Selected reviews of books about science, 1992-2000

THE GOLEM: What Everyone Should Know About Science

by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, Cambridge University Press, 164pp

PERILOUS KNOWLEDGE: The Human Genome Project and Its Implications

by Tom Wilkie, Faber, 195pp

THE ORIGINS OF ORDER: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution

by Stuart A. Kauffman, Oxford University Press, 709pp

A Golem, as Australian opera-lovers have reason to know, is a Judeo-Gnostic artificial servant made out of mud and powered by the Hebrew word for truth embossed in its forehead: a sort of Frankincense monster. Collins and Pinch, sociologists of science from the constructivist school, are forthright relativists who claim that the content of scientific knowledge is less a portrait of truth than of fashion, rivalry, raw power and skilful negotiation. So science, they urge, is best seen as a clumsy Golem: useful but you should keep a wary eye on it. `It is not an evil creature but it is a little daft.'

            This might strike some as close to blasphemy, as science and technology have tended to fill the vacuum left by the retreat of religion and traditional morality. For others, who feel a blend of dread and contempt for the pretensions of science and its special logic, it will seem self-evident. In seven neat, digestible case-studies, Pinch and Collins set out to show that `there is no logic of scientific discovery. Or rather, if there is such a logic, it is the logic of everyday life.'

            Re-examining the original experiments from certain famous turning points in science--proofs of Einstein's relativity, disproofs of `cold fusion', Louis Pasteur's demonstration that life cannot emerge spontaneously, and more--they uncover manipulation, public relations stunts, careful spin doctoring.

            The famous total eclipse photos obtained by Eddington and others in 1918 looked for deflection of starlight due to the sun's gravity. `Everyone knows' this proved the truth of general relativity. In fact, the measurements were all over the place. Some photographic plates were blurred. All in all, `it would be difficult to... provide a clear answer' on this basis. `Nevertheless, on 6 November 1919, the Astronomer Royal announced that the observations had confirmed Einstein's theory.'

            Though many tests since have supported relativity, Collins and Pinch make an important point. Both calculation and experiment are often intractably difficult. Marginal success in either can reinforce the allure of the other. But this is not an `anti-science' finding. `Our conclusion is that human "error" goes right to the heart of science, because the heart is made of human activity.'

            In another sense, of course, science can literally replace the human heart--with a baboon's, say, or an artificial pump. In coming decades, it will gain increasing power literally to re-write the genetic code that builds each heart from protein. The international Human Genome Project has been in full swing for five years, mapping the sequence of DNA coding in both human and other control organisms. In humans, that's 3 billion letters of information (though much is apparently junk mail) comprising perhaps 100,000 different genes.

            It's almost magically emblematic of the headlong rush of scientific prowess that James Watson, one of the two men who cracked the DNA code in 1953, should be a director of the Project in its first four years. It's as if the woman who discovered fire went on in later life to oversee the invention of the steam engine. Ominously, Watson departed in 1992, apparently over the ethical question of who owns the human genome. He warned against a competitive, nationalistic approach to the new bioscience, where research groups try to patent strings of human DNA code.

            A science writer trained as a physicist, Tom Wilkie deftly explains the fundamentals of this enigmatic new scientific and political reality, using precise examples like the inherited disease cystic fibrosis. Maybe one Caucasian in 25 carries a defective CF gene, meaning about one child in 2500 will inherit a defective gene from each parent and get this awful illness. Genetic mapping provides prospective parents a simple, inexpensive test allowing them to assess their chances of creating a damaged child. Similar techniques permit pre-natal screening for various crippling disorders, so only afflicted foetuses need be terminated--which can actually reduce the overall number of abortions.

            More menacing--or exhilarating--are prospects of splicing new genetic instructions into either somatic cells (bone marrow, say, in the body of someone born with a defect, an intervention that dies with the recipient and in any case needs to be topped up regularly) or germ-line cells (where the new instruction is passed on to the recipient's children). The former are now being trialled in humans, while the latter are forbidden--though they are commonplace in experiments, when human-mouse cell hybrids have long been a useful lab tool.

            Although the Genome Project will accelerate the knowledge base for such interventions, there is very much more in an organism (especially a person) than is to be found even in a total DNA map. The ethical consequences are formidable. We need to get our thinking under way well and truly in advance. Wilkie's social democrat view, more startling to Americans than to us, makes a good starting point to informed debate.

