Richard Dawkins - The Genetic Book Of The Dead (Head Of Zeus, 2024) ****½

Richard Dawkins writing purely about our biology and the impact of evolution, without any attacks on religion. This is new territory for me, and this book is a treat. Dawkins "Book of the Dead" has nothing to do with the Tibetan or Egyptian "books of the dead". This one is about how we can trace back some of the characteristics of animals to their genetic origins, including the environments in which they lived and evolved. 

How camouflage evolved in some animals, how some animals evolved to land and returned to the see, how eye-sight changed and developed, ... He gives hundreds of bizarre and quite exceptional behaviour in animals that become easy to understand once Dawkins explains what has or might have happened in the genetic archives of the species. He also explained how different species developed similar characteristics independently from each other. He does this with layman's language, with sufficient science to make it interesting, but still focused on delivering a text that many without a scientific education can read without any problem. And to his credit, he also comes with quite a number of "scientific intuitions" or theories on what needs further exploration. 

The book is nicely illustrated by Jana Lenzová and contains a wealth of pictures. 

Apart from the interesting subject itself, Dawkins's enthusiasm and wonder about our living world makes it an even easier to recommend book. 

Peter Godfrey-Smith - Living On Earth (Harper Collins, 2024) ***

This book is the follow-up of Peter Godfrey-Smith's "Metazoa", a book that I really liked for the new insights it brought to me regarding the emergence of consciousness in animals. It is the final book in the trilogy that started with "Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life", which I haven't read. 

This book is less scientific and more observational, like a documentary. He describes the animals he watched under water, in the jungle, in the desert and other places, but without adding many new scientific insights, just adding additional examples and depth to what he wrote earlier. The book ends with a strong plea to safeguard the planet and its vulnerable ecosystem, a topic that we fully endorse. 

We are destroing the earth's riches and wonder and surprises. Sentient beings that took millions of years to develop, with all their skills and features of today, are being wiped out by the dumbest of all animals. We agree, of course, but I did not buy the book to confirm my opinion. 

Daniel C. Dennett - Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Penguin, 1995) ****

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett passed away earlier this year. He is one the four riders of the apocalypse, together with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, called like that for their outspoken and often militant atheism. This was a good reason to read one of Dennett's initial books on Darwin's theory of evolution. 

Thirty years after publication, the book is somewhat outdated, luckily, but unfortunately also very actual. Many of his references about genetics, quantum physics and artificial intelligence are of course no longer entirely correct, and would have been presented in a very different way today, considering the incredible progress that was made in the last decade and years. But the essence of what he writes is still valid. The idea that life is the result of random chance events, with some basic rules that continue to be subjected to chance, and the organsism's fitness to survive in an often hostile environment, is something that - my guess - roughly 90% of the world's population would still reject today. 

"Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe. 

Right from the beginning, the cost of doing something is running the risk of doing it wrong; of making a mistake. Our slogan could be: No taking without mistaking. The first error that ever was made was a typographical error, a copying mistake that then became the opportunity for creating a new task environment (or fitness landscape) with a new criterion of right and wrong, better and worse. A copying error "counts" as an error here only because there is a cost to getting it wrong: termination of the reproductive line at worst, or a diminution in the capacity to replicate. These are all objective matters, differences that are there whether or not we look at them, or care about them, but they bring in their train a new perspective. Before that moment, no opportunity for error existed. However things went, they went neither right nor wrong. Before that moment, there was no stable, predictive way of exercising the option of adopting the perspective from which errors might be discerned, and every mistake anybody or any­thing has ever made since is dependent on that original error-making pro­cess. In fact, there is strong selection pressure for making the genetic copying process as high-fidelity as possible, minimizing the likelihood of error. Fortunately, it cannot quite achieve perfection, for if it did, evolution would grind to a halt. This is Original Sin, in scientifically respectable guise. Like the Biblical version, it purports to explain something: the emergence of a new level of phenomena with special characteristics ( meaners in one case, sinners in the other). Unlike the Biblical version, it provides an explanation that makes sense; it does not proclaim itself to be a mysterious fact that one has to take on faith, and it has testable implications. (p. 203)

This core idea cannot be repeated enough. It's a message of humility. It's a message that requires collaboration and pragmatic solutions among people for the complex problemas that we are confronted with, instead of relying on age-old and unworkable rigid ethical concepts. 

