Henry Gee (Dr Henry Gee announced as winner of the 2022 Royal Society Science Book Prize | Royal Society) is is a palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist and senior editor of the scientific journal Nature. In this book from 2021 Gee undertakes to explain the 3.7 billion years of life on Earth in 319 pages. For billions of […]
A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth by Henry Gee Read More »
English psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes noted that grief is the price we pay for love. (Colin Murray Parkes – Oxford Reference). Most would agree it’s a price worth paying. It must be a sad human indeed who has never known love. Without some such redeeming experience the world can look pretty bleak, like the ‘sterile
A Book About Love by Jonah Lehrer Read More »
4th April 2020. We’re in the midst of the gravest health emergency any of us can remember. Hospitals around the world are filling up with people dying of the disease Covid-19. The UK economy has effectively been placed in a coma. To get an understanding of this contagion forget the conspiracy theories with which the
Plague’s Progress by Arno Karlen Read More »
It’s been hot in Scotland over these past days in July of 2019. ( https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/24/uk-records-hottest-day-of-year-and-could-hit-new-high-of-39c ) High temperatures of this sort in The Upper Ward induce a febrile and mordacious mood. So we can say our weather’s been nothing to do with with climate change or global warming. Nothing to do with human activity. Nothing
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells Read More »
The breakneck rush into digital technologies has delivered much that is useful, impressive and dazzling. But what have we lost, and what are the dangers? James Bridle (http://jamesbridle.com/) takes on these concerns here. We live in times of increasing bafflement. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by
Psychological research has been digging about in that highly subjective matter – personal happiness. It’s against a background of consumer culture which offers ‘solutions’ about how we can be ‘made’ to be happy. These offers come in various forms of chemical compound, guru generated bullshit and lifestyle choices which (not co-incidentally) cost a lot of
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert Read More »
The ‘Scientific Revolution’ (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-revolutions/) cannot be thought of as occurring neatly in a certain time period. Steven Shapin (https://scholar.harvard.edu/shapin/home, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Shapin) states: ‘There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it!’. He continues ‘There was, rather, a diverse array of cultural practices aimed at understanding explaining, and controlling the natural
The Scientific Revolution Read More »
Just as fossils provide a window into the past, evolution leaves a footprint on DNA. In The Making of the Fittest, Sean B. Carroll (http://seanbcarroll.com/about/) sets out the overwhelming evidence for evolution provided in DNA. Carroll offers examples from sequences of DNA that once coded for genes no longer used, remnants of ancestral lives,
The Making of the Fittest Read More »
In the week which marked the death of Stephen Hawking on 14 March 2018, many people will be prompted to read one of his books or another on cosmology. Afterglow of Creation is one from which I learned much and enjoyed reading. This is the story of the cosmic background radiation, the ‘afterglow’ of
Afterglow of Creation Read More »