            Underlying the DNA code, and the proteins and cells which are its living expression, are laws of chemistry and quantum physics that seem alien in their cool, reductive simplicity. How can the rich diversity of life arise from less than a hundred elements, from a handful of quarks, leptons and exchange forces? Can this truly be nothing more than necessity catching the wing of chance? A impressive new answer to this conundrum is offered by Stuart Kauffman, whose magisterial The Origins of Order may prove to share more than a mnemonic resemblance to Darwin's pivotal On the Origin of Species of 1859.

            Kauffman is one of the more buoyant gurus of the Santa Fe Institute, premier centre for study of complex phenomena. A biochemistry professor, he is interested in the ancient origin of life from non-living chemicals as well as the development of an individual from DNA code through embryo development to maturity. Darwin and his Mendelian followers saw evolution as the result of competition for resources and fecundity between slightly variant organisms.        Kauffman looks to other, deeper sources of order--not to replace Darwin's, but to amplify and accelerate them.

            Spontaneous order can be seen in oil droplets in water, whose molecules automatically form a sphere. Snowflakes have sixfold symmetry without benefit of natural selection. Proteins, coded by a linear string of DNA, only become effective when they spontaneously fold up into ornate lock-and-key shapes. There's nothing mystical about this, but Kauffman's great achievement is to show how much order can emerge from linked networks of extremely simple elements.

            His favourite example is a web of 100,000 lights wired so adjacent bulbs are switched on and off in a random cascade. In principle, we'd expect such a net to flicker through a cosmically vast set of possible patterns. In fact, order spontaneously emerges, restricted to some 370 stable variants (about the square root of 100,000). It happens that humans have roughly 250 distinct cells types and 100,000 genes, which suggests to Kauffman that these might well be the cell varieties generated, so to speak, by spontaneous anti-chaos. His book is difficult but rich as torte cake.

WRINKLES IN TIME: The Imprint of Creation

by George Smoot and Keay Davidson, Little, Brown, 333pp

BLACK HOLES AND BABY UNIVERSES

by Stephen Hawking, Bantam, 182pp

A VISION OF THE BRAIN

by Semir Zeki, Blackwell, 366pp

When I was a kid and no-one knew anything much, about a third of a century ago, two of my most precious books told me about the origins of everything. (Three, if you count the Bible. At that stage `Let there be light!' was about as scientific as it got.) One of them, `The Creation of the Universe', turned out to be amazingly close to the truth--assuming we now know what that is. It was first published in 1952 by unorthodox physicist and prankster George Gamow. Its scientific rival was `Frontiers of Astronomy', published three years later by equally eccentric astronomer Fred Hoyle.

            Hoyle's treatment of cosmology twisted my youthful mind with a wonderful, silly question: Why is it dark at night, dark between the stars? After all, if the universe extended without limit--and there was no reason to think it didn't--there should always be further bunches of stars (no matter how faint) filling in the stipple we actually see, until the whole sky blazed like the sun. Hoyle's answer drew upon Edward Hubble's majestic insight of the 1920s: The sky is dark at night because the Universe expands.

            But if that is so, as we've known now for a whole human lifetime, maybe it's expanding from a single moment of origin? That was Gamow's claim, and he was humble enough to admit that in the 1950s it was `probably too early to say which of the two points of view will ultimately prove to be correct'. He did mention, though, that such a cosmic explosion would leave a trace we might now detect all around us: the freezy embers of a universal fireball, some 50 degrees above absolute zero.

            Neither of these wonderful, child-bending books used the term `big bang', because Hoyle hadn't yet coined it as a sarcastic put-down of Gamow's theory of the `big squeeze'. Hoyle's own notion was the `steady state', in which matter and energy expanded endlessly into infinity, continuously replenished by an unknown force-field. In less than a decade, though, he was proved wrong, when that remnant background radiation was detected. It was cooler than Gamow had predicted, though. He'd made a mistake in his add-ups.

            In recent years, the big bang theory has been improved by the theory of `inflation' (who says scientists are out of touch with reality?) which welded cosmology with quantum theory--the absurdly large and the ridiculously small. But problems remained. Above all, the layered structure of the visible universe went unexplained. An inflationary big bang, bursting instantly from zero to literally cosmic proportions, should have left spacetime so smooth and featureless that no galaxies, no stars, no people could evolve. Unless... tiny quantum imperfections at that initial fraction of a second were also inflated, creating vast `wrinkles' or ripples in spacetime, the irritants upon which matter might precipitate the pearls we call stars.