A large part of the book consists in refuting concepts of other academics whose writings and viewpoints are no longer a point of discussion today. If you can live with this, the book is still easy to recommend, and Dennett's knowledge of various scientific disciplines and the rigour of his approach are an absolute pleasure to read. 

Our world has lost a great mind. 

Siddharta Mukherjee - The Song Of The Cell (Penguin, 2022) ****½

Siddharta Mukherjee is a biologist, physician, researcher (Stanford, Oxford, Harvard) and author of the very popular science books "The Emperor Of All Maladies" (on cancer) and "The Gene". With his latest book - The Song Of The Cell - he takes us along for a journey into the human body to find out how our cells work together to give our body all its functions and possibilities. 

His way of presenting this is fascinating: he does this step by step, each time with some personal stories to illustrate, and always by honouring the researchers who discovered the functions he described, including what they looked like, what they struggled with (or even literally killed each other for), yet all this focused on the incredible variety and functions of cells we have in our bodies, and how they have evolved from their original egg cell to become hyperspecialised in some organ or circulating through the body. Bone cells, blood cells, brain cells, liver cells, pancreatic cells, and the zillion of other cells are presented, and how they interact, how our immune cells do their work (or not) ... and all that without going into too much technical details of biology or biochemistry or even physics. 

His biological overview is also a historical one, showing the immense progress we have made in the last decades, almost exponentially, considering how little we knew a century ago, and how we even knew less for thousands of years before. 

In his exploration of the cells in our body, and the clear explanation of all that is currently known, he leaves a lot of space for the unknown, for the deeper mysteries and areas for further discovery and research. 

Near the end of the book, he gives this summary which describes it well: 

"We are built of uni­tary blocks-extraordinarily diverse in shape, size, and function, but uni­tary nonetheless. 

Why? The answers can only be speculative. Because, in biology, it is easier to evolve complex organisms out of unitary blocks by permuting and combining them into different organ systems, enabling each to have a spe­cialized function while retaining features that are common across all cells (metabolism, waste-disposal, protein synthesis). A heart cell, a neuron, a pancreatic cell, and a kidney cell rely on these commonalties: mitochondria to generate energy, a lipid membrane to define its boundaries, ribosomes to synthesize its proteins, the ER and Golgi to export proteins, membrane­spanning pores to let signals in and out, a nucleus to house its genome. And yet, 'despite the commonalities, they are functionally diverse. A heart cell uses mitochondrial energy to contract and act as a pump. A beta cell in the pancreas uses that energy to synthesize and export the hormone in­sulin. A kidney cell uses membrane-spanning channels to regulate salt. A neuron uses a different set of membrane channels to send signals that en­able sensation, sentience, and consciousness. Think of the number of dif­ferent architectures you can build with a thousand differently shaped Lego blocks. 

Or perhaps we might reframe the answer in evolutionary terms. Recall that unicellular organisms evolved into multicellular organisms-not once, but many independent times. The driving forces that goaded that evolu­tion, we think, were the capacity to escape predation, the ability to compete more effectively for scarce resources, and to conserve energy by specializa­tion and diversification. Unitary blocks-cells-found mechanisms to achieve this specialization and diversification by combining common pro­grams (metabolism, protein synthesis, waste disposal) with specialized pro­grams ( contractility in the case of muscle cells, or insulin-secreting capacity in pancreatic beta cells). Cells coalesced, repurposed, diversified-and con­quered."

 As a physician, he not only talks about how our cells do work, but also what happens when they are out of control, when our immune system starts attacking our own body, when pancreatic cells malfunction and lead to diabetes, how cancer cells never stop growing. He is proud of the achievements, but also humble in his realisation that there is still a gigantic amount of discoveries to be made. 

