Peter J. Hotez - The Deadly Rise Of Anti-Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) ****

If there is one topic of interest for all of us, is the rise of anti-science. Out of the political frustration and dissatisfaction with their fate, many people have huddled together in a weird movement that rejects reason, science, evidence and even education. They seem tired to be on the wrong side of rationality, hence they accept any theory to feel equal to people who completed higher studies and have acquired some intellectual expertise, whether in medicine, chemistry, biology or engineering. 

Peter J Hotez is clearly a true expert. He is an American scientist, pediatrician, and advocate in the fields of global health, vaccinology, and neglected tropical diseasecontrol. He serves as founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also Director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics. He also serves as a University Professor of Biology at Baylor University.

He is also very active on X (Twitter) to keep advocating for evidence-based medicine, crusading against anti-scientists on a daily basis, and risking his own life and that of his family in the process. 

In this book he gives an overview of the rise of anti-science in the world, and how it has become its own kind of business, generating huge amounts of money for snake oil salesmen. 

With the appointmentof Robert Kennedy Junior as Health Secretary in the United States, it appears that the battle for reason and evidence has been lost, with all results already showing in terms of the spread of measles, small pox and other infectious diseases in the United States. I only hope people will soon realise why experts and expertise is highly needed. 

I selected some related excerpts from his book, showing the way forward not only for the scientific community but for all of us to ensure that people get the right information and are not the victims of selfish conmen. 

"One of the most challenging aspects of confronting anti-science aggres­sion is that those promoting its agenda have acquired wealth, power, and organization. The anti-vaccine/anti-science ecosystem now in­cludes the most widely viewed nighttime cable news shows, far-right members of the US Congress and extremist groups, and a formidable array of contrarian intellectuals or pseudointellectuals. From my per­sonal experience, I learned firsthand that these groups play hardball. Not only are they aggressive, but as I have tried to make clear, they do not feel compelled to be truthful. They sometimes seek to trigger waves of hate e-mails and attacks via social media. 

Another challenge is the simple reality that anti-science very much runs along a partisan divide. The anti-vaccine and anti-science move­ments are fully enmeshed in extreme conservative or far-right politics. At times, this can include extremist politics, such as when the Proud Boys and other White nationalist groups participate in anti-vaccine ral­lies and messaging. Therefore, combating anti-science means it is often not possible to remain politically neutral." (p. 134)

"In the biomedical sciences, anti-science groups exploit to their advan­tage two key tactics that make it difficult for the scientific community to counter their influence. First, anti-science in America is currently spurred by a strong partisan divide, but the scientific professions re­main committed to political neutrality. Next, health freedom propa­ganda often dismisses mainstream science as little more than science dogma perpetuated by high priests working at elite research universi­ties or institutes. To make matters worse, the anti-science groups dom­inate the modern public square-the Internet and social media-know­ing full well that our profession looks inward, seldom engages the public, and prefers journals and scientific conferences where we speak only to other scientists. 

Therefore, success in combating anti-science aggression requires that we must at some level be prepared to do battle on multiple fronts. It means that at least some biomedical scientists must show a willing­ness to learn and practice science communication in the public market­place." (p. 140)

"However, these actions do not address those generating the content from the far-right, the role of the disinformation dozen in monetizing the Internet, or the Russian government's weaponized health commu­nication. Given the 20 years of relative neglect by the US government in tackling anti-science aggression, I believe we must realize that this issue goes way beyond the health sector. We need input from other branches of the federal government such as the Departments of Homeland Secu­rity, Commerce, Justice-and even State, given the Russian involve­ment. We must seek ways to demonetize the use of the Internet by the disinformation dozen or halt the anti-science aggression emanating from Fox News and elected officials, but in ways that do not violate the Bill of Rights or the US Constitution. Although the health sector may not know what can and should be done to address anti-science aggres­sion, there are those who do and who could come to the table with ex­periences that taught them how to combat global terrorism, cyberat­tacks, and nuclear proliferation. We must learn from them. Along those lines, the White House should consider establishing an interagency task force to examine such possibilities and to make recommendations for action to slow the progression of anti-science." (p. 159)

There is work to be done. We try to participate in this where possible. 

An important book that should be read by everyone in politics. 

 

Michael Taylor - Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion (Bodley Head, 2024) ****½

What a wonderful treat of a book. It describes the discovery of "impossible monsters", the skeletons of dinosaurs and other reptiles in the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset, Southwest England, first by the 12-year old Mary Anning. The ongoing discoveries of other skeletons created a completely different view on ancient animals and on the age of the earth, questioning biblical stories in which these strange animals never even featured. But the book is not about the animals themselves, but how they became the subject of intense debates with the Church and scientists who claimed that the earth was only 6,000 years old. 

Not much later Darwin developed his theory of evolution of the species which added even more fuel to the heated discussions. 

The book gives a wonderful overview of the debates that ensued between religion and science, the opposing views, the discrediting of scientific evidence by religious dogma, but also the whole public debate, including the reports of the actual meetings of the Royal Society of Science in which the topics were debated. 

Michael Taylor was born in 1988 and graduated with a double first in history from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD. He is also the author of "The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery". The discoveries of Mary Anning have been made into a worthwhile movie, called "Ammonite" with Kate Winslet in the leading role. 

The discoveries of ancient animals and Darwin's theory of evolution found fertile ground in the now formal questioning of the actual reality of the Bible stories: 

"In 'The Essence of Christianity' (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach developed an anthropological approach to religion, which he described as merely 'the dream of the human mind'. Here, the God of justice represented human ideals of justice, and the God of love was the perfection of human ideals of love; it followed that Christ the miracle-worker was 'nothing else than a product and reflex of the supernatural human mind'. In 'The Life of Jesus' (1835) David Strauss had meanwhile looked at the gospels, striving to separate historical evi­dence from mythology. Though he did not deny that Christ had lived, Strauss decried the New Testament's 'false facts and impossible conse­quences which no eye-witness could have related'. Fatally, in his view, 'there was [for a long time] no written account of the life of Jesus', so that 'oral narratives alone were transmitted'; such tales had become 'tinged with the marvellous', growing into 'historical myth[s]'. For Strauss, these stories 'like all other legends were fashioned by degree', only in time acquiring 'a fixed form in our written Gospels' (p. 133)

The discoveries shoock the very foundations of religious belief, of the concept of right and wrong: 

