Why Elephants Have
Big Ears: Nature's Engines and the Order of Life
By Chris Lavers, Gollancz, 238pp
It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human
Genome and Other Illusions
By Richard Lewontin, Granta Books, 330pp
You've heard the gag: a horse walks into a bar.
The bar-keep asks, Why the long face? That wouldn't have been funny if it had
been an elephant and the question had been, Why the long nose, why the big ears?
In fact these aren't such silly questions. Answering them calls for an unusual
approach to life--looking at creatures not just from a fashionable evolutionary
point of view, but from the angle of a quizzical engineer.
Why do the big lovable beasts sway from side to side as they plod along?
Because they are so immensely massive. You can't spring about as lightly and
gracefully as a gazelle when your twin tusks weigh more than a sturdy human
apiece. African bulls can reach 13 tonnes, rarely less than four. Plodding under
the tropical sun, all that hot meat and fat is packed inside a bald, tough rind.
It needs to radiate away the heat of the elephant's internal engines, or risk
boiling the poor beast in its own juices. So, big ears: all the better to hear
you with? No--they are radiators, dispersing metabolic waste heat from a huge
array of blood vessels close to the cooling air.
And that long trunk? Well, if you had a head as big and high off the
ground as an elephant's, mounted on a thick, sturdy neck, you couldn't readily
get your mouth down to the tucker and a long drink of water. An elongated
prehensile nose does the job of hands and straw in one--and, at a pinch, serves
to spray water over the hot, radiating ears. Mammoths, those defunct hairy
elephant look-a-likes, had small, furry ears. They needed to retain all the
warmth they could during the Ice Ages. It's simple engineering.
Well, not all that simple. Life forms are more complex than machines, and
developed by strange and twisty paths. Not every feature of an animal can be
`reverse engineered' as readily as the elephant's ears and trunk. Chris Lavers
tells a pleasantly engaging and thoughtful story of `nature's engines', the
inner mechanisms we share with lions and lambs and koalas and dinosaurs. But do
we really have that much in common with extinct species such as the mighty
saurians, doomed in the random smash of an asteroid into our planet 65 million
years ago? Weren't they cold-blooded folk, lumbering stolidly through their
marshy world?
Films like Jurassic Park have taught us to doubt this, and indeed for 20
years there's been a vigorous dinosaur heresy claiming that many dinos were
warm-blooded. Lavers explores the topic enchantingly in a chapter titled,
characteristically, `Hot and Cold Running Dinosaurs'. And he closes with a
blood-chilling warning: if we're not extremely careful, we're going to end up
exterminating ourselves in a vast new species dieback that's already begun.
But won't science have an answer to such impending doom, to that loss of
bio-diversity due to human rapacity and carelessness? After all, we now know the
very sequence of human DNA, the recipe of our kind. With such knowledge in hand,
won't we be able to correct such temporary set-backs and rebuild the lost biota?
Maybe (I'm inclined to think so myself), but one expert who scorns such
confidence is Harvard's scathingly articulate Richard Lewontin.
A world-class geneticist, and avowed but subtle Marxist, Lewontin speaks
to popular concerns about the ambitions of grasping corporations, allegedly
reckless gene engineers, subtly discriminatory IQ testers, foes of the autonomy
of women, and other targets of criticism in an era of global capitalism. Oddly
enough, his voice is heard regularly in urbane intellectual journals such as The
New York Review and The New York Review of Books, where these essays first
appeared. Like his friend and colleague Stephen Jay Gould, Lewontin argues that
decent values and scientific understanding need not be at loggerheads--that we
are far more than complex gene-machines, even if we do run on nature's heat
engines. His case is tendentious, but often hilariously and cruelly funny.
Critics are given their chance to reply in this book, and Lewontin's returns
across the net are always sizzling, even if you're sometimes left wondering
about those line-balls. He challenges our complacencies, a valuable service.
That he makes it such exquisite fun is a blessing not to be missed.
The Pearly Gates
of Cyberspace
By Margaret Wertheim, Doubleday, 322pp
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of
Worms
By Stephen Jay Gould, Jonathan Cape, 405pp
Remember the Space Age? Thirty years ago, humans
stepped onto the airless shores of the Moon's Sea of Tranquillity. By then the
adventure had already moved elsewhere. J. G. Ballard's cool, ironic gaze was
fixed on inner space. Now the action has shifted again, to cyberspace, the
current final frontier.