            George Smoot and hundreds of colleagues worked for years to map the faint tracery of those ripples in the sky, and in 1992 announced their discovery to tremendous press enthusiasm. In effect, their arcane efforts had confirmed the big bang. We now know with some confidence how the universe was formed (though Hoyle's still not convinced). Smoot thought his computer-enhanced pictures were like looking at the Face of God. To me, it's more like the beaming grin of George Gamow.

            In a hurried and rather badly produced book, Smoot and journalist Davidson tell just how the COBE team got its exquisitely delicate results--heart-breaking years of efforts in horrid climates from desert America to Antarctica, balloon instruments lost, their shuttle satellite heroically rebuilt for rocket launch after disaster in space--and something of what it all implies for science.

            If Smoot is a Nobel-candidate experimenter, Stephen Hawking is the kind of theorist who tells him what to look for. Trapped in his ruined body, Hawking's mind beavers away with black holes that leak and eventually evaporate (I once dubbed them `pink holes'), big bangs without any strict starting point (which gets rid of God's Hand as well as his Face), and indeed an infinity of baby bangs budding off from this universe and others through holes of various hues. His new book is a collection of articles, some written in the 1970s and 80s and replete, I fear, with repetitions, though this redundancy might help unfamiliar ideas to stick.

            While his `A Brief History of Time' is notoriously the least-read bestseller of our time, this one might be easier for his coffee-table fans, especially the transcription of his chat with a BBC interviewer for Desert Island Discs. Hawking still doesn't quite explain what he means by `imaginary time', though he does say it's a commonplace of science fiction. Too right; I once used it in a novel, where I called it `orthogonal time', which is one small reason why Hawking is a millionaire writer and I'm not. (True, in the same book I also coined the term `virtual reality', but that was before VR became actual reality, so hardly anyone noticed.)

            At the other end of the scale from expanding spacetime and cosmic seeds is Semir Zeki's beautifully illustrated book on visual neuroanatomy, how the eyes are mapped to the brain. This might sound as alluring as spending your holidays learning log tables, but Zeki spices his complex tale with the sort of anecdotes we've learn to love in Oliver Sacks.

            The most astounding, I suspect, is from a 1983 Munich clinical paper on a woman who is motion-blind! Pouring tea is tricky, because `the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier'. Crossing the street is scary: `When I'm looking at the car first, it seems far away. When I want to cross the road, suddenly the car is very near'. Her brain edits out the intervening motion, like a lethal video clip. Zeki shows in some detail how recent research links quite specific portions of the brain with the most deceitfully transparent of human experiences: looking at the world.

THE HUMAN NATURE OF BIRDS: A Scientific Discovery with Startling Implications

by Theodore Xenophon Barber, PhD, Bookman, 226pp

MUSIC OF THE MIND: An Adventure into Consciousness

by Darryl Reanney, Hill of Content, 186pp

INTERFACE ART: Computers, Graphics, Language

by Greg Eiffe, 15 Kent Rd, Keswick SA 5035, 143pp

A VIEW OF THE UNIVERSE

by David Malin, Cambridge University Press, 266pp

Two reviewing paths present themselves. Here's one: fans of hypnosis and other altered states will instantly recognise T. X. Barber's name. He's a world authority, sober as a presbyter. That's his name, after all, on the fabled Barber Suggestibility Scale. Well, T.X. has kicked over the traces, come out for the Cosmic Christ. Theodore Xenophon is a great name for a great guy battling uphill--and who will shave the barber, to throw in a paradox from Bertrand Russell? Yes, T. X. has stepped forward from the back of the tent and declared himself for kindly Mother Gaia and her web-footed friends (for, as the old song had it, `that duck might be somebody's mu-u-u-ther').

            `People of the earth, awaken!' cries Barber, as if conjuring his slumbering subjects from their millennial trance. `Open your eyes, look around you, and become aware of the fast-moving lives of your neighbors, the birds... Look closer and see the strivings, feelings, experiences of the individual animals near you. Wake up!' It's true, folks! `You too can befriend birds, look into their secret lives, and perceive their hidden personalities.'