"And what of the Lord Himself? (conservative priest) Richard Froude despaired at the 'goodness' of a god who had chosen to bless 'arbitrarily, for no merit of their own, as an eastern despot chooses his favourites, one small section of mankind, leaving all the world besides to devil-worship and lies'. Just why were the chosen people chosen? And how could Sutherland believe the Lord to be 'all-merciful, all-good' when He was 'jealous, passionate, capricious, [ and] revengeful, punishing children for their fathers' sin', tempting men 'into blindness and folly' when He knew they would fall, and punishing them eternally in a 'hell prison-house'? This god was not divine. He was 'a fiend' (p. 135)

The broadening of the number of scientists and other amateur scientists to deal with the information and the data, led to even further destruction of the foundations of religious belief: 

"Here, he (William Parker Foulke, an American lawyer) compared 'the modified bird Archaeopteryx' with 'the ordinary Dinosauria' in which class, in con­tradiction of Wagner, he placed the Compsognathus. There were differences to be sure, but Cope remarked upon 'the union of the tibia and fibula [of the Compsognathus] with the first series of tarsal bones, a feature formerly supposed to belong to the class Aves [ that is, birds] alone'. He also looked at 'the transverse direction of the pubes', the hip-bones, and again observed 'an approach to the birds'. After describing other 'bird-like features' such as the number and nature of its vertebrae, Cope suggested that the Compsognathus stood 'inter­mediate between the position in most reptiles and in birds' (p. 249)

"All this was proof, he concluded, that 'the facts of palaeontology . . . are not opposed to the doctrine of evolution, but, on the contrary ... enable us to form a conception of the manner in which birds may have been evolved from reptiles'. The 'fowl that may fly above the earth', sup­posedly created by the Lord on the fifth day of the first week, had in fact evolved from the sixth day's creatures 'that creepeth upon the earth'. The book of Genesis lay in ruins, the dinosaurs had tri­umphed, and even Richard Owen recognised the quality and force of the bulldog's performance. (p. 251)

"John William Draper (American chemist, professor at New York University) moved from the library at Alexandria to the 'pillared halls of Persepolis', from the Arabian schools of mathematics to the courts of the Inquisition, and from Renaissance universities to the learned societies of London. There was no question of his favour: 'The history of Science', he declared, 'is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expan­sive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other'. Of that 'traditionary faith' he was unsparing, describing the development of Catholicism as an 'intellectual night' which settled on Europe, .during which spiritual affairs passed from the control of classical philoso­phers 'into the hands of ignorant and infuriated ecclesiastics, parasites, eunuchs, and slaves'. At last, however, that night was lifting, and civi­lised society had recognised the truth: 'that Roman Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being abso­lutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice - it cannot have both'. (p. 286). 

Taylor's erudition is a pleasure to read, as is the fluency of his writing style. Highly recommended reading. 

Douglas R. Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979) *****

This fascinating and genial book was published in 1979, when I was at university. It was a kind of a hype among my fellow-students, and even if I did not understand (or read) half of it, it opened a world, or rather a universe of thinking, while at the same time presenting it in an incredibly creative way. Earlier this year, I decided to read it in full and buy a copy. Fourty-five years later, it is still as enthralling as it was then. Hofstadter explores the boundaries of our thinking, where reason and logic meet their limits in paradoxes, contradictions, self-references and loops. The subject is about cognitive science, logic and computer sciences (and Artificial Intelligence), and he learns us how meaning and meaninglessness exist and how they come to life (or not) in abstract systems, including the human mind and the perception or delusion of the self or the "I". 

I do not think the book would have so much resonated with larger audiences or with us at that time, if it were not for the extensive illustrations of Dutch artist M.C. Escher and his impossible drawings, or the long dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise, occasionally joined by the Crab, and further illustrated by analysing the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, and their inherent structural elements of self-reference and loops, as in the sentence sequence: 

"The following sentence is false

The preceding sentence is true"

The starting point of course are the theorems of German mathematician Kurt Gödel: "The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure(i.e. an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system" (Wikipedia)

On top of this, Hofstadter develops dozens of new ways of looking at familiar or less familiar problems of logic and computation. He creates his own different logical systems in the book to illustrate his points, to take the reader without knowledge of mathematics or the formal language of computer scientists by the hand, and explain whatever elements he wants to demonstrate. 

He describes it as follows: 

"Here one runs up against a seeming paradox. Computers by their very nature are the most inflexible, desireless, rule-following of beasts. Fast though they may be, they are nonetheless the epitome of unconsciousness. How, then, can intelligent behavior be programmed? Isn't this the most blatant of contradictions in terms? One of the major theses of this book is that it is not a contradiction at all. One of the major purposes of this book is to urge each reader to confront the apparent contradiction head on, to savor it, to turn it over, to take it apart, to wallow in it, so that in the end the reader might emerge with new insights into the seemingly unbreachable gulf between the formal and the informal, the animate and the inanimate, the flexible and the inflexible.  This is what Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is all about." (p.26)

or:  

"No one knows where the borderline between non-intelligent behavior and intelligent behavior lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists is probably silly. But essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:

• to respond to situations very flexibly; 
• to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances; 
• to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages; 
• to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation; 
• to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them; 
• to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them; 
• to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways; 
• to come up with ideas which are novel. "

"This little debate shows the difficulty of trying to use logic and reasoning to defend themselves. At some point, you reach rock bottom, and there is no defense except loudly shouting, "I know I'm right!" Once again, we are up against the issue which Lewis Carroll so sharply set forth in his Dialogue: you can't go on defending your patterns of reasoning forever. There comes a point where faith takes over." (p. 192)

On the origin of life:  

"A natural and fundamental question to ask, on learning of these incredibly intricately interlocking pieces of software and hardware is: "How did ever get started in the first place?" It is truly a baffling thing. One has to imagine some sort of a bootstrap process occurring, somewhat like that which is used in the development of new computer languages - but bootstrap from simple molecules to entire cells is almost beyond our power to imagine. There are various theories on the origin of life. The run aground on this most central of all central questions: "How did Genetic Code, along with the mechanisms for its translation (ribosome_ tRNA molecules), originate?" For the moment, we will have to content ourselves with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than with an answer and perhaps experiencing that sense of wonder and awe is more satisfying than having an answer-at least for a while". (p. 548)

 Or using nice examples to make the reading easier to digest: 

"Here is a well-known children's joke which illustrates the open-endedness of real-life situations: 

• A man took a ride in an airplane. 
• Unfortunately, he fell out. 
• Fortunately, he had a parachute on. 
• Unfortunately, it didn't work. 
• Fortunately, there was a haystack below him. 
• Unfortunately, there was a pitchfork sticking out of it. Fortunately, he missed the pitchfork. 
• Unfortunately, he missed the haystack. 

