Exiled to Jamaica after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Sir John Wedderburn made a fortune, alongside his three brothers, as a faux surgeon and sugar planter. In the 1770s, he returned to Scotland to marry and re-establish the family name. He brought with him Joseph Knight, a black slave and a token of his […]
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Denise Mina (http://www.denisemina.co.uk/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Mina) treats us to a grisly Glasgow crime novel in Garnethill. Maureen O’Donnell wasn’t born lucky. A psychiatric patient and survivor of sexual abuse, she’s stuck in a dead-end job and a secretive relationship with Douglas, a shady therapist. Her few comforts are making up stories to tell her psychiatrist, the company of
Nature Via Nurture (first published 2003) tackles one of the most contentious debates in science: Are human qualities and behaviour determined by genes (nature) or by their environment (nurture)? The debate has only grown louder since the human genome has been found to comprise only 30,000 genes. Some scientists claim that we don’t have enough genes to account
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Richard Dawkins’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins and http://www.richarddawkins.net/) 2004 popular science book, The Ancestor’s Tale, is loosely modelled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Instead of pilgrims journeying to Canterbury, Dawkins’ protagonists are living species, journeying back through evolutionary time. In real time, individual species diverged and speciated. But in the backwards time of The Ancestor’s Tale, separate species start the
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Gavin is creating a unique ‘holiday experience’; every horrid facility hated by tourists who dislaike being abroad will be available on a converted North Sea oil rig. To test the facilities he’s hosting a reunion for his old school (none of his ex-classmates can remember him, but what the heck, it’s free). He is so busy showing
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At the heart of relativity theory, quantum mechanics, string theory, and much of modern cosmology lies one concept: symmetry. In Why Beauty Is Truth, world-famous mathematician Ian Stewart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stewart_(mathematician)) narrates the history of the emergence of this remarkable area of study. He introduces us to such characters as the Renaissance Italian genius, rogue, scholar, and gambler Girolamo
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Tens of thousands of years ago, the arrival of people in the Americas, and in Australia and New Zealand, was followed by a wave of extinctions, particularly of the largest species, which made the most attractive game. More recently, rats, cats and goats have eaten their way through the native plants and animals of small
Evolution does not proceed in mighty anatomical jumps but through a process of gradual change, by transforming – very slightly – a gene, cell or bone so that it acts to a new purpose. In this way, a new species is eventually created, albeit one that still carries the hallmarks of its evolutionary predecessors. This inner
Brian Greene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Greene and http://www.briangreene.org/) has a gift for elucidating big ideas and knowing that a bombardment of too many small ones might make the armchair physicist despair. ‘The art of theoretical physics lies in simplifying the complex so as to preserve essential physical features while making the theoretical analysis tractable,’ he writes in his latest
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