BOOK REVIEW
Degrees Kelvin, Why We Do It and more...
Robert L. Dorit, David Schneider, Christopher Brodie
Lord Kelvin, it seems, is best
remembered for being forgotten. The first scientist to be elevated
to the peerage, he was buried next to Newton in Westminster Abbey.
But in a recent poll, British physicists failed to rank him even
among the top 10 of their number. Why has his star fallen so far?
In Degrees Kelvin: A Tale of Genius, Invention, and Tragedy
(Joseph Henry Press, $27.95), astrophysicist and science popularizer
David Lindley shows that Kelvin's mind was perfectly attuned to the
clockwork elements of classical physics: heat, light, electricity
and magnetism. But as Newton's universe began to waver in the new
century, Kelvin clung to his old views, meeting new ideas with
increasing mistrust, resistance and denial.
By then Kelvin was an old man, and perhaps he can be forgiven for
trusting the ground he knew. Lindley wisely refrains from drawing
pat conclusions and concentrates instead on the lasting products of
Kelvin's gigantic energy: brilliant theoretical insights into
electromagnetism and thermodynamics, and valuable shirtsleeve work,
particularly on a submarine telegraph cable and a reliable marine
compass. "Uniquely, Kelvin existed in both spheres,"
Lindley notes, "a philosopher and a practical man rolled into one."—G.R.
Given that "Cold Cape Cod
clams, 'gainst their wish, do it / Even lazy jellyfish do it,"
shouldn't evolutionary biologists have already figured out why
almost every multicellular species reproduces sexually? Maybe so,
but we're not sure. Why bother making offspring with a
partner—and thus sharing only half your genes with your
children—when asexual reproduction ensures that babies carry
100 percent of the parent's genes?
Niles Eldredge, in Why We Do It (W. W. Norton, $24.95),
takes a perspective that encompasses deep time and deep patterns in
the fossil record. His answer? Sex prevails because species that
engage in it, on average, resist extinction and give rise to new
species more often than do their asexually reproducing counterparts.
Sexual reproduction is, in effect, a hitchhiker, incidentally
carried along to predominance by processes occurring at the species
level. The "ultra-darwinian" notion that all of nature is
the struggle of genes to make copies of themselves is replaced with
a more nuanced view: Genes are just chroniclers of the rising and
falling fortunes of the species in which they are found.
This book, meant for nonspecialists and informal almost to a fault
(the multiple mentions of "humping" grate), comes as a
welcome antidote to the raft of books providing evolutionary
rationales for every aspect of human behavior, from philandering to
capitalism. Nature, Eldredge reminds us, is organized much like
those nested Russian dolls: genes within cells within organisms
within populations within species. This hierarchy guarantees that
events at one level affect all the others, greatly complicating the
search for a single causal layer. We live in an age that wants to
privilege genes as the real currency of evolution, but the very
history of life argues for a more encompassing view.—R.D.
Should you be worried about
the threat of black holes to your continued existence? Have you ever
wondered why some birds stand on one leg while they sleep? And what,
exactly, is the difference between a level I and a level II
multiverse? The answers to these and many other questions can be
found in the eclectic and entertaining mix of essays that editor
Steven Pinker has crammed into The Best American Science and
Nature Writing 2004 (Houghton Mifflin, $27.50, cloth; $14,
paper). Pick up this volume and you'll find a short, witty
explanation of how to avoid upsetting an introvert, longer profiles
of medical and scientific pioneers, and a great deal more.
To its credit, the collection tackles head-on some of the current
cultural and political debates surrounding scientific work. Covering
a diverse range of topics, the pieces share a disregard for opinions
that, although widely held, do not stand up to close examination.
Thus we read that suicide bombers are neither inherently
"evil" nor simply the product of poverty and lack of
education. Another essay discusses the implications of Iraqi
marriage practices for the process of democratic nation building.
Multiple articles assess the perceived threats of genetic
engineering. It may be impossible to identify a single common theme,
but certainly Pinker has succeeded in his quest to find writing that
has both style and substance.—A.E.
You've probably often seen
diagrams that show space as a rubber sheet being warped by bowling
ball-like masses. But who can really claim a solid understanding of
this modern view of gravity? Those who want to get a better grasp of
it without having to wrestle with the mathematical details of
general relativity should pick up Bernard Schutz's Gravity from
the Ground Up: An Introductory Guide to Gravity and General
Relativity (Cambridge University Press, $45), which is
delightfully thorough yet easy to read. Schutz nurtures an intuitive
understanding of the subject, relegating more quantitative
descriptions to sidebars. His book is full of historical detail. He
describes, for example, a toy given to Einstein, containing a ball
on a string that in turn is attached to a weak spring, one not quite
strong enough to draw the ball up into a cup. This gadget is
suitable for demonstrating the equivalence principle: To capture the
ball, just make it "weightless" (for a brief time) by
letting the toy free-fall. Astronauts in training experience
temporary weightlessness similarly, on aircraft sent along a
parabolic, free-fall trajectory (above).—D.A.S.
Whose View of Life?
(Harvard University Press, $27.95), Jane Maienschein's book about
the ethical debates over cloning and its equally provocative
siblings, stem cell research and gene therapy, has much to recommend
it: accessibility, fine-grained detail, thoughtful analysis and a
grand historical sweep. The discussion leaps from Aristotle (the
debates have their intellectual roots in ancient Greece) to Arthur
Caplan (perhaps the most quoted bioethicist working today), from
Leonardo da Vinci to Wilhelm His (whose techniques and practices
shaped modern human embryology), from geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan
to Ian Wilmut (who cloned the sheep Dolly). At the crux of the
debate is nothing less than the nature of life, a slippery,
superstition-plagued subject. But Maienschein provides readers with
the scientific background and the social and political context
needed to understand the issues. The result is part textbook on the
new biology, part horror story of the nearsightedness of public
policies, and part extended op-ed calling for a more reasoned
approach. This is a first-rate volume for philosophers (armchair or
professional) as well as scientists, but it may appeal most to
biologists who, because of the current trend toward microspecialized
research, may have missed bits and pieces of a story that concerns
them greatly.—C.B.