I’m a scientist at the University of Cambridge who’s worked on
environmental research topics such as jet streams and the Antarctic
ozone hole. I’ve also worked on solar physics and musical acoustics.
And other branches of science have always interested me. Toward the
end of my career, I became fascinated by cutting-edge issues in
biological evolution and natural selection. Evolution is far
richer and more complex than you’d think from its popular description
in terms of ‘selfish genes’. The complexities are central to
understanding deep connections between the sciences, the arts, and
human nature in general, and the profound differences between human
intelligence and artificial intelligence.
I wrote...
Science, Music, and Mathematics: The Deepest Connections
It’s about connections that are ‘deep’ in the sense of being deep in
our nature, and evolutionarily ancient. Despite that, they’re
understandable in simpler ways than you might think. And to see how
evolution and natural selection gave rise to them it’s essential to
see past the limitations of selfish-gene theory, including its
tendency to think that competition between individuals, ‘winner
versus loser’, is all that matters. The deep connections include
connections between our music instinct and our unconscious
mathematics. Among the practical spinoffs are ways to encourage
diversity of thought in problem-solving, to improve our communication
skills, and to better understand what science can and can’t tell us
about the climate crisis.
I was blown away by the vistas it opened across classic work on
genetics and palaeoanthropology, and the implications for
understanding how our ancestors evolved.
It also showed how the
politics of so-called ‘sociobiology’ impeded that understanding,
through acrimonious disputes that later turned out to be pointless.
Those disputes were very much examples of what I call
‘dichotomization’, the unconscious assumption that an issue is
binary, an either-or question, when in reality it is far more
complex with many different aspects.
You might not suspect it, but we are currently living through a revolution in scientific knowledge. What we know about the human brain's workings and about the earliest history of our distant humanoid ancestors changes almost weekly. A new view of humanity is being forged - new theories appear all the time, splinter, are revised and adandoned. Scientists from different fields of research are finally co-operating and sharing their insights in order to map out a new view of the human brain. Paleaoanthropologists digging in Kenya, neuropyschologists building organic robots in their labs and geneticists unearthing the secret in all…
It achieves an important and unusual cross-fertilization between two
very different kinds of expertise. Both authors are highly
innovative, and creative, thinkers, Cohen in biology and Stewart in
mathematics.
Cohen is a biologist fascinated by the complexity
observed in the living world, and Stewart is an expert on the
mathematics of chaos and complexity. The result is a profound and
multifaceted view of many natural phenomena, and of evolution in
particular. It becomes very clear how selfish-gene theory fails to
take account of important evolutionary mechanisms.
Moving on from his books on chaos ("Does God Play Dice?") and symmetry ("Fearful Symmetry"), the author of this book deals with the wider field of complexity theory. The book tackles the question of how complexity arises in nature, of how life overcomes chaos and entropy to create developing order. Co-written with biologist Jack Cohen, the book will range across the central areas of modern science, from quantum mechanics and cosmology to evolution and intelligence, looking at the central questions of order, chaos, reductionism and complexity.
This short and lucid book by an eminent molecular biologist shows
how our DNA and its genes do not act as a blueprint that dictates
everything, as assumed by selfish-gene theory.
Rather, there’s a
fascinating ‘systems biology’ of the DNA and its surrounding
biomolecular ‘circuits’, which act like electronic circuits in many
ways. Different parts influence each other. So there are influences
on the DNA as well as from the DNA. Noble likens the DNA to a
musical recording, which can influence our mood but not dictate it.
What is Life? Decades of research have resulted in the full mapping of the human genome - three billion pairs of code whose functions are only now being understood. The gene's eye view of life, advocated by evolutionary biology, sees living bodies as mere vehicles for the replication of the genetic codes.
But for a physiologist, working with the living organism, the view is a very different one. Denis Noble is a world renowned physiologist, and sets out an alternative view to the question - one that becomes deeply significant in terms of the living, breathing organism. The genome is…
It’s a powerful update on Noble’s book, zooming in on the workings
of the biomolecular circuits surrounding the DNA.
Some of the
circuits are studied in great detail, looking closely at how they
work, and at how they evolve in response to mutations in the DNA. A
disadvantageous mutation is eliminated by natural selection. But as
well as advantageous mutations it turns out that ‘neutral’ mutations,
conferring no immediate advantage, are important and indeed crucial.
That resolved one of the dichotomized disputes noted in Wills’ book.
The power of Darwin's theory of natural selection is beyond doubt, it explains how useful adaptations are preserved over generations. But evolution's biggest mystery eluded Darwin: how those adaptations arise in the first place. Can random mutations over a 3.8 billion years be solely responsible for wings, eyeballs, knees, photosynthesis, and the rest of nature's creative marvels? And by calling these mutations 'random', are we not just admitting our own ignorance? What if we could now uncover the wellspring of all biological innovation?
Renowned evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner presents the missing piece in Darwin's theory. Using cutting-edge experimental and computational…
An early book, it’s one of Pinker’s best. Though Pinker later argued
for selfish-gene theory, here he avoids the issue, focusing instead
on showing that our language ability is instinctive, for which there
is powerful evidence.
Genetic memory is crucial. All that I’ve
added in my own book is to emphasize that genetic memory is less like
a blueprint and more like a set of self-assembling building blocks, responsive to environmental influences,
and that for language those building blocks must have come from a multi-timescale
process – genome–culture co-evolution – over millions of years.
All this is invisible to selfish-gene theory.
'Dazzling... Pinker's big idea is that language is an instinct...as innate to us as flying is to geese... Words can hardly do justice to the superlative range and liveliness of Pinker's investigations' - Independent
'A marvellously readable book... illuminates every facet of human language: its biological origin, its uniqueness to humanity, it acquisition by children, its grammatical structure, the production and perception of speech, the pathology of language disorders and the unstoppable evolution of languages and dialects' - Nature
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
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