Books
>> Genre >> Paleontology
>> Life's Other Secret | Peripatus Home
Page Books
>> Genre >> Paleontology
>> Life's Other Secret |
Updated: 18 Jun 2006 |
Check Amazon for this book: United States (Amazon.com) / International (Amazon.co.uk)
ISBN 0-1402-5876-0
|
Life’s Other Secret sets about making a statement to the effect that mathematics – by which Stewart means the physical laws of the universe (mathematics being merely the language we humans use to describe them) – plays at least as significant a role in the development and evolution of living things, as does genetics. More about that in a moment; first, the book itself.
I have to say I was unimpressed from the outset. The first chapter is deeply muddled, and affected – to my taste – by an arrogance which physical scientists not uncommonly bring to their pronouncements on biology. Consider the following remarkable statement, for example:
‘The bodily scaffolding of these tiny animals [radiolarians] displays innumerable and beautiful mathematical patterns, some of which bear a striking resemblance to Euclid’s regular solids – the octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron (Figure 9). Some say the resemblance is too striking; the illustrator may have exaggerated their skeletal regularity.’ – pp. 18-19
May have? May have? Didn’t you take the trouble to find out, Dr. Stewart?
In fact, Stewart’s figure 9 is based on a 1917 lithograph (sic!) and only a few seconds on the internet would have revealed to him that most (perhaps all) radiolaria look nothing at all like his illustrations, and evidence no resemblance to Euclidian solids whatsoever. I’m happy to forgive him for erroneously calling them animals (they are not) but I am most unenthusiastic for his presumption to lecture me about life on the evidence of an ancient wood-cut which, by his own admission, may be bollocks, but he is too lazy to check.
How much else of Stewart’s argument is rubbish? I don’t know. Although I did finish the book, and although it did generally improve, my confidence in the author’s veracity was already lost, and I felt his thesis didn’t merit the effort of finding out.
Yes, Stewart is certainly right about one thing: there is insufficient information in the human (or any other) genome to exactly specify how to make an organism. If development were not constrained by physical and chemical laws, then genetics wouldn’t work. But a similar statement can be made about your mother’s baking, tomorrow’s weather, or the trajectory of Newton’s apple, so isn’t the whole argument simply vacuous? Well, perhaps not completely, but this exposition is certainly pleonastic: more deserving of a one page article than a 285 page book ... unless, of course, you’re being paid by the word.
A fine perspective with which to counter-balance Stewart’s down-playing of the role of the genome, is Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful . In chapter 4, Carroll sketches out "a few frames in the film" of how a genome is turned into an animal and, then, in chapter 5, with reference to the Turing-type modelling of biological pattern, beloved of Stewart, the explicit statement:
‘While the math and models are beautiful, none of this theory has been borne out by the discoveries of the last twenty years. The mathematicians never envisioned that modular genetic switches held the key to pattern formation, or that the periodic patterns we see are actually the composite of numerous individual elements.’ – p. 123
What Carroll is saying is that Stewart’s and others attempts to reduce ontogeny to a few simple mathematical rules is fundamentally doomed to failure: it really is complicated.
Recommendation: Kind of recommended; read it on holiday or something.
Look and Feel: My copy is a paperback of the usual rubbishy quality, featuring a few, unusually poor b&w photographs and some generally well-executed, simple line drawings.
| Peripatus Home Page Books >> Genre
>> Paleontology >> Life's Other Secret |