"When the comprehensive list of genes that drive the growth of cancer cells were first identified in the mid-2000s, there was an exuberance that we had unlocked the key to cures for cancer.  

"You have a leukemia that has mutations in Tet2, DNMT3a, and SF3bl;' I would tell a bewildered patient. I would look at her triumphantly, as if I'd solved the Sunday crossword puzile. 

She would look at me as if I was from Mars. 

And then she would ask the simplest question: "So, does that mean that you know the drugs that are going to cure me?" 

"Yes. Soon;' I would say, with exuberance. For the linear narrative ran thus: isolate the cancer cells, find the altered genes; match it with medicines that target those genes, and kill the cancer without harming the host. 

Not that I believe that he said this to a patient in real life, but it illustrates the realisation that there is still a lot of work to be done. Biology and medical science have barely scratched the surface of what could be achieved. 

The topic of the book is one with many wonders, and the deep insight that our life on earth is truly exceptional and precious, incredibly difficult to understand and incredibly complex and fascinating. Mukherjee is a wonderful guide, and the amazing thing is that he finds the time to even write this kind of book despite all his other work as a physician and top-researcher. We can only be grateful that he shares his knowledge and enthusiasm with us. 

Bill Mesler & H. James Cleaves II - A Brief History Of Creation (Norton & Company, 2016) ****

The title of this book has to be taken literally: it's a history of all the theories about the origin of life, a fascinating subject that has boggled the minds of the smartest scientists in the world since time immemorial, with the exception of course of religions.

They start with the ancient Greeks - where else? - and then guide us through the centuries. It's a wonderful overview of scientific questioning, research and discovery, but at the same time the book offers a good insight in some primitive and wrong theories, including the very longstanding error that animals could arise out of nothing. Aristotle already concluded that eels just came to existence out of water, because he couldn't figure out how they migrated to the Mediterranean (unaware of their travels to the Sargasso sea), but even in the 19th century, people believed that mice could come to life just out of hay.

Luckily, cleverer minds made interesting discoveries. Belgian alchemist Jan Van Helmont came to the conclusion that all life came from eggs. Dutch weaver Anthony van Leeuwenhoek discovered microbes in the placque from his teeth that he put under his newly developed microscope.

The more interesting and in-depth analysis is the one from Darwin to Crick and Watson, followed by the initially controversial theories by Carl Woese into the real origins of life by studying DNA. He shook the foundations of scientific thinking by adding new, and more archaeic life forms into our general notion of how nature is organised, and how evolution works.

Today, we know that life must have come to existence out of the most basic amino acids, small chemical entities that create proteins. In lab tests, self-replicating RNA has been developed, yet never without the presence of a copying protein. Bacteria were discovered in the most uninhabitable places on earth, such as the hot water vents at the bottom of the ocean. Expectations are that in such extreme conditions chemical reactions have come into play to start the replicating process. But how, that still remains a mystery.

"A Brief History Of Creation" is an easy to read, and fascinating overview of the theories of creation throughout the ages. It demonstrates again how important science is to come to an understanding of our world. The biggest challenges remains to make sure that everybody in the world because aware that life was not created in the garden of eden.

David Quammen - The Tangled Tree - A Radical New History Of Life (Simon & Schuster, 2018) ****

In "The Tangled Tree", science author David Quammen gives a historical overview of how the visual image of the 'tree of life' evolved from a mythical concept into Darwin's biological concept of evolution, with one cause of life out of which all the different species branched out.

The discoveries and theories developed after the discovery of DNA, and this combined with the sequencing of the human genome at the beginning of this century, has given a totally new perspective. To put it simply, at the basis of the original "tree trunk", there may have been more species than anticipated, and secondly, DNA and other genetic material does not only replicate from one generation to the next, but evidence shows that genetic material also becomes incorporated through lateral 'infection', possibly through retroviruses. But even in earlier days, in their earliest life forms, the simplest bacteria probably became more complex not through evolution, but by absorbing other bacteria who transformed into useful ingredients with a new function and became part of the host's DNA.

