Selected reviews of books about science, 1992-2000  
Reviews by Damien Broderick

DIVORCE AMONG THE GULLS: An Uncommon Look At Human Nature

by William Jordan, Abacus, 205pp

A lot of moaning has been heard lately about cold-blooded scientists who pick cruelly at our warm flesh, stealing the mystery and joy from life. William Jordan's altogether charming essays in natural history give that canard the lie... and yet-- His closing piece follows a group of young biologists through their training in the early 1960s, smashing rats to death (neatly), sawing open living turtles (painlessly--maybe), stabbing thermometers into mice `nicked and bloodied' by human hair clippers.

            `We have become calloused,' Jordan confesses. From day one, Jordan says, students must be made aware that `the goals of science... carry a price tag. The price is humanity. Each sacrifice, each dissection, each surgical incision is drawn on the account of good and decency.... Then teach some small gesture, some little expression of thanks to the creature... Say a small prayer for the souls of us all.'

            Of course that is not all science is, and Jordan's glowing, witty mind and heart embrace the living world with understanding as well as tremulous sensibility. His American take on our outback--termite mounds like Gothic cathedrals, a sudden palm-and-eucalyptus grove alive with fruit bats--is a bright blend of trained insight, teasing imagination and love of nature. He's equally good on randy medflies, lethal snakes, stressed-out mockingbirds, and Darwinian gulls. And through all this bestiary, Jordan tells us things (as his subtitle notes) about ourselves.

THE HUNGRY APE: Biology and the Fall of Civilisations

by Jim Penman, Distributed by Tower Books, 220pp

But can science say much about the human condition? Aren't we children of mutable, self-reflexive culture? The fashion in human studies is `thick description', immersion in local ways. Global grand theories, especially the reductionistic sort made popular a couple of decades back by E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, are rejected as misguided and simplistic.

            Dr Jim Penman, a Melbourne entrepreneur (his lawn-mowing franchises have made him a millionaire), got his PhD in history for just such a theory. His claim is shocking: that the rise and fall of civilisations has less to do with ideologies, faiths, economic forces or the growth of science than with 300-year-long pulses in dominant temperament, controlled by physiological factors evolved to deal with food shortage, population pressure and levels of stress.

            All mammals, Penman asserts, follow such boom-and-bust cycles, humans included. Civilisations are driven along a dynastic cycle of 10 generations which oscillates--depending upon stress--between extremes of Restraint and Vigour. Child-rearing practices set the appropriate levels of these parameters. Subtle shifts occur as kids raised by inhibited parents under low stress tick around into regimes of growing stress and adult exuberance, to increased Vigour in childhood, major stress, and the slow turn of the cycle back to Restraint.

            Each stage matches a cultural stereotype: aristocracy with local loyalties, modulating through sceptical creativity, energetic economy and national unity, to conservative, unstable autocracy, and anarchy. All this, Penman declares, is written in the history books for anyone to check. He adds an evolutionary explanation: `civilisation is biochemical'. This outrageous claim has the singular merit, among competing cultural theories, that it can be falsified (though Penman says it has not been) by heaping up contrary evidence. Strikingly, the author was obliged to publish the book himself--very handsomely, though irritatingly without an index--because, apparently, the canonical paradigm found it so offensive. Quite a good reason to buy it.

GENIUS: RICHARD FEYNMAN AND MODERN PHYSICS

by James Gleick, Little, Brown, 520pp

This paper recently quizzed notable Australians on the gaps in their `cultural knowledge'. Replies ranged from the faux philistinism of Clive Robertson (well, I hope it was feigned) to the bluff omniscience of Barry Jones. While some of these luminaries lacked mastery of music, and others of history, recent literature and painting, none confessed any unease with the vast panoply of the sciences. Either they're all well set up with genetics, cognitive science, physics, cosmology and topology... or else the sciences are not deemed part of late 20th century culture.

            I suspect, to my horror, it's the latter. Yet science is the signal monument of living culture in our century, a magnificent and flourishing human creation. Our equations and experiments coax the very universe to unfold within our minds like a green bud.

            Its culture, in some measure, can embrace anyone open to its joys and stresses. Luckily we're in the midst of a harvest of wonderful books (and television programs) that invite non-specialists in. James Gleick wrote the wildly (and justifiably) successful Chaos. Now his double talent--for evocative biographical sketches and limpid explanation of hard topics--captures the flamboyant life and nonstop thought of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, quirky quantum genius of the mid-century.

            Feynman's life epitomises the splendour and misery of nuclear-age science, for he was one of the mathematical physicists who developed the bomb (the cancer that killed him might be linked to the A-bomb tests).

            His life was shadowed by the early death of his beloved wife Arline, but his spectacular mind and charming directness made him an unusual companion: `he taught himself how to play drums, to give massages, to tell stories, to pick up women in bars.'

            He was a fine teacher. In his book The Character of Physical Law (Penguin, 173pp) Feynman notes that prior to Kepler many people thought the planets were propelled by angels pushing from behind. Wrong. Actually, since it's inertia that keeps the planet going, only its inward motion `has been deflected toward the sun. So that what the angels have to do is to beat their wings in towards the sun all the time.' This lovely jest captures a surprising truth about gravitation and inertia with a wry wit rare even among physics instructors. Gleick's biography shares that quality: deep, scrupulous, amusing and endlessly surprising.

PI IN THE SKY: Counting, Thinking, and Being

by John D. Barrow, Clarendon Press Oxford, 317pp

Even if evolutionary biology or fluid dynamics get excluded from culture, it can't be denied that mathematics has always been a corner-stone of classical education. While there are strong pragmatic reasons for retaining maths as a crucial aspect of everyone's learning, the sad reality is that most of us are gob-smacked by anything harder than simple add-ups. Office computer spread-sheets dissolve some of the computational barriers, and calculators spare many kids the rote task of learning tables, but maths itself is as fraught as ever.

            Barrow's previous books range from the formidable Anthropic Cosmological Principle (with maverick astronomer Frank Tipler) to solid meditations, half-expository, half-philosophical, like Theories of Everything. Here he takes us back to the very roots of the problem: the origins of maths in simple counting. Even people who find maths impossibly alien assume that counting is an innate human skill. Barrow reminds us that many cultures know only 1, 2 and `many'. The power to enumerate quantities larger than that, using chunks of fives and tens that we can map onto our fingers, is a major breakthrough.

            So if counting itself is a peculiar skill, what are the sources of mathematical truths? Are they dug out of the world, like other practical discoveries--or even invented? Or do they reflect an unchanging realm of pure thought? Oddly enough, there's been a resurgence of popularity for this Platonic opinion. Barrow splendidly surveys the debate, leading without pain into profound questions: do the laws of physics ordain what arithmetic and geometry we can do, or are they `themselves consequences of some deeper, simpler rules of step by step computation'? This second possibility encourages a new kind of experimental mathematics, endlessly open, yet strangely ugly to traditionalists.