Space is a versatile metaphor. New Agers daily voyage amid shifting
psychic spaces: `I'm in a really bad space, man'. Naturalists like Stephen Gould
track evolving species across abstract mathematical landscapes. We lose
ourselves in the imaginary and symbolic spaces of film and television, borne by
the powerful vehicle of a gaze. So `space' loses its value, appropriated on
every side. Are the computer-mediated realms of cyberspace safe from erosion? Or
were they always bogus to begin with?
Australian Margaret Wertheim, trained in physics and computing, is a
well-known interpreter of science to a public baffled by its mysteries and eager
for palatable explanations. By a kind of public relations paradox, being an
attractive woman competent in areas regarded as Boys' Town gives her a special
allure.
Her angle is, indeed, a quizzical glance at the ways science grew up
lop-sided, bent by its gender bias. In Pythagoras' Trousers (a title nobody
can pronounce), she got stuck into `Mathematical Man' and his warped way with
cold equations. Now she has her doubts about the Internet. As with physics, she
spies a secret religious yearning within the bits and gigabytes. Cyberspace, for
Wertheim, is a return to medieval Christianity's dualistic space, spirit above,
us below--but mostly without its redemptive, community-steeped values.
In two strikingly successful 14th century images, she walks us through
Dante's medieval hell, purgatory and paradise, and around Giotto's Arena Chapel
in Padua. Giotto's Annunciation is an early triumph of perspectival rendering,
complete with trompe-l'oeil effects lending a third dimension, the depth
of scientific space. Yet facing the chapel's altar is a Giotto masterpiece in
the older style, enlarged Christ at centre, angels against blue spiritual space,
damned and saved humans crowding below. Wertheim wishes to reclaim that power of
sacred representation which one-note science, or so she asserts, has abolished.
She speaks for `those who wish to see reality as more than a purely
physical phenomena [sic]'. Between Dante's world and our own, what changed? Her
clever allegory explains how we use, construct, travel through and transcend
space itself. The medieval world was doubled, its earthly landscape a projection
of timeless sacred space. The Renaissance shifted from spirit to flesh, the
Enlightenment from divine authority to space and time as Absolutes. Our own
century dethrones both with relativity, placing each observer within an
idiosyncratic but valid frame of reference.
As a parable, this catches the post-industrial disintegration of
community. Will cyberspace, with its instant connectivity across the globe,
reinstate links between atomised, lonely people> Or will it make matters
worse by splitting mind from body in a malign perversion of sacred dualities?
Aloft in cyberspace's window onto endless imaginary worlds, will we forget the
real pain and joys of fleshy life? Revolted, Wertheim cites `Mike Kelly, a PhD
in computer science and founder of the Extropian movement', who argues for
uploading our minds into machines while we await physical immortality from the
labs.
This is a small slip, but a typical and telling one. As it happens, the
Extropians were founded by a PhD philosopher, Max More, who (via the Net) tells
me he's never heard of Mike Kelly. Despite the instantaneous world-bridging
power of the Net, Wertheim's research is often sloppy or unsound. She has a gift
for just the wrong word: repeatedly, she calls space or mathematics `ephemeral'
(transitory) where plainly she means `ethereal' (immaterial). Robotics expert Dr
Hans Moravec--whose important new book Robot she ignores, although it's
been available via the Net for several years--is alleged to `write
breathlessly', a good trick. (In fact he writes very calmly indeed on topics
that can leave you breathless).
Her arguments aren't much better. Science simply doesn't make the simple,
stupid errors she deplores. Far from `denying' the reality of mental spaces,
cognitive science multiplies them. Hilbert space, crucial to quantum theory, is
a mathematic realm of literally infinite dimensions. Nor does any sane physicist
think everything is `just atoms' (or warped space in 10 dimensions) and nothing
more: evolution has generated a vast array of complex higher levels, from
stars to beating hearts to brains stocked with information. Nor is information
`immaterial'--it is perfectly real, can be copied, and physical errors
(mutations, say) can turn it into nonsense. For all her good motives, that is
what has happened, alas, in Ms Wertheim's tut-tutting thesis.
