February 2018

The Man Who Found the Missing Link by Pat Shipman

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology, LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

Dutch scientist Eugene Dubois (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Dubois) is not nearly as well known as his most important scientific contribution. Dubois’s 1892 archaeological expedition found the first fossil evidence of Pithecanthropus erectus (what we know today as homo erectus, http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-erectus) or ‘Java man’. At the time of its discovery, P. erectus was viewed by many scientists as the […]

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Feeling Beauty

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Something’s happening in your brain when you sense beauty, just as something’s happening in your brain when you eat a chocolate biscuit. One would like to think there is more to looking at a masterpiece by Titian than chewing a Jaffa Cake.   In Feeling Beauty, G. Gabrielle Starr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Gabrielle_Starr) argues that understanding the neural underpinnings of

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Extinction

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Some 250 million years ago, the earth suffered the greatest biological crisis in its history. Around 95 percent of all living species died out – a global catastrophe far greater than the extinction of dinosaurs 185 million years later. Scientists are slowly working out how this happened and there are many competing theories. Some blame

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Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

The Enlightenment (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/) has been battered, abused, misrepresented and accused of leading to all sorts of horrors like the worst excesses of the French Revolution and Nazism. The vilification has been going on since its earliest appearance in Europe in the 1600s. This is mostly because it had deeply unsettling implications for established world views,

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The Triumph of Numbers by Bernard Cohen

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

The entire digital world in which we’re steeped, not to mention the power of technology and all modern convenience is all based on numbers. I Bernard Cohen’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._Bernard_Cohen) book here shows how this relation to our world only developed gradually. The author begins with the scientific revolution of the 17th century, which formulated the laws

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Catching Fire

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

There have been many attempts to define the demarcation between humans and other animals. Tool use, spirituality, complex language, moral intuition, culture have all been offered. In Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham (a British primatologist working at Harvard, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wrangham) argues that cooking really put us on the path to becoming homo sapiens. Almost 2 million years

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Anthony Powell by Hilary Spurling

LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

No-one who has relished reading  A Dance to the Music of Time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dance_to_the_Music_of_Time) will want to miss this monumental biography of Anthony Powell. Hilary Spurling (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/17/hilary-spurling-biographer-pearl-buck) lets us in on a huge amount of interesting detail about the novelist. There is the Eton schoolboy and Oxford undergraduate, a Parisian prostitute, Nina Hamnett (the artist’s model painted by

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Sacred and Secular by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris here offer detailed research on the place of religion in modern societies across the world. They point to a seemingly confusing picture. First, during the last century people in industrial societies have grown more secular. Second, ‘The world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever

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Forest Dark

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

You may remember Dante’s words “Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark,/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” In Nicole Krauss’ (https://www.nicolekrauss.com/) fourth novel, two characters travel to Israel to confront the aridity of their lives. One is a powerful, 68-year-old Manhattan attorney and philanthropist named Jules Epstein. The

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Mortal Coil

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Like most animals, humans cling to life tenaciously. Even in care homes and hospices where the spirit is weakened, one more breakfast and one more dawn is generally preferred to oblivion. David Boyd Haycock (http://www.johnsonandalcock.co.uk/haycock-david-boyd/) here gives us a history of our battle against mortality.   Four centuries ago in western Europe more people died

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The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Is it just luck that some people find purpose and fulfilment while others do not? Jonathan Haidt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt) compares philosophical, religious, and theoretical texts with recent scientific insights to find out. He draws on psychology’s ‘attachment theory’, sociological research, and recent developments in the neuroscience of emotion. Haidt uses this research to illuminate ancient and more

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