Quammen did some very thorough research to write this book of recent finding in evolutionary biology, not only by making the published science also accessible to lay audiences - even if some basics are needed to grasp everything - but he also spoke to many of the actual scientists about their discoveries. And whether you like it or not, Quammen also spends a lot of time to present the fights between those scientists, their rejection of each other's ideas, their personal feuds and rivalries. It's probably the price you have to pay to receive a narrative such as this one, very readable and fascinating to follow, and I guess the personal and personality aspects of the stories play a good part of that.

Alice Roberts - The Incredible Unlikeliness Of Being (Heron Books, 2015) ***

A interesting book, one that creates a wonderful parallel between biological evolution and the growth of a child after conception. The idea is of course obvious and simple. Somehow, we all go back to the same ancestors so many millions of years ago, and this ancestry is still clear in the splitting of cells, in the growth of the foetus and the embryo. Roberts show what parts of our bodies we have in common with all other living things and how the function of some of these changed over time.

Alice Roberts is a professor of anatomy and television documentary maker. She is specialised in paleopathology, the study of disease in ancient human remains, receiving the degree in 2008. She worked as Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Bristol Centre for Comparative and Clinical Anatomy, where her main roles were teaching clinical anatomy, embryology, and physical anthropology, as well as researching osteoarchaeology and paleopathology.

 In a very methodical way, she takes the reader through all the organs of the body, explaining the common origins with other species, the comparative and different use these body parts evolved into over time: heads and brains, skulls and senses, speech and gills, spines and segments, ribs, lungs and heart, guts and yolk sacks, gonads, genitals and gestation, limbs, legs, shoulders and thumbs.

The earliest creatures, interestingly, evolved from simple cells to take in nutrients, process them and discard them: a mouth and an arse is all it needed to get us started. And the result is absolutely fascinating: well told, easy to understand for lay people and with many drawings to illustrate her points.

Robert Sapolsky - Behave (Bodley Head, 2017) *****

Truly amazing. In "Behave", Robert Sapolsky, professor in biology and neurology at Stanford University, gives a big picture overview of all the processes that make us do what we do. He uses the simple act of pulling the trigger of a gun, but he could have used any other action. He then analyses all the biological (hormonal, genetic, ...), psyschological, cognitive, genetic and cultural elements that drive that specific simple activity, by moving back in time, starting with the first seconds preceding the act, step by step back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In fact, Sapolsky tries to go beyond the traditional academic distinction between the sciences of behaviour.

As is often the case by such sweeping overviews of current scientific insights, academics will criticise the lack of true in-depth and up-to-date knowledge of each of the disciplines presented, and especially in their own field of interest, but that is unavoidable in books with the ambition to popularise and create such a broad canvas. The big advantage is that it brings together the incredibly complex processes behind our everyday actions. It shows were our limits are, allowing to become more conscious of why we do what we do, and therefore also to become smarter, and as Sapolsky advocates, also wiser.

Sapolsky's ways of presenting human behaviour in all its complex processes, should be mandatory for all schools in the world. If everybody understood some of the essential drivers of our current behaviour, the way our hormones work, the way our brain functions, the way adolescents brains differ from adult brains, understanding how us-versus-them thinking drives moral choices, how apperent personal moral decisions may have deep emotional roots that can only be overcome by becoming conscious of them ... the world would definitely be a better place.

And that is the great value of a popular science book such as this one. It's insightful, humane, wise and compassionate.

One of the best books of the year.

Richard Dawkins - Silence In The Soul (Bantam Press, 2017) **

"Science In The Soul" is a compilation of speeches that biologist and atheism advocate Richard Dawkins has given over the years, and at very diverse occasions and on a variety of topics.

Needless to say, they are all about biology, Darwin, science and religion, including his usual attacks on intelligent design and other non-scientific aberrations.

Interesting to read, but it gives the impression that the publisher needed some more revenue from a best-selling author. Most of the texts do not add anything to Dawkins's other books.

Daniel Dennett - From Bacteria To Bach And Back (Allen Lane, 2017) ***

In this ambitious book, American philosopher Daniel Dennett describes the evolution of mind and consciousness as the result of biological adaptations in a very Darwinian way. No problem with that of course. And to a large extent you can only agree with all the different facts that support his vision.

