Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes
4th Estate, £16.99, ISBN 1841150606

On 23 April 1851 Charles Darwin’s beloved ten-yearold daughter Annie died after a long illness. Randal Keynes’ book argues that this bereavement marked a turning-point in Darwin’s life and work: “After Annie’s death, Charles set the Christian faith firmly behind him” (p.222) and threw himself further into the researches which were to result in The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Keynes is Darwin’s greatgreat grandson, and has access to an impressive archive of family papers and artefacts, including the “box” which gives the book its title. Annie’s box was a portable writing-desk (the Victorian equivalent of a laptop computer) filled with her personal possessions. After her death, her griefstricken parents treasured it as a memento of her, and it became a family heirloom.
Annie’s short life is central to this book. Keynes posits that Darwin’s theories on the evolution of humanity from apes were formulated partly by observing his children’s growth from babies to fully sentient beings. But does Keynes over-estimate the effect of Annie’s death? Would Darwin’s scientific research have led him to reject Christianity anyway? Yes, probably, but Keynes’ book is none the less interesting for that.
The book offers a detailed and reliable account of Darwin’s life, which will be welcome to those of us intimidated by the prospect of ploughing through Moore and Desmond’s authoritative biography (Darwin, by Adrian Desmond, James Moore, 1992, ISBN 0140131922). Keynes’ touching picture of the Darwins’ family life makes the book eminently readable even for those with no great interest in Darwin. Of course, this scholarly and erudite book will not be welcomed in Fundamentalist Christian quarters where it will be yet another red rag to the Creationist bull. But for skeptics, that’s a definite recommendation!

Hunt for Zero Point
by Nick Cook
Century, £17.99, ISBN 0712669531

I walked into the bookshop, my eyes glanced from side to side and then I saw it, “The hunt for zero-point”! My heart sped up as I slowly approached; here was the answer to the problems that had been plaguing me… Do you find the above prose style irritating to the point of distraction? I do, but unfortunately it was the style that Nick Cook decided to use when writing The Hunt For Zero-Point.
Nick Cook was a journalist with Jane’s Defence Weekly, a fact that I have managed to independently verify. I had heard a lot about antigravity and thought that this might be the book to pull together all the various strands of the pro- and anti- arguments into a sensible debate about the subject. I wish! The book is written in the first person and chronicles not the history of “antigravity” but the author’s attempts to investigate the field. The result is a bizarre entertaining high-tech film-noir thriller, but not a history book.
Mr Cook seems unaware of how history books should be written. First you present your facts and documents, then separately you interpret them. This book makes no distinction between the two — the reader is unaware of whether he is reading historical fact, or supposition. The research into the subject, however, was excellent. I have found many of the documents he mentions on the Internet. (Some of T T Brown’s antigravity patents mentioned in the book can be found at www.soteria.com/brown/info/patents.htm. The document “ELECTROGRAVITIC SYSTEMS: An examination of electrostatic motion, dynamic counterbary and barycentric control” which was supposedly a study funded by the U.S. Government and mentioned in the book can be found at www.padrak.com/ ine/INE24.htm).
The gist of the book is that in the 30s and 40s there was a lot of work concerning new propulsion systems, jet engines, rockets, pulsejets, and also anti-gravity machines, some of which was instigated by the Nazis.
The book goes on to “prove” that this information was hushed up by the US Government in the 50s and that the anti-gravity programs went on as “deep black” projects in Area 51 and other such sites. Personally, I think that Nick Cook has unearthed enough information to support the idea that research was hushed up in the 50s… (The CIA dabbled in telepathic spying so the idea of antigravity research isn’t too far fetched.) However, the simple fact of a lack of antigravity 747s or Stealth bombers throws doubt on the idea that these projects came up with anything. A more realistic scenario is that these secret research projects carried on for a few years, came up with nothing, and were cancelled.
If you’re interested in antigravity then I would recommend getting this book from a library. It holds up quite well as a science-fiction thriller, but not a science history book. The book does suffer from the lack of an index, but the bibliography is very useful. I would suggest obtaining the documents listed therein and making up your own mind.

Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour
by Kevin N. Laland and Gillian R. Brown
Oxford, £17.99 (hb), ISBN 0-19-850884-0

Evolution is the central idea in biology, so it makes sense to use it to take a good scientific look at human behaviour: in principle, human sociobiology is unobjectionable. So why did the actual results of this discipline (or at least the results as they reached a mainstream audience) seem such tosh: oversimplified and skimpily-supported speculations which conveniently reproduced historically local social norms? And just what do memeticists do all day? If, like me, you have ever asked these questions then you will be both pleased and illuminated by this book. The authors are Cambridge zoologists whose preparation for this book included talking to many of the major current researchers. The result is a model of clear science writing (I found myself agreeing with the flattering blurb). It starts with a historical discussion which takes us from the ethologists (politely trashing the deeply irritating populariser Desmond Morris, I’m pleased to say) to the fracas which followed the publication of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology. In fact, the term ‘sociobiology’ is rarely used these days. The authors then take us through the strengths and weakness of the four contemporary approaches. It seems that much of the work now being done is genuinely low on speculation and high on actual data: ‘human behavioural ecology’ seemed the most fanciable of the options to me. So what do memeticists do all day? Well, the authors tell us what they could be doing: just give it a few years…

Only One Sky to Fly in: Embracing the Reptiles
by Jacqueline Maria Longstaff
Quester Books, ISBN 0954190440

There are two reasons why you might read this book. One is that you are mad. The other is that you are required to write a review of it for The Skeptic magazine.
Not that this is a boring book. At one point the author relates making love to a man who, during intercourse, changes into a reptile from another planet. (Incidentally, it turns out that alien reptiles are even worse lovers than terrestrial men.) A few pages further on it is revealed that the United States is a puppet of the English royal family. Mind you, it’s easy for them: the Queen Mother was a solar angel, while the Queen tops enormous wealth with a very vibrant light body on Sirius.
For older readers, the puzzle of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men is brilliantly unravelled. Bill is of course Baal, the Phoenician Sun God, and is locked in eternal struggle with the mechanization of time perpetrated by (Big) Ben. No, of course it isn’t that simple: the Mayan calendar and the mis-channelling of female energy in Little Weed come into it as well, but you get the general idea (or energy level/consciousness-frequency, etc.). Anyway, the good news is, if we all play our parts sincerely, the Universe will move on to higher frequencies, although the implanting of micro-chips by the elite who are running the New World Order may prevent us from reaching those levels, unless we are saved by the constant prayers of thousands of Tibetan monks and David Icke. Nuts, isn’t it? Though hang on: what was that about Donald Rumsfeld implanting micro-chips…

Intuition: Its Powers and Perils
by David G. Myers
Yale University Press, £17.95 (hb), ISBN 0-300-09531-7

I had a good feeling about this book from the moment I read about it. Vast claims are routinely made for the powers of intuition, and those pleased by its results insist that it constitutes a mode of knowing equalling if not excelling that of science, with its tedious observations and bewildering calculations, and usually preferable. Hence an upto- date account of experiments showing the pitfalls of human judgment is more than welcome.
Of course, as Myers spells out, we’d be lost without intuition. Natural selection has favoured the quick-witted during all those millennia when articulation and numeracy were not available to us.
However, with the wisdom of hindsight, a faculty welldiagnosed in this book, I can now see a troubling pattern emerging. There seemed to be rather a lot of biblical quotations, and C. S. Lewis popped up a bit too often.
My conscious mind discounted these signs in the race for the final (13th) chapter on Psychic Intuition. There we find a decent summary of the failure of parapsychology to come up with any evidence for psychic claims after thousands of tests. Then, right at the end, comes a really disappointing straw-man argument that we should credit people who make a leap of faith, betting their lives “on a humble spirituality, on an alternative to purposeless scientism, gullible spiritualism, and dogmatic fundamentalism.” These are people who, according to psychologist Robert Emmons, “perceive a reality that transcends the material and physical”. They seem to include, for Myers, that vile obscurantist, Mother Teresa (exposed in Christopher Hitchens’ The Missionary Position, 1995).
If only the author had pondered the intuitionist sins of belief perseverance, availability and illusory correlation in respect of spiritual world-views, and made more of the counter-intuitive insights of Darwinism, we could have ended on a more constructive note.

Fundamentalist World: The New Dark Age of Dogma
by Stuart Sim
Icon Books Ltd., £12.99 (hb), ISBN 1 84046 532 8