It can be extended indefinitely. To represent this silly story in a frame­based system would be extremely complex, involving jointly activating frames for the concepts of man, airplane, exit, parachute, falling, etc., etc." (p. 675)

His ultimate endeavour is to link the world of abstract logic with the physical reality we live in, and of course especially our brain and its capacity to for abstract thought, to cross the levels set by scientific disciplines and to come to an more holistic understanding of the interactions. 

"My belief is that the explanations of "emergent" phenomena in our brains-for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will-are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing "resonance" between dif­ferent levels-quite like the Henkin sentence which, by merely asserting its own provability, actually becomes provable. The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself. 

 This should not be taken as an antireductionist position. It just implies that a reductionistic explanation of a mind, in order to be comprehensible, must ring in "soft" concepts such as levels, mappings, and meanings. In princi­ple, I have no doubt that a totally reductionistic but incomprehensible explanation of the brain exists; the problem is how to translate it into a language we ourselves can fathom. Surely we don't want a description in terms of positions and momenta of particles; we want a description which relates neural activity to "signals" (intermediate-level phenomena)-and which relates signals, in turn, to "symbols" and "subsystems", including the presumed-to-exist "self-symbol". This act of translation from low-level physical hardware to high-level psychological software is analogous to the translation of number-theoretical statements into metamathematical state­ments. Recall that the level-crossing which takes place at this exact transla­jon point is what creates Gödel's incompleteness and the self-proving character of Henkin's sentence. I postulate that a similar level-crossing is what creates our nearly unanalyzable feelings of self. In order to deal with the full richness of the brain/mind system, we will have to be able to slip between levels comfortably. Moreover, we will have to admit various types of "causality": ways in which an event at one level of description can "cause" events at other levels to happen. Sometimes event A will be said to "cause" event B simply for the reason that the one is a translation, on another level of description, of the other. Sometimes 'cause" will have its usual meaning: physical causality. Both types of causality-and perhaps some more-will have to be admitted in any expla­nation of mind, for we will have to admit causes that propagate both upwards and downwards" (p. 709)

And of course also the existence of free will. Are we the consequence of algorithms (historical/cultural/social/genetic/contextual/...) or not. 

"One way to gain some perspective on the free-will question is to replace it by what I believe is an equivalent question, but one which involves less loaded terms. Instead of asking, "Does system X have free will?" we ask "Does system X make choices?" By carefully groping for what we really mean when we choose to describe a system - mechanical or biological - as being capable of making "choices", I think we can shed much light on free will." (p. 711)

We will come back to this topic when reading Robert Sapolsky's "Determined". 

Even if in some respects the book is a little dated, especially when describing Artificial Intelligence or genetics, it remains one of the milestone books on cognitive science and logic, absolutely unique in terms of content and form, incredibly complex yet fun to read, even if it is impossible to understand everything, as most readers such as myself will have to confess. 

John Glassie - A Man Of Misconceptions (Riverhead Books, 2012) ****

Several years ago I read Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès novel "Là Où Les Tigres Sont Chez Eux" in which he extensively mentions the 17th Century polymath and jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who was as much a scientist as he was a fantast and con man. For one or the other reason I stumbled upon a biography of the man, which is easy to recommend for anyone interested in the history of science or religion. 

To the man's credit, he was interested in everything, and his arrogant self-confidence made him also belief he was the best at everything, from math over astronomy and physics to medicine and linguistics, and of course also astrology and alchemy. He taught for more than 40 years at the Roman college. He wrote extensive books on many subjects. Some of his contributions were valuable, but for many of them he got away with them because nobody else had any knowledge on the subject. 

His books were read by scientists and philosophers such as Leibniz, Descartes and Christiaan Huygens. Descartes sent the books back with the following comment: "The Jesuit is quite boastful; he is more of a charlatan than a scholar". Leibniz was then much younger and absolutely fascinated by Kircher's writings, even if he already asked for some evidence for the claims made by the Jesuit. 

The Jesuits were at that time among the world leaders in science education and development, and Kircher's role is best placed in this context. 

"Clavius envisioned an elite corps of mathematician priests "distributed in various nations and kingdoms like sparkling gems," serving as "a source of great fear to all enemies" and as "an incredible incitement to make young people flock to us from all the parts of the world." Many of his proposals were put in place. And so while he was rigorously and rather inflex­ibly educated in Aristotelian and Thomist doctrines, Kircher also received private instruction in the very discipline that was beginning to undermine them." (p.34)

Although already at that time, the role of the jesuits was often mocked, and Kircher clearly did not match the description of the ideal jesuit: 

"Recall that for the Jesuits, the path toward Christ was predicated on an effort to achieve humility. It's unclear how well or how often Kircher took a good look at his apparent lack in that regard. But given that hypocrisy is almost requisitely present in human beings, and common among religious, political, and philosophical practices, he surely wasn't the only vain or selfinterested member of the Society of Jesus. As the satirizing sermon by a monk from another order in Rome went, the Jesuits "are the best Men that Live on the Earth. They are as Modest as Angels. They never open their eyes to cast a Look upon the Ladies at Church. They are such great Lovers of Restraint, that you never see them in the Streets. They are so in Love with Poverty, that they Despise and trample upon all the Riches in the World. They never come near Dying Persons or Widows, to importune them to be Remember' d in their last Wills .... They never go among Courts, or mind State Affairs."  (p.209)

Kircher claimed that he could decipher hieroglyphs, and because nobody else had any clue, he was believed in this matter. When a heavy fallen obelisk was found, Kircher even gave the translation of the side that had not been revealed yet because it was still lying on the ground. 