            But one might approach Barber's book less sarcastically. It's true that he ends his startling disclosures with a warning that sounds paranoid: `committed adherents of the dominant view will strive to remove it from scientific consideration by ridicule and direct and indirect attacks'. That, though, is a perfectly plausible prediction from our current understanding of how science works--as much by the venom and rhetoric of entrenched mandarins as by the dispassionate weighing of fact and theory. So if a notable cognitive scientist of 30 or more years standing declares that birds (and other animals large and small) have intelligence comparable to our own, he can expect knee-jerk mockery rather than careful scrutiny.

            Barber's book is well researched, copiously documented (though the same few core sources appear again and again), touching, screwball, and perhaps extremely important. His case is that all animals (us included) respond adaptively and with genuine if specialised intelligence to their circumstances, using complex skills and instincts grounded in genetic programs. Chomsky's theories, he says, show that language, our own prized tool of consciousness, is built on a DNA template.

            What's more, scrupulous observation of (and friendship with) budgies, parrots, jays and wild birds prove that their equivalent `languages' are supple, nuanced, emotional, and form the basis for individual personalities, even a limited degree of self-awareness. The tales of Blue Bird, Blondie and Lover, three budgies observed by behavioural scientist Sheryl Wilson, are deeply touching. Is this mere anthropomorphism? `Although Lover did not talk to Blondie and had never before been heard to say her name, surprisingly, he expressed concern and caring for her on the day she was dying... saying caring phrases such as "Poor little Blondie. Sweet little Blondie".'

            Naturally (after dabbing one's eyes with a Kleenex) one thinks of alternative explanations that avoid birds having real brains. They don't call them bird-brains for nothing, one thinks, almost angrily. What kind of redemptive Green ethic will be built on such palpably sentimental bosh? But Barber is no ninny, and his careful presentation might undermine even the proudest human's sense of supreme uniqueness.

            There are also dual ways of reviewing the late Dr Reanney's book. One might praise the courage of this profound scientist who dares venture beyond the limits of reductive paradigms, blending the deep if shocking insights of quantum theory with numinous visions from the Near Death Experience. Mind is an uncollapsed quantum wave, consciousness a songline stretched back to the Big Bang (and Before?), life a cosmic fact that surpasses and transcends the inconvenient interruption of death. This reading is widespread among people who know nothing of science, and goes far toward explaining the prodigious sales of Reanney's last book, The Death of Forever, trounced savagely by me (to no visible effect) in these pages.

            A much sounder way to review Music of the Mind is to wonder why it was not candidly entitled Muzak for the Mindless. One might go through its awful mock-poetic pages one by one, trembling with rage at the misuse of crisp, difficult scientific ideas, foaming at the mouth at the impropriety of an expert microbiologist who shows so little respect for the findings of disciplines he acknowledges are outside his own competency (quantum theory especially). One might pounce on every ludicrous distortion cloaked with the pretend-defence that it is meant as a `metaphor', while actually it casts aside every aspect of the analogy it purports to set up. If we wish to understand true reality, Reanney seems to suggest, we should see that it's exactly like riding a bicycle--except that we have no legs, and the bicycle has neither wheels nor pedals. See? Isn't that scientifically inspiring?

            Greg Eiffe, in Interface Art, proposes dozens of new ways to make the dreaded computer a tool to enhance language rather than crush it, to open the playground of cyberspace to a larger audience than its hacker custodians. His self-published guide to re-programming our brains with the power of the microchip is fascinating stuff. It reminded me a bit of Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach in its remorseless tumble of ideas and gags (and you can't give better praise than that). Words and phrases in the age of the colour monitor can become vivid icons (`viewcabularies', in an Eiffe coinage) taking advantage of aspects of our visual scanning system that trad print media ignore.

            The book is fun, though perhaps it's so embedded in its own discourse--what Eiffe dubs `hyperanalysis'--that sometimes it loses touch with any likely market outside the graffix labs of Silicon Valley and their local equivalents. I would hope that future editions can include some sample programs (maybe on diskette, as the popular computing magazines do). In the meantime, every computing class needs a stack of copies: `smart pills' for the Mac or PC user.

            Eye, heart and brain are linked in another and equally powerful way in the astronomical photography of Dr David Malin, a former chemist from the slums of Lancashire, now at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Siding Spring in NSW. Malin's soul-stretching images of deep space cannot even be approached in words. The colours of the night are here in glory, as we'd see them if our own poor limited vision were a thousand times more acute. Malin's book is truly wonderful.