We Are All Stardust
Stefan Klein
Scribe
Herding Hemingway’s Cats
Understanding How Our Genes Work
Kat Arney
Bloomsbury SigmaThe Confidence Game
The Psychology Of The Con And Why
We Fall For It Every Time
Maria KonnikovaNewspapers are obsessedwith celebrities Canongate^
from the arts: even Z-list actors get asked
for their views on global issues if they’ve
got a new movie out. In contrast, there’s a
belief that scientists must be
incomprehensible and boring. The
trouble is that while any airhead can
interview a movie star, it takes some effort
to come up with interesting questions for
Nobel Prize winners. That’s what gives
Stefan Klein an edge in this collection of
interviews with leading scientists in fields
ranging from cosmology to consciousness,
genomics to psychology – before
becoming a writer, Klein was a scientist
himself. His interviewees include some of
the usual suspects like Astronomer Royal
Lord Rees, but also less familiar names
like neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese,
discoverer of ‘mirror neurones’ that play a
key role in social interactions. Whatever
the subject, Klein elicits both neat
explanations and entertaining stories and
insights. So if you want to get a glimpse
of the workings of some great minds –
and find out how a trip in a sports car led
to a Nobel Prize and what Lord Rees
nearly ended up doing for a living - this is
the book for you.
Ernest Hemingway’s cat famously had six
toes, as do some humans. In Kat Arney’s
delightful new book she explains how this
condition is not the result of a mutation or
error in some gene, but rather an example
of how a perfectly good gene has been
misregulated.
Gene regulation might seem a dry topic,
but it explains how, for example, we can be
98-99 per cent identical to chimpanzees in
our genes while being so utterly different
in every other respect. Our genomes
are packed with regulatory mechanisms
with strange names such as ‘fused genes’,
‘epigenetics’, and ‘RNA editing’. These
enable our bodies to use our genes in a
dazzling variety of ways.
A similar bounty of such mechanisms in
other organisms can produce stunning floral
colours or rewire the brains of a fruit fly
(and probably us!), leading Arney to say: “It’s
not what you’ve got, but what you do with
it that counts”.
Arney’s book is accessible to those
without a scientific background and
its breezy anecdotal style makes for
entertaining reading, making it a nice treat
for GCSE or A-level students.This book is filled with real-life tales of
people duped out of their life savings,
tricked into bogus marriages and much
more. Maybe you’ve been conned, but
don’t realise it yet, or don’t want to admit
it. That’s what Maria Konnikova makes
you wonder through her masterful
blend of storytelling and psychological
theory. Thanks to psychological
phenomena such as ‘optimism bias’ and
the ‘better-than-average effect’, we’re all
overconfident about our expertise, our
ability to judge others’ trustworthiness
and the likelihood that we’ll ever be the
target of a con. Once we’re lured in by a
persuasive story our emotions take over,
blinding us to what’s really going on. Even
as our losses mount up and the con takes
hold, we keep going thanks to effects like
the ‘gambler’s fallacy’ (surely a win is due
after so many losses) and the ‘sunk cost
effect’ (our reluctance to give up on an
enterprise that we’ve invested in).
Ultimately, what makes us vulnerable
to the con is our universal need to
believe that we can become healthier,
happier, richer versions of ourselves.PROF MARK PAGEL is an evolutionary biologist and
a Fellow of the Royal SocietyCHRISTIAN JARRETT is the author of
The Rough Guide To PsychologyROBERT MATTHEWS is Visiting Professor in
Science at Aston University
IN 1943, Donald Triplett was the first child to be
diagnosed with autism. Today, around 700,000
people have autism in the UK alone. In A Different
Key tells the story of those intervening 73 years,
covering the history of the disorder in a detailed,
rational way.
Unfortunately, though, it’s somewhat
disadvantaged, being released so soon after Steve
Silberman’s award-winning book NeuroTribes,
which essentially does the same thing. The timing
is a shame, because In A Different Key is a very
good book. A lot of time and effort has clearly
gone into it, and the writing flows well without ever
getting bogged down in needless detail. AuthorsJohn Donvan and Caren Zucker manage to remain
objective but compassionate throughout, and
prominent individuals in the field are described with
respect and dignity, though there are times when
you feel this is very generous on their part.
It’s not so much a science book as a history
book with a compelling narrative, the only thing that
may deter the casual reader is its 672-page length.
But autism has a long and varied history, and you
obviously need a big book to fit all that in.
In A Different Key
The Story Of Autism
John Donvan and Caren Zucker
Allen LaneDEAN BURNETT is a neuroscientist. His first book, The Idiot
Brain, is out in FebruaryEDITOR'S
CHOICE