""They in turn marveled at my boldness," Kircher claimed, "and perhaps my lack of temerity, but several decreed that the truth of the matter must be determined by the original on the obelisk itself' After the obelisk had finally been rolled, they compared Kircher's scheme with the newly revealed side. "And when they had discovered that soundly and without error all of my markings were composed as on the original," he recalled, "they were utterly stupefied, those same men who were formerly mocking my interpretations as merely pure conjecture." This left "certain individuals saying that this knowledge had been inspired by the power of God, while several, not without calumny, even asserted that the knowledge had been acquired by some illicit pact with a demon. Some, finally, judged that this type of knowledge, attained by many years of study, was able to be acquired by the strength of a singular intellect." (p.204)

Kircher collected automata and made some himself, such as this wonderful tool that could do almost anything: 

"What is known about Kircher's device comes from an instruc­tional guide he wrote titled Specula Melitensis (Maltese Observatory), which, as one historian says, mostly conveyed Kircher's "enthusiastic capacity for fatiguing detail." The apparatus had "the form and figure of an observatory," or watchtower, hence its name, and it evidently employed the Llullian discs. Beyond that, it's hard to say precisely what this instrument looked like or how it worked. A "universal chronoscope" was on "the first cubical side." A "cosmographic mir­ror" was on the second. A "physico-mathematical mirror" was on the third, and the fourth cubical side was used for "medical-mathematical" purposes. The top of the structure was a pyramid. In all, the device had one hundred twenty-five functions. Among other things, it could be used to determine: 

• the "amount of dusk"
• the "flux and reflux of the seas"
• the astrological houses of the planets
• the signs of disease and "simple medicines for healing"
• the best times to go fishing and to give birth" (p.90)

He was fascinated by everything, often boastful, less competent and scientific than he presented himself, but like with Leibniz, his unbridled interest in everything, and his incredibly productive output on so many topics raised the interest among other, possibly better scientists, to also start investigating the same topics with more success. 

"Peiresc put it very mildly when he said that Kircher's ambitions were "a little grander than the ordinary goals of his colleagues." This led to a lack of restraint as well as other problems, including a certain flexibility with the truth. But for Kircher there were greater truths and lesser ones; there were different measures of truth, metaphors, and-multiple meanings, things for which fact-based modern science has no place. Progress required another kind of split, between the literal and the literary. But that was not a split Kircher ever would have been able to abide. And it makes sense that as his scientific reputation diminished, his work continued to capture and to fuel the creative imagination. (p. 269)

This biography is well-documented, well-written and offers a fascinating view on the century when science was still in its early infancy. That some did not make great inventions such as Kircher, is inevitable. His broad interests, his assured self-confidence and his deliberate fabrications make this a wonderful read. 

Kit Yates - How To Expect The Unexpected (Quercus, 2023) ****

Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Mathematical Sciences of the University of Bath, UK, and Co-Director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology, amongst others. 

In this excellent book he introduces us to our human strategies to predict the future based on past events, or on support material such as religion, rituals, and other tactics. He gives multiple examples of how our way of reasoning fails because of our failures in adequately assessing the complexity of a situation and the probability of things to happen. In this sense the book is relatively predictable because certainly not the first on the subject, but Yates writes well, gives excellent examples and adds additional strategems to make logical mistakes or to help manage a situation better. 

In the end, of course, there's only so much science and mathematics can do to predict what will happen. Our world is in a state of chaos, and "chaos puts fundamental limits on how far we can peer into the future (...). The ubiquity of uncertainty and chaos mean we shouldn't try to make definitive predictions too far off into the future. And if we do cast our predictive nets a long way forward in time, we should be careful about how we interpret their haul" (p.395).  From my professional perspective, I always liked looking back at the corporate long term strategies we developed even five years ago with the executive committee, only to identify how many false assumptions were made, and how science and technology had indeed progressed without any possibility for prediction. It was a sobering experience, and I can recommend corporate archivists not to throw away these strategic documents. 

Yates is also sufficiently open-minded to allow alternative strategies to intervene and even if they do not actually function as assumed, the result may be beneficial. During my years at university, I used to play with the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, not that I believed in its predictions, but they gave me something to reflect on. 

"For hundreds of years, the Naskapi people of eastern Canada have been using a randomised strategy to help them hunt. Their direction­choosing ceremony involves burning the bones of previously caught caribou and using the random scorch marks which appear to deter­mine the direction for the next hunt. Divesting the decision to an essentially random process circumvents the inevitable repetitive­ness of human-made decisions. This reduces both the likelihood of depleting the prey in a particular region of the forest and the probability of the hunted animals learning where humans like to hunt and deliberately avoiding those areas. To mathematicians, using randomness in this way, to avoid predictability, is known as a mixed strategy."(p.129)

He also presents the work of British mathematician Thomas Bayes, who lived in the late 18th Century. 

"This was Bayes' idea in a nutshell: that he could update his initial belief with new data in order to come up with a new belief. In modern parlance, the prior probability (initial belief) is combined with the likelihood of observing the new data to give the posterior probability (new belief). As much as a mathematical statement, Bayes' theorem was a philosophical viewpoint: that we can never access perfect abso­lute truth, but the more evidence that accrues, the more tightly our beliefs are refined, eventually converging towards the truth." (157)

"Despite the continued scepticism and its unfashionable nature, there were many distinct successes during the period that Bayes' theorem spent in the hinterland. In the late eighteenth and early nine­teenth centuries, artillery officers in the French and Russian armies employed it to help them hit their targets in the face of uncertain environmental conditions.75 Alan Turing used it to help him crack Enigma/6 significantly shortening the Second World War. During the Cold War, the US navy used it to search for a Russian submarine that had gone AWOL77 (an event which inspired the Tom Clancy novel and subsequent film The Hunt for Red October). In the 1950s, scientists used Bayes to help demonstrate the link between smoking and lung cancer.78 The vital premise that all these Bayes adherents had come to accept was that it was OK to begin with a guess, to admit to not being cer­tain of your initial hypothesis. All that was required in return was the practitioner's absolute dedication to updating their beliefs in the face of every piece of new evidence that came along. When applied correctly, Bayes' theorem would allow its users to learn from estimates and to update their beliefs using imperfect, patchy or even missing data. The Bayesian point of view does, however, require its users to accept that they are attempting to quantify measures of belief - to cast off the black and white of absolute certainty, and accept answers in shades of grey. Despite the paradigm shift required - thinking in terms of beliefs rather than absolutes - Bayesian reasoning didn't fit the subjective, anti-science label its detractors had pinned to it. In fact, Bayes absolutely typifies the essence of modern science - the ability to change one's mind in the face of new evidence" (p.159-160)

"We must be wary about overweighting our prior beliefs, too, though. The feeling of confidence in our convictions might make it tempting to ignore small pieces of information that don't change our view of the world significantly. The flip side of allowing ourselves to have prior beliefs as part of the Bayesian perspective is that we must commit to altering our opinion every time a new piece of relevant information appears, no matter how insignificant it seems. If lots of small pieces of evidence were to arrive, each slightly undermining the anthropogenic climate-change hypothesis, then Bayes would allow us to - indeed, dictate that we must - update our view incrementally"(p.167)

 Yates also gives wonderful examples from international policy, and the subsequent excerpt could be as handy for Vladimir Putin as it once was for Nixon. You don't want to negotiate with a madman. 