But then he suddenly makes a jump to the description of consciousness which is, if I understand him well, an illusion. I can understand that the perception of the ego is an illusion, but consciousness itself? He calls it a 'user-illusion' at the same level as the color that stays on your retina after you've closed your eyes, a kind of imprint of continuity that does not exist in reality. I have no problem with this either, but he does not substantiate this fully, apart from a philosophical plausible explanation. Suddenly, the facts are no longer there, only the analogy with visual illusions.

At the same time you wonder who is writing for? The language is too complicated and the arguments too subtle to be read by mass audiences. But then why does he spend so much time on attacking "Intelligent Design", when surely none of his readers will need to be convinced of its stupidity? Why does he need to attack Noam Chomsky in such a way, when it's not even needed for his reasoning? Why does he refer so often to his own work to make his point?

In the end the reader will have read an interesting overview of a selection of scientists working in the area between biology and cognitive science, or seperately but brought together by Dennett in a synthesis of current thinking, with a original viewpoint of his own. At the same time, it is needlessly complicated, with divergence and repetitions that could have been avoided.

E. O. Wilson - The Meaning Of Human Existence (Liveright, 2014) ***

Na zijn meer uitvoerige "The Social Conquest Of Earth", kan ik dit boekje van E.O. Wilson ook aanraden : het is luchtiger, minder wetenschappelijk, eerder een aantal bedenkingen en mijmeringen over de mens in deze wereld als sociaal dier, waar de mens als een dysfunctioneel wezen zijn eigen habitat dreigt te vernietigen, en zichzelf in hetzelfde proces. Hij heeft ook bedenkingen bij het wetenschappelijk bedrijf op zich, waar dogma's soms ook innoverend wetenschappelijke bevindingen tegenhouden, en hij richt zijn pijlen vooral op wie in het zicht van de feiten, weigert die te aanvaarden, uiteraard te beginnen met alle gelovigen van welke godsdienst dan ook.

Het lezen waard.

Edward O. Wilson - The Social Conquest Of Earth (Liveright, 2013) ****

Tijdens mijn studies antropologie heb ik ooit het boekje "The Use And Abuse of Biology : An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology", van Marshall Sahlins moeten lezen, een sterke kritiek op de sociobiologie zoals die door Edward O. Wilson werd geponeerd, en die verketterd werd als sociaal determinisme en biologisch kapitalisme, waarschijnlijk deels omdat het hele veld van sociologie en antropologie was ingepalmd door Marxistisch beïnvloede "wetenschappers", en deels omdat het niet kon dat een bioloog zich op het terrein van de socioloog begaf.

In dit boek geeft E.O. Wilson een populair-wetenschappelijk overzicht van al zijn bevindingen, die deels zijn opgebouwd rond zijn veldwerk bij mieren en andere insecten, en die ook analoge processen kennen bij de mens. De basis van zijn stelling is dat evolutie verloopt door "groep-selectie", eerder dan selectie door verwantschap ('kin selection'). Hij noemt dit "eusociale evolutie".

Hij begint met een overzicht van de evolutie van de mensheid, telkens wijzend op het belang van groepsdenken en - gedrag op overlevingskansen, evenals het belang van taakverdeling. Het is duidelijk dat de meest succesrijke soorten op onze aardbol als groep ageren. Hij gaat dan na wat precies de menselijke natuur uitmaakt, en onderzoekt het ontstaan van cultuur, taal en religie, en hun belang bij groepsevolutie.

Nu zijn we op een punt gekomen dat ons succes zich tegen ons riskeert te keren, en we zijn onze wereld grondig om zeep aan het helpen. Ons ingebakken stamdenken moet plaatsmaken voor een ruimer denken van onze soort en de omgeving als groep. Godsdienst en andere ideologieën, van zowel rechts als links, moeten als elementen van een verouderd denken worden gezien.

Een stevig betoog, goed onderbouwd en gedocumenteerd, vol interessante wetenswaardigheden, en vlot geschreven.