This fascinating book discusses many fundamentalist groups which it had not occurred to me to consider as such. The author analyses not just Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism but also the Hindu and various Christian forms, post-Marxism, anti-globalisation, the British National Party, eco-terrorism, “gundamentalism” (the American militia movement), and imperialist fundamentalism with special reference to the US. The concepts of agonism and apostasy were new to me, as was market fundamentalism and the thought that the World Bank is a fundamentalist organisation.
The fundamentalist creed, whatever the variety, is (my words) that “The truth has been revealed to us and those who do not believe it are to be vilified, converted or, if necessary, killed.” “Liberal” is a dirty word and so is “sceptic”.
“What fundamentalism involves above all else is a desire for certainty and for the power to enforce that certainty over others”, says the author, and he proceeds to show at length how important the power aspect is. He brings forth arguments from other sources to show that an Enlightenment such as Christian civilisation experienced during the 18th century is what is now needed in the Islamic world. My response to that is “Lots of luck!” For the record, I see the third world war currently shaping up rapidly to be a conflict between “Islamic” and “Christian” forces and reaching full potential in the next few years. “Tens of thousands of children born to Muslim parents world-wide have been named Osama” is quoted from Rohan Gunaratna. I wonder how many have been named “Dubya”?
Fundamentalism and sexuality, male supremacy and the “compulsory heterosexuality” demanded by the Christian Right in the US are discussed. I can’t agree that “When you have to resort to terrorism to make your points, the political battle is half lost already”, but I firmly support “… we find it hard to regard religion as anything other than an excuse to exercise control over others; a method of trading on human vulnerability in order to gain power.”
No doubt other readers will find different things to agree and disagree on, but that’s what makes us sceptics, not fundamentalists, I hope. 225 pages of text, 9 of bibliography, 13 of notes, and a five-page index make this a useful working reference for further study. Highly recommended.

Defending Science, Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism
by Susan Haack
Prometheus Books, $28.00, ISBN 1-59102-117-0

Susan Haack, professor of philosophy and of law at the University of Miami, discusses the many different views on science and deals with the illusion of a “scientific community” or “the” scientific method. To demarcate the borders between science and non-science is not as easy as some claim.
Scientific inquiry can best be compared to solving a crossword puzzle, using bits and pieces gathered from the works of fellow scientists, standing on the shoulders of those before, and avoiding standing on the shoulders of crackpots.
The social sciences have their merits and pitfalls: the differences between understanding and explaining, between honesty and bias are not always obvious. This seems like kicking-in open doors. The science critics are dealt with, the debunkers who claim that knowledge and rationality are relative to social context and political influences. Haack discusses the differences between scientific and literary texts, the sometimes dubious competence of scientific experts in legal trials, and the relations between science and religion. She elaborates on the pros and cons, and illustrates well, but do not expect clear answers. But then she strongly deals with the anti-science movements.
Science is not a religion, white, male dominant and Western, a mere construct of its time and place. The results endure and are valid also in other societies, although science is not the only way of acquiring knowledge.
One also has to see the difference between inquiry and advocacy, and the dangers of mixing them, well-illustrated by the negative influence of dictatorships and theocracy on science. She cites Hitler: “We stand at the end of the age of reason, a new era of magical explanation of the world is rising”.
She ends by discussing whether there will ever be an end to science, and whether the ultimate laws of physics will ever be discovered. Those who are already very well acquainted with the philosophy of science literature should enjoy this book.

Why Smart People Can be So Stupid
by Robert J Sternberg (Editor)
Yale University Press, £12.50, ISBN 0300101708

The title alone triggers a cascade of questions. Is smart the same as intelligent? Does that mean that stupid is a synonym for unintelligent? What kind of behaviours are stupid anyway? These are tricky questions to answer, even though we all have an intuitive idea of what smart and stupid are, just as we all know smart people who behave in ways that are irrational (does that mean that rational and smart are the same thing?).
The contributors to this interesting and eclectic collection of papers attempt to unravel the ins and outs of the topic and to cast some light on an issue that is rarely addressed in anything but colloquial terms. The tone of the pieces here, in contrast, are decidedly on the academic side, though not to the extent that they are inaccessible to all but the expert. A couple of papers stand out in particular.
One case of a smart person acting dumb that is analysed in some detail is that of Bill Clinton. Diane Halpern does a good job of deconstructing the Monica Lewinsky scandal. This is, most people would agree, a case where someone nominally quite smart engaged in a behaviour that was incredibly dumb. Rather than adopt a moralistic tone, the author analyses Clinton’s behaviour in terms of his previous history. He had been getting away with similar activities for years and had survived. One of his errors, according to Halpern, is that he had not adapted to the changed circumstance of being in the Whitehouse. In this respect stupid behaviour is related to a failure to adapt to the environment.
In contrast David Perkins, in Engines of Folly, analyses the problem using the tools of complexity theory. In this fascinating paper he uses the ideas of self-organised criticality and emergent properties of complex systems to propose a theory of behaviour that encompasses various forms of folly. In identifying changes in patterns of activity as of prime importance, Perkins suggests that it may be possible to address folly. Perhaps, he suggests, people do not necessarily have to be so stupid so often.
In any case, this book makes for an intriguing read.