"In the context of international diplomacy, sticking to a pure strategy - having a preordained response for any given situation -might reduce the ability of a negotiator to bluff, bluster or manipulate an opponent. Conversely, when negotiating with a despot who is employing a mixed strategy - someone who might, for example, have their finger on the nuclear button one minute, while advocating for total disarmament the next - an opponent might find themselves making more concessions than they would to an actor whose rational actions they find easy to predict. One particular mixed strategy, a form of brinkmanship known in political science as the Madman Theory, was the basis of much of Richard Nixon's foreign policy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The aim, as the name would suggest, was to convince Nixon's communist opponents that he was more than a little unhinged. He reasoned that if his opponents judged him to be an irrational actor, they would not be able to predict his plays and would thus have to make more concessions to avoid the risk of accidentally triggering him into retaliation". (p.197)

And one other fun example as a last illustration from the book: the strategy of Kleptogamy or the "Sneaky Fucker" strategy. 

"Kleptogamy is derived from the Greek words klepto, meaning 'to steal' and gamos, meaning 'marriage' or, more literally, 'fertilisation'. Natural selection suggests that if only the alpha males were reproducing, then the variation in male fitness in future generations would become limited. The evolutionary game theorist John Maynard Smith came up with the theoretical idea of kleptogamy to explain how a wide range of male fitnesses could be sustained over time, although he and his colleagues preferred to call it the 'Sneaky Fucker' strategy. And in some species, the evidence is there to support his hypothesis. A study of the mating habits of grey seals on Sable Island, off the coast of Canada, found that 36 per cent of females guarded by an alpha male were, in fact, fertilised by non-alpha males". (p.189).

As you notice, there is a lot to learn in this book, and a joy to read, and a great frustration that courses such as this one never actually found their place in the curriculum of all schools and colleges. I think our world would be a better place if people truly understood how poorly they reason. 

Patrick Loobuyck - Wetenschap & Religie (Pelckmans, 2023) ***½

In dit inspirerende boek geeft godsdienstwetenschapper en moraalfilosoof Patrick Loobuyck een mooi historisch overzicht van de interactie tussen geloof en wetenschap. Sinds 2006 is hij hoogleraar aan de Universiteit Antwerpen, en sinds 2016 is hij gastprofessor politieke filosofie aan de Universiteit Gent.

Net als velen is hij religieus opgevoed, maar heeft hij zijn geloof verloren, maar hij blijft verrassend genereus in zijn benadering van godsdienst. Hij begint zijn boek met de verschillende soorten interacties tussen religie en wetenschap in kaart te brengen, van de "battle-field positie" die stelt dat geloof en wetenschap niet compatibel zijn, over de 'nothing in common' positie, die ze naast elkaar plaatst - het ene voor begrip, het andere voor zingeving - tot de 'togetherness' positie, die ervan uitgaat dat beide ook kunnen samenwerken.

Het boeiendste stuk van zijn boek is de lange tocht doorheen de geschiedenis van het ontstaan van het formeel geloof tot vandaag, met alle gekende spelers, van de Griekse filosofen, de christelijke kerkvaders als Augustinus, de moslimdenker Averroës, de opkomst van het humanisme, de grote ontdekkers Galilei, Kepler, Copernicus, over Francis Bacon en Darwin tot de hedendaagse tijd. 

Loobuyck is wetenschapper en docent, en dat blijkt uit zijn boek: hij houdt zich op de vlakte, is open over zijn eigen atheïsme, maar neemt voor de rest geen standpunt in. Dit geeft ruimte aan de lezer om zelf een oordeel te vormen, wat in deze tijden een welkome verademing is. Hij is geen strijder voor het grote gelijk, maar een deskundige die de mogelijke opties voorlegt. 

Ik ben zelf nogal een groot adept van de 'vier ruiters van de apocalyps': Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett en Harris. Wetenschap is geen geloof, maar een methode. Die methode houdt in dat theorieën kunnen worden getoetst aan evidentie en als die wordt tegengesproken, moet de theorie worden herzien. Wetenschap is fundamenteel open voor kritiek. Het geloof staat voor het omgekeerde: het primaat van het 'boek' en de enig mogelijke interpretatie door de 'Kerk'. Geloof is fundamenteel afkerig van kritiek. De basis van elk geloof zit al fout. Als deel van onze realiteit moet godsdienst zich ook kunnen onderwerpen aan wetenschappelijke analyse. De waarheid en fictie van de Bijbel en Koran moet kunnen worden onderzocht en blootgelegd op wetenschappelijke manier, zoals bv Bart Ehrman en vele anderen het Oude en Nieuwe Testament hebben gefileerd. Zaken zijn slechts waar als je die ook kan bewijzen en herhalen. Zeggen dat sommige zaken 'bovennatuurlijk' zijn en dus niet onderworpen aan de wetten van de natuur is onzin. Als je daar van uit gaat, kan je werkelijk alles verzinnen. En geloven. Denk maar aan de Mormonen, Scientology en andere Moon-sekten. Er is dan geen reden waarom zij minder geloofwaardig zouden zijn dan de meer gevestigde godsdiensten. Of zoals Dawkins het graag zegt: in jouw ogen is elk geloof in een andere god ook niet meer dan goedgelovige fantasie.

Wetenschappers die elkaar geen gelijk geven, zouden met rationele argumenten en feiten elkaar moeten kunnen overtuigen. Bij gelovigen wordt die discussie al meteen emotioneel en vijandig, omdat er geen rationele argumenten en feiten te vinden zijn. 

Het is duidelijk dat religie in de samenleving een belangrijke rol heeft gespeeld voor een reeks aspecten van het menselijk bestaan die redelijk fundamenteel lijken: begrijpen wie we zijn en hoe alles ontstaan is, moreel besef hebben en ernaar handelen, deel uitmaken van een gemeenschap, troost vinden, controle krijgen over onze omgeving, en transcendente ervaring. Godsdienst probeert op elk van die domeinen een rol te spelen, maar voor elk van die domeinen loopt ze achter, als een verouderd mechanisme om met de realiteit om te gaan. De samenleving verandert, de mens verandert. Voor elk van deze punten zijn andere vakgebieden of benaderingen een stuk doeltreffender om voor veel mensen een echt verschil te maken. Er is geen domein waarin religie een aparte rol zou kunnen hebben die niet beter kan worden uitgevoerd door seculiere specialisatie. 

