Shopping for Bombs

-->

Title: Shopping for Bombs – Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity and the Rise and Fall of the A.Q.Khan Network

Author: Gordon Corera

Publisher: Foundation Books 2006 (First)

ISBN: 1-85065-826-9

Pages: 251

Corera is a Security Correspondent for BBC News since 2004. He covers counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation and international security issues. His voluminous knowledge on those issues are abundantly evident in the subject matter of the book. It illustrates how a little known scientist from Pakistan managed to steal nuclear secrets from the company he worked for in Europe, used it to develop the Bomb for his home country and then actively peddled his secrets around the world for the highest bidder. The author has maintained justice to his subject, Khan and put before the world his true colours. It has also demonstrated in vivid detail how much the unsuspecting world has to fear for the future, as a result of rampant proliferation put in place by rogue states like Pakistan and outright rogue actors like A Q Khan. The imperfect practices and methodology of the non-proliferation regime. Corera has described how the West has been blinded by its own superiority complex as to curtail the monitoring of nuclear deals to technology transfer from the developed to developing countries and not among the latter nations.

Abdul Qadeer Khan was