Something similar, surprisingly, has damaged the evolving body of
argument from America's favourite populariser of Darwinism. For years an
uncomfortable stand-off has grown between Steve Gould and those he dubs
`ultra-Darwinists', such as his equally well-known and lucid rival, Richard
Dawkins. Sometimes this dispute is mistakenly pitched in political terms: left
against right, remediable environmental influences versus cruelly selfish genes.
In fact, what's at stake is a matter of testable science. Political implications
are not so easily found out. Ignoring the diversity of genetic biases in
behaviour is as bad for everyone as denying its impact on health.
By inclination, I tend to fall into Gould's leftish nice-guy camp,
fearful of those who try to locate original sin or destiny in the genes. His
elegant if rather preening essays, as in the current volume, are usually amusing
and stimulating. You learn that Leonardo's study of fossils, an early triumph of
observational method, served biblical literalism. Gould argues soothingly for a
rapprochement between science and faith, setting their boundaries as
`non-overlapping magisteria'. This is the very dualism Wertheim hungers for, and
I find it spurious. Others will differ; Gould makes his case well.
More importantly, his colleagues increasingly denounce his methods. John
Maynard Smith, one of the world's great Darwinists, states that `evolutionary
biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose
ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who
should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the
creationists.'
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, brilliant evolutionary psychologists,
slammed Gould (on the Net at http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/users/steen/Debate/CEP_Gould.html):
`the myths and inversions actively cultivated by Gould over the last two decades
have materially retarded progress' in biomedical, behavioural, and social
science. Allowing for professional disagreements, the charge is still a shocker.
As you enjoy his charming essays, bear it in mind.
Phantoms in the
Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind
By V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee,
Fourth Estate
Mapping the Mind
By Rita Carter, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 224pp
One Renegade Cell: The Quest for the Origins of
Cancer
By Robert Weinberg, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
170pp
Forever Young: Science and the Search for
Immortality
By Jim Schnabel, Bloomsbury, 229pp
Despite the medieval horrors in Kosovo, this is
a glorious time to be alive if you're enthralled by new knowledge. Alongside the
barbarous cruelties and simple foolishness, we are actually solving many of the
greatest mysteries. The mind, and the brain that holds it, give up their
secrets. New keys to the origins of cancer are found in the lab. Even death
might prove less than all-powerful.
Luckily for us non-experts, a fresh generation of experts eloquently
blends science and anecdote. Brain specialists tell of odd behaviours and even
odder theories of self or soul. An upmarket coffee-table cartography of the
brain by aptly-named medical journo Rita Carter is pricey but colourful and
accurate. More compulsively readable, Indian neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran,
with the help of skilled co-writer Blakeslee, draws us into an explanation of
the mind that's at once rigorous and delightfully chatty.
Like postmodernists, Ramachandran argues that the self is a construct, a
kind of non-stop illusion. Where the humanities deconstruct the soul into shards
of political power, cognitive and neuro-scientists find key components in the
many distinctive tissues of the brain. (Both ways of understanding are valid, of
course, operating at different levels.)
That grey stuff under the skull is not the mass of porridge it seems.
When we recognise a hat or a wife, several pathways fire up and combine their
analysis. The `how' path is a kind of mindless zombie, evolutionarily ancient,
that makes pragmatic decisions. The `what' route, linked to thirty different
brain regions, does the semantics--that is, generates our conscious sense of the
hat's meaning, and why it isn't a wife. These twin aspects of vision get smashed
apart in certain tragic brain disorders. New scanning methods can pinpoint when
distinct regions of the brain go active, allowing us to map them. Carter's fine,
copiously illustrated volume conveys this vividly and well.
In all that tangle of cross-wiring, weird and revealing errors can occur.
`Gaze tinnitus' is a phantom ringing in your ears that only happens when you
look right or left. Why? The brain's auditory nucleus is right next to the
oculomotor nerve nucleus, controlling eye motion. Ear damage can allow ocular
brain nerves to invade the auditory circuits, which get activated when you
swivel your eyes!
Ramachandran, famous for working out what's behind `phantom limb' pain in
amputees and tricking the brain into a cure, details a trove of rare but
illuminating ailments. A patient, convinced his stepfather was a robot,
`proceeded to decapitate him and opened his skull to look for microchips'. He
was victim to Capgras's delusion: that identical imposters or androids replace
those dearest to you. The
explanation is not psychiatric. Specialised face-recognition apparatus, in the
temporal lobes on both sides of the head, normally send messages to the limbic
system deep in the centre of the brain (the amygdala), where processed data gets
charged with emotional colour. This link is broken or impaired in victims of
Capgras's.