Dat we mensen die geloven moeten respecteren, zonder enige twijfel. Maar dat wil niet zeggen dat we het geloof als instelling niet mogen ontbloten en zeggen dat de keizer geen kleren draagt. 

Ook al is mijn opinie duidelijk scherper dan Loobuyck, is dit boek toch een aanrader voor iedereen die in het onderwerp is geïnteresseerd, al was het maar voor het vele historisch materiaal dat wordt aangehaald, zoals het feit dat het tot 1835 heeft geduurd voor de werken van Galilei en Copernicus van de Index werden gehaald, zo'n 200 jaar later. 

Een kleine discussie terzijde: Wanneer werd god uit de wetenschap geweerd? 

"Zowel Boyle als Newton verdedigde het idee van een al­machtige God die ook nu nog kan tussenkomen. Zij kozen de kant van de 'voluntaristische' theologie, in die zin dat God de materiele wereld kan blijven sturen zoals hij dat wil. (...) Maar Newton sloot niet uit dat God nog direct kan ingrijpen in de werkelijkheid. Dat was trouwens ook nodig in het newtoniaanse sys­teem om de planeten in hun baan te houden. Newton doet dus iets wat vandaag erg ongewoon zou zijn: hij gebruikte het ingrijpen van God in de natuur als onderdeel van de weten­schappelijke beschrijving van hoe de werkelijkheid functio­neert. Het verband tussen een voluntaristische theologie en een mechanisch wereldbeeld hielp ook om de experimentele methode te legitimeren. Niet door van aan een schrijversdesk aan filosofie te doen, maar door te experimenteren kon men Gods wil te weten komen. Als de natuur de vrije wil van God reflecteert, is het empirische onderzoek de beste manier om die te ontdekken. 

De Duitse wiskundige, natuurwetenschapper en filosoof Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was een van de belang­rijkste tegenstemmen in dit debat. Leibniz denkt niet dat God nog kan tussenkomen en kosmische reparaties moet uitvoeren aan zijn schepping. Gods vrijheid ligt besloten in het feit dat hij van alle mogelijke werelden gekozen heeft voor "de beste van alle mogelijke werelden". Volgens Newton geeft een wereld­beeld waarin God afwezig is en niet meer kan tussenkomen in de werkelijkheid aanleiding tot een atheistisch wereldbeeld. Voor Leibniz is het andersom. In zijn correspondentie over deze kwestie schrijft hij dat een God die moet tussenkomen te veel lijkt op een gebrekkige ambachtsman "die zijn uurwerk nog van tijd tot tijd moet opwinden". Dit idee van een on­volmaakte God zou de religie kunnen ondermijnen. Hoewel Leibniz zelf nog ruimte probeert te maken voor de vrije wil, is zijn wereldbeeld voor het overige deterministisch ingevuld: de dingen die gebeuren, gebeuren noodzakelijk en met mede­weten van God.

Het determinisme van Leibniz werkte in de achttiende eeuw door bij Diderot, d'Holbach, Condorcet en de La Mettrie. Anders dan bij Leibniz kreeg het determinisme bij hen een atheistisch-naturalistische invulling. (p. 134,135)

Over dit onderwerp was de minnares van Voltaire, de wiskundige Emilie du Châtelet (1706-1749), een heel belangrijk figuur. Ze vertaalde Newtons werken naar het Frans. Ze was iemand die tegelijk kritisch was over sommige aspecten van het werk van Newton en Leibniz, en voor verschillende van de door haar voorgestelde verbeteringen bleek ze nadien gelijk te hebben (bvb dat vuur geen gewicht had, of dat de energie gelijk is aan de massa maal het kwadraat van zijn snelheid of (e=mv2), een kleine voorloper van Einsteins gekende formule).

"The fourth objection, and one particularly identified with Newton and his adherents, concerned the dissipation or conservation of force (energy) the universe. This issue had occasioned the argument between Leibniz an Newton, and it was with Newton's followers that she argued explicitly. She could not accept the metaphysical connotations of his hypothesis in the last query of the Opticks, that, given the loss of force in the universe because of the infinite numbers of impacts "our System will sometimes need be corrected by its Author". In Newton's world, the Creator had to replenish the force periodically and in perpetuity. From Du Chatelet's perspective, ac­cepting this image of the Supreme Being and his "continual miracles" under­mined any claim to certain knowledge of the workings of nature's laws. As she had argued in chapter II, there could be no '"science" in a universe subject to unpredictable intervention by a deity, however benevolent and reasonable. In contrast, in Leibniz's world of forces vives, there was no need for God to intervene, for the German philosopher believed that this force was conserved in the universe. In fact, Du Chatelet explained to Maupertuis, "all things being equal," the conservation of force "would be more worthy of the eternal géomètre". (Judith P. Zinsser : In Emilie du Châtelet, Daring Genius of the Enlightenment, 2006. p. 189)

Of nog

"On the one hand, such a God negated her image of his necessary perfection, and, on the other, it raised the chi­mera of unpredictability. No law, not even Newton's, would be fixed if always subject to "the will of God." Thus, there could be no certain knowl­edge, no science, of the workings of the universe"(p.177)

Of, om het anders te zeggen: je kan in wetenschappen niet een hele wiskundige en fysische redenering opbouwen over de banen van de planeten in ons zonnestelsel om tussenin een zinnetje te hebben dat zegt dat God af en toe tussenkomt om de planeten terug op hun juiste baan te brengen. In haar ogen moet God uit de wiskunde en moeten betere wiskunde en begrip van de astronomie dat gat opvullen. Vandaag zouden veel wetenschappers nogal opkijken mocht in een artikel staan dat God plots tussenkomt om het experiment te laten lukken. 

Andere aan te raden boeken over wetenschap en religie

• Amir Alexander - Infinitesimal - How A Dangerous Mathematical Theory Changed The World (Oneworld, 2015)
• Stephen Greenblatt - The Swerve (Norton, 2012) 
• Carl Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Ballantine Books,1997)
• Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion (Mariner, 2006)
• Sam Harris - The End Of Faith (Simon & Schuster, 2006)
• Daniel Dennett - Breaking the Spell (2006)
• Christopher Hitchens - God is not Great: The Case Against Religion, (Atlantic Books, 2007)

Frank Swain (Ed.) - This Book Will Blow Your Mind (New Scientist, 2018) *

Let marketeers have their way, and you end up with a book title such as this one. In reality, This Book Did Not Blow My Mind, for a number of reasons.

