to the notes - as such it is, frankly, longer my preferred length, but though just occasionally there was too much detail, it remains highly readable and gives a brilliant insight into Darwin's family life as much as his work. We get, of course, his academic background, the voyage of the Beagle and the slow move towards Origin of Species , suddenly spurred on by competition. Then there's the later books, with the particularly contentious Descent of Man amongst them. And it's all excellent stuff. But I think the part that really captured me is Jane Browne's insight into Darwin as a person - an invalid for most of his life, and somewhat beset with doubts, especially as his religious beliefs ebbed away; a generally mild man, but capable of acerbic responses to criticism. And...

There have been some excellent books on the origins of life, notably Philip Ball's How Life Works and Henry Gee's A Very Short History of Life on Earth , taking distinctive approaches. The field might feel overcrowded - except Christophe Galfard managed to come along with a whole new, highly entertaining take on the project with a physicist's-eye-view. We begin with evolution. An excellent example of Galfard's sideways take on the topic is the short chapter entitled 'Why alien fish don't fly'. This starts with the reader picturing themselves lying by a river in a forest clearing. A fish jumps out of the river... but doesn't swim towards the clouds, it drops back in. We then pivot to Aristotle dividing the universe into the bit with the Earth and the bit outside the Moon's orbit - and giving us the concept of natural laws (including that a jumping fish will drop back). Then Newton breaks Aristotle's barrier between Earthly things and the heavens,...

The interesting premise of this book is that evolution goes far beyond its biological applications, reaching into everything from economics and language to invention. Strictly the title doesn't accurately fit the starting point we get regularly reiterated in the text, which is that there are basically two sciences. The first science is physics, and the other is evolution.  The idea here is that physics is based on natural laws, fundamental constants and the like and is effectively unchanging (hence my doubt about the title). This then drives chemistry and biology, which as all physicists will agree (but probably not many chemists and biologists) are just more messy applications of physical principles. The second science, though, Mark Vellend argues is all about change and explains many things that physics-based science can never deal with. I could really enjoy a book of this kind if it gave us lots of detail about evolution in those application areas like economics and languages wh...

I'm always a little wary of popular science books that start with a personal story, but I'll make an exception for Madeleine Beekman's excellent book, which sets out a possible explanation of our ability to speak, because the approach fits in with a well-balanced combination of storytelling and scientific information.  There have been a good number of books that either set out to explain some of our species' physical oddities or abilities that seem to set us apart from other animals. Twenty years ago I was impressed by Clive Bromhall's The Eternal Child , which suggested retaining infantile features (neoteny) enabled us to exist more effectively in large groups, while  many authors have attempted to highlight aspects of being human that set us apart (as was the case with storytelling in Brainjacking ). Here Beekman first takes us through what palaeontology can tell us about the development our biological form, then explores the function of speech and language. In ma...

One of Rudyard Kipling’s just so stories tells us about early humans domesticating animals and how the 'The Wild Dog' became the 'First Friend'. Kipling was right: archaeology and genetics evidence tell us that dogs were the first animals to be domesticated. They descend from wolves that lived about 23,000 years ago. Today, there are so many different looking dogs — Poodles, Bulldogs, Afghan Hounds… — that it is pretty astonishing that they all originated from wild wolves.  As with other things that happened a long time ago, we can just imagine how this happened (like Kipling did) and scientists can infer it from the data they gather. But ultimately, we have no way of knowing the exact story of what happened. Still, some lines of research may help with this. One particular long-term experiment, started in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s rule, selecting tame(r) silver foxes throughout generations, has provided plenty of insights on how domestication can happen and how do...

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 under...

In writing this book, Henry Gee had a lot to live up to. His earlier title  The Accidental Species was a superbly readable and fascinating description of the evolutionary process leading to Homo sapiens . It seemed hard to beat - but he has succeeded with what is inevitably going to be described as a tour-de-force. As is promised on the cover, we are taken through nearly 4.6 billion years of life on Earth (actually rather more, as I'll cover below). It's a mark of Gee's skill that what could have ended up feeling like an interminable list of different organisms comes across instead as something of a pager turner. This is helped by the structuring - within those promised twelve chapters everything is divided up into handy bite-sized chunks. And although there certainly are very many species mentioned as we pass through the years, rather than feeling overwhelming, Gee's friendly prose and careful timing made the approach come across as natural and organic.  There was a w...

Updated for paperback Things start well with this latest title from Brian Greene: after a bit of introductory woffle we get into an interesting introduction to entropy. As always with Greene's writing, this is readable, chatty and full of little side facts and stories. Unfortunately, for me, the book then suffers something of an increase in entropy itself as on the whole it then veers more into philosophy and the soft sciences than Greene's usual physics and cosmology. So, we get chapters on consciousness, language, belief and religion, instinct and creativity, duration and impermanence, the ends of time and, most cringe-making as a title, 'the nobility of being'. Unlike the dazzling scientific presentation I expect, this mostly comes across as fairly shallow amateur philosophising. This is a distinct case of attempting to discover the answer to 'life, the universe and everything', but missing the compactness of the answer 42. Of course it's perfectly possib...

A few years back, I went to see my doctor. I’d been experiencing a number of apparently unrelated minor ‘symptoms’. I wanted to make sure the symptoms really were minor and unrelated, and not due to some more serious, underlying, undiagnosed condition. One of my symptoms was a recurring, dull pain in my left shoulder. I could never work out precisely where the pain was coming from, but it was, I explained, 'definitely somewhere in the shoulder region.' My doctor smiled and said she knew exactly what my problem was, as she experienced it too! Like me, she suffered occasional bouts of acid reflux in her stomach. When acid reflux kicks in, excess gases expand the stomach wall, putting pressure on your diaphragm. One of the nerves associated with the diaphragm runs a convoluted route via the left shoulder blade and hooks up with the rest of the nervous system in the neck. So, when my acid reflux kicked in, I experienced pain signals that seemed to be coming from my shoulder, b...

There's something rather satisfying about a nice, chunky book of quotations. I treasure my Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations , for example. However, single author collections can be quite a struggle to get through.  I've already seen both The Quotable Feynman and The Ultimate Quotable Einstein for two of the great names of physics, each of them rather good at profound sound bites and witty interjections. But also in each case, even though I like the author's writing, I found it difficult to get too enthusiastic, as it's neither a book you can read from end to end, nor one where you can necessarily find a useful quote on a particular topic, as is the case with the dictionary of quotations. And any concerns I have about those two are probably increased here because, though Darwin was, without doubt, an accomplished writer, the Victorian style rarely makes for a pithy quote. As I'd recently seen (in the excellent Inferior , for example) some sharp crit...