So the customary `warm glow' felt on seeing a loved one is not activated.
When the patient sees an expected figure who lacks any hint of an answering
emotional tone, who else can it be but a fake? When we construct the world
around us from sensory evidence, we largely project outward the tags and mental
categories we've imposed on its actors. Hence, the Capgras's patient (mis)reads
this emotional dead zone as a failure on the part of the other person--even, I
suspect, as active malevolence.
In a related disorder of the temporal lobes, seizures trigger immensely
intense visual images, powerful feelings of awe and transcendence, a sense of
unity with the All, even a conviction of direct communion with God. Temporal
lobe patients tend to see cosmic significance in the trivial, to be `humourless,
full of self-importance, and to maintain elaborate diaries that record quotidian
events in elaborate detail--a trait called hypergraphia... and they are
obsessively preoccupied with philosophical and theological issues'. It would be
grimly amusing if certain religious sages and warrior princes were victims of
just such maladies.
Robert Weinberg's splendid short book illuminates a different area of
medical research. A notable and productive researcher, he is surely shortlisted
for a medicine Nobel. With the acknowledged help of his US editor, he's produced
a wonderfully lucid, exciting book about what cancer is and how it works--and,
importantly, how reductive science achieved these discoveries.
Is cancer caused by nasty things we eat or breathe (like cigarette
smoke), or by viruses, or do our tissues just lose their grip, as they do when
we age? Answer: all of the above. Interestingly, environmental pollution isn't
as big a problem as you'd expect. Since 1930, adjusting for age and cigarette
use, cancer rates have declined. If people give up their smokes and fatty
cuisine, cancer rates will plummet. The secret of cancer is the secret of life:
our cells are brilliant-maintained but fallible organic machines controlled by a
library of genes prone to spelling mistakes.
Genes are both a hoard of recipes for building proteins, and part of the
factory that compiles them. If the recipes get scrambled, our cells cook up the
wrong materials. To use Weinberg's own metaphor, cells have genetic brakes and
accelerators. Malignant cancer--uncontrolled, disordered growth--happens when
the genetic brakes (tumour suppressors) are disabled and the accelerator (growth
promoters) is jammed on. Proofreading systems, and standard `suicide genes' that
usually destroy corrupted cells, also have to fail. The odds of all these errors
striking a single cell are very small, but cellular xeroxing happens 10 thousand
trillion times in a lifetime. The few multiply-mutated cells to escape
correction become immortal and uncontrolled, sometimes growing their own blood
supplies.
Alas, Weinberg falls into a misleading rhetorical trap, speaking of
mutant cells that `evade' their suicidal programs via certain `strategies'.
Wrong. Tumours accrue their malign abilities via one chance error after another.
Weinberg's description would make sense only if tumours had an internal
goal-directed program, like an organ. Actually, renegade cells are so rare
(given that vast number of proliferating cells in the body) precisely because
each fatal tumour requires a cascade of perhaps five or six random, independent
proofreading or code-wrecking errors.
Of course, one lapse can make the others a thousand times more likely
(just as having a tyre blow out at high speed makes your windscreen more likely
to shatter), but not because of a plan. Still, is there a deep plan for the
course of human life, one that dooms us inevitably to death? Brilliant and cool,
as funny in his sardonic way as P. J. O'Rourke, journalist Jim Schnabel roamed
America in his baby blue Cadillac in search of scientific answers to mortality.
His choice of laboratories and experts is inspired, his tale sublimely apt at
the millennium's turn. Is Alzheimer's disease, for instance, a curable kind of
arthritic inflammation? Yes, says Schnabel, and the drugs to stop it are in
clinical trials right now, perhaps on sale by 2004.
Can we trace and fix those damnable genes whose evolved programs or
glitches doom us? Maybe. Schnabel made his name with whimsical, scathing reports
on crop circle believers, UFO abductees and CIA ESP experiments. He's just as
good on the prospect of greatly extended longevity--which, perhaps surprisingly,
he takes rather more seriously.