First, it's a compilation of very short and easily accessible factoids about a zillion different topics, from nocturnal sun to computers and physics and chemistry and biology.

Second, there is no big picture. There is no relationship between the topics suggested, other than that they ever appeared as articles in the New Scientist. And for every topic selected, there may be a hundred other topics that easily qualify for publication. So you get a lot of trees, each three to four pages long. But there's no wood. There's nothing linking these factoids. And some of the factoids are even less than that, and they present only a theory that's as yet not further investigated.

Third, and maybe because of the second reason, this is not truly science. There's no effort to understand what's happening, or why. It's as boring as reading the Guiness Book of Records.

But I guess that's how marketeers work.

Next time, it would be better to let the scientists do the work.

Stanley Redgrove - Johannes Baptista Van Helmont (William Rider & Son, 1922)

Jan Van Helmont was a Flemish alchemist, physicist and philosopher, as the subtitle of this biography explains. He lived in the 17th Century, not far from where I live.

He termed the word 'gas', as he discovered that there were more gaseous substance apart from air. He was a true experimentalist, which was very new at that time. He not only observed things that were happening, but he set up experiments to check and double-check whether his intuitions were right or what would happen if he mixed certain things. The fact that he was also an alchemist and believed in the existence of the Elixir of Life, may have helped him in his endeavours.

He also understood the importance of other agents to help digestion, such as enzymes, even if he did not know about how this actually worked.

Interesting how science and ignorance and superstition look from a distance. In some centuries people will look back at us in the same way, and wonder why we could not see what is so obvious.

Mario Livio - Brilliant Blunders (Simon & Schuster, 2013) ***

"Brilliant Blunders" is not about how blunders turned out to true, and the subtitle "Colossal Mistakes By Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding Of Life And The Universe" is clearly erroneous. It should actually read "Colossal Mistakes By Great Scientists Who Changed Our Understanding Of Life And The Universe", or in other words, the mistakes were mistakes and they didn't change our understanding of life and the universe.

Yet despite these semantics, the Mario Livio's book gives a deep insight into the theories of well-renowned scientists, and their emotional attachment to them, which often resulted in initial rejection when new theories were brought forward that went against the ones that made them so famous and renowned.

The scientists under review are not of the least: Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Linus Pauling and Albert Einstein. On top of the explanation of their core theories, the blunders look like blunders from our own current perspective, but could not in all truth be called 'blunders'. The stupidity of it only depends on clinging to one's own insights and intuitions, which in hindsight appeared to be wrong. More importantly, it shows that science is a journey with many bifurcations and dead ends, with theories exploring new possible explanations, only to be proved false by new evidence or more coherent theories.

An interesting book.

David Wootton - The Invention Of Science (Penguin, 2015) ****

David Wootton's "The Invention of Science", has a very appropriate subtitle: "A New History of The Scientific Revolution".

Wootton is a professor of history at the University of York, who has done a lot of actual research by reading the old manuscripts first-hand, which allows him to come with very detailed accounts of how scientists since the renaissance thought about their world they gradually started discovering, but at the same time he has this broad sweeping vision of discoveries and evolutions in a variety of disciplines to give the big picture as well.

He starts by explaining how until 1492, the year of Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas, every intellectual was of the opinion that everything there was to know, was actually already captured in the scriptures and in the texts of the ancient Greeks, with Aristotle as their number one source. Intellectual work was often limited to understanding these texts better, or interpreting them differently. Columbus's discovery came as a shock, because it was evidence that the world was a different place than actually thought, and that not everything was already written. It even changed the concept of time and the concept of progress, since many medieval people, did not consider the Romans or the ancient Greeks as more technologically backward. They were just people living at another time, just as they were living in another place. The idea that new technology could improve things, was not very high on the agenda.

And actually, many of the new discoveries came from the mundane and military. Telescopes evolved from monoculars to watch ships, physics partly evolved from calculating the ballistic trajectory of cannon balls, how double bookkeeping changed the way to represent data, etc. Brahe, Galileo, Copernicus, Bruno, Newton, ... of course all come into the picture, in a way that is both known and new, because Wootton expertly describes what these great scientists thought and felt about their own discoveries, how they struggled, also internally, with the shifting reference frameworks to look at reality.

He expands quite a lot on the simple aspect of using "fact" as evidence, a concept which was totally alien to the world before the early 'modern age'. He describes how experiments were made to test the validity of theoretical assumptions, again something that shattered the words in the books of for instance Galenus. Observation and testing suddenly got valued, and the first experiments with the vaccuum paved the way to create the barometer.

Obviously all this is further increased through the creation of scientific communities, who no longer only needed to write letters to each other, but who, thanks to the invention of the printing press, could share their insights more broadly, generating interest and inviting in comments from many more people to collectively move a better understanding forward. Despite this, the time frame within which new discoveries were accepted as scientific evidence could take and did take much more time than it does today. For instance, Newton's 'Principia' on his discovery of gravity, was first published in 1687, but resistance against his findings continued until the 1740s by other eminent intellectuals such as Huygens and Leibniz.

It's a long book, 570 pages with another 200 of notes, bibliography and index, but amazingly interesting and well written. Wootton knows so many little details about the tests, the personal opinions of the scientists to make it read like a novel. He is also a master in explaining the other side of rational thinking, that was equally part of the world in which science evolved: astrology, alchemy and witchcraft, and other bizarre theories about how our body and our world function.

It is only through this lens that Wootton offers us that we can really understand what progress actually means, and how our current world view has struggled to emancipate itself from the obscure, bizarre, dangerous and sometimes funny worldviews of the past.

A book to read when you have lots of time.

Amir Alexander - Infinitesimal - How A Dangerous Mathematical Theory Changed The World (Oneworld, 2015) ****

Fascinating! In 17th Century Italy, some mathematicians, first the monk Cavalieri, later, Torricelli and Angeli, came to the conclusion that in order to make correct calculations, "a line should be considered as composed of distinct and limitlessly tiny parts". This would later become the basis for calculus. The concept itself was strongly opposed by the Jesuits, the christian order of the educated and educators themselves, who could not accept this reasoning for theological reasons. They could not accept that their god would have created a universe where ambiguity and lack of precision played a role. The mathematicians themselves, had of course no theological or religious intention, but discovered that their use of "infinitesimals" was the only way to calculate slopes and volumes. What ensued was a real battle to destroy any thought and use of this new mathematics, because they endangered the world view of order as organised by the creator himself.

In the Jesuit view, "divine mathematics, universal and perfectly rational, orders and arranges the physical world to the best possible effect".

"For the Jesuits, the purpose of mathematics was to establish the world as a fixed and externally unchanging place, in which order and hierarchy could never be challenged. That is why each item in the world must be carefully and rationally constructed, and why any hint of contradictions and paradoxes could never be allowed to stand. It was a 'top-down' mathematics, whose purpose was to bring rationality and order in an otherwise chaotic world. For Cavalieri and his fellow indivisiblists, it was the exact reverse: mathematics began with a material intuition of the world, that plane figures were made up of lines and volumes of planes, just as cloth was woven of thread and a book compiled of pages. One does not need to rationally construct such figures, because we all know they already exist in the world. All that is needed, as Cavalieri says, is to assume and imagine them, and then proceed to investigate the inner structure. Ultimately, he continues, nothing contractory can be deduced, because the fact that the figures exist guarantee that they are internally consistent".

The attack by the Jesuits was fierce. Excommunication, joblosses for university mathematicians, angry letters and public denunciation, the abolishment of the monastic order who welcomed the mathematicians ... every trick could be used to bring these mathematicians back to order and old-school Eucledian geometry. And even if they managed to destroy the Italian world leadership in mathematical thinking, the concept of the new mathematics resonated with mathematicians in northern Europe, with again a comparable existential philosophical battle between John Wallis who expanded on the new mathematics and Thomas Hobbes who fiercely opposed them, to become gradually accepted, and part of every secondary school curriculum.

Again: fascinating! Amir Alexander manages to write a book on the history of mathematics that reads like a suspense novel. He goes into sufficient detail in the lives and contexts of each of the various 'dramatis personae' to bring them to life, even illustrating their personal hesitations and uncertainties from a load of well-documented material like personal letters. But it is even stronger that he shows how this - to lay people insignificant - mathematical innovation created a seismic shift in the way the worldview changed, how even well before the enlightment, and at the same time of Galileo, another revolution took place to bring science and factual thinking to a higher level than church doctrine to understand reality.

Andrea Wulf - The Invention Of Nature (John Murray, 2015) ****

This is an incredible book, about an incredible person, written by a magesterial story-teller. Yes, we had heard about Alexander von Humboldt before (starting with 'Humboldt's Gift', the phenomenal novel by Samuel Below), but he remained some kind of vague and hard-to-place figure in my mind.

Andrea Wulf has brought him back to life, and how! With stylistic and compositorial mastership she recreates his life, as a well-to-do 18th century aristocratic boy interested in nature, with an exceptional drive to explore and observe. His mother's death comes as a liberation, and he spends his entire fortune on his travels to South America, where he explores everything he sees. His mind is also at the same time analytic and synthetic: he records everything, big and small in biology, stones and geography, clouds and weather conditions and temperature and height and all the rest that he notices, with absolute precision thanks to all his observation tools, and then he brings it all together in one big picture that demonstrates that everything is linked.

That is why the book is called "The Invention Of Nature", because he was the first person to see that everything is connected. He was the first to complain that logging the forests in South America would have disastrous effects on nature, that it would destroy the basic conditions for renewal. Interestingly enough, Humboldt himself seems to have been self-destructive in a way, pushing himself forward beyond the limits of his capital and physical possibilities. He even ventured to Siberia without official permission from the authorities, and he still went on despite an anthrax epidemic that killed everyone.

Humboldt was a legend in his own time, known and cherished by everyone, from school children to emperors. His works and his vision of nature inspired people like Darwin, Thoreau and of course also Jules Vernes, who used Humboldt's adventures as an inspiration for his novels.

Humboldt was also an ecologist and human rights activist (within limits ... he also understood the value of diplomacy when he needed money), and at the same time a wonderfully skilled draughtsman, who could draw what he saw in the most minute detail, including his geographical maps of plant life.

And to repeat my kudos : Andrea Wulf is an incredibly skilled narrator. Her topic is of course very interesting, yet the way this book is written and composed, is an achievement by itself.

Fritjof Capra - Learning From Leonardo (Berrett-Koehler, 2013) ***

Interessant overzicht van de spanwijdte van Leonardo da Vinci : hydraulica, plantkunde, architectuur, anatomie, geologie, wapentuig en andere vliegende contrapties. Hij deed het allemaal, en vele van zijn ontdekkingen of hypothesen werden pas in de 20ste eeuw echt getoetst en begrepen. Capra gebruikt de oorsrpronkelijke nota's van Da Vinci, inclusief de vele prachtige tekeningen van de meester zelf.

Jim Holt - Why Does The World Exist? (Liveright, 2013) **½

De titel zelf, en de veelbelovende ondertitel "An Existential Detective Story" deden me dit boek uit de rekken plukken, mede aangemoedigd door de sticker van "10 Best Books New York Times Book Review Of The Year". Jim Holt beschrijft de oorsprong van het universum door een bezoekje te brengen aan een aantal deskundigen : filosofen, fysici, wiskundigen en zelfs een schrijver om zo een overzicht te geven van wat de wetenschap vandaag denkt over dé oorsprong en het antwoord op de vraag "waarom is er iets en niet veeleer niets?". De namen zijn wetenschapsfilosoof Adolph Grünbaum, godsdienstfilosoof Richard Swinburne, fysicus David Deutsch, theoretisch fysicus André Linde, fysicus Alex Vilenkin, theoretisch fysicus Steven Weinberg, wiskundige en wetenschapsfilossof Roger Penrose, filosoof John Leslie, filosoof Derek Parfit en schrijver John Updike.

Het boek heeft zijn goede momenten, maar het is niet duidelijk waarom Holt precies deze onderzoekers aanspreekt? Bovendien schrijft Holt zijn zoektocht alsof hij Sherlock Holmes is die de oplossing gaat vinden op de fundamentele vraag, en plaatst zichzelf hierbij de ganse tijd in de kijker, wat na verloop van tijd redelijk irritant is. Hij heeft zelf geen mening of theorie, hij gaat gewoon bij deze specialisten ten rade om hun mening te vragen, in een verhaal doorspekt met zinloze anekdoten over zijn eigen interactie, brieven, telefoontjes en bezoeken aan de geleerde heren.

Ik had ook net "The God Problem" van Howard Bloom gelezen, een boek dat een stuk dieper en verder gaat dan Holts oppervlakkige journalistiek, wat misschien mijn wat negatieve kommentaar verklaart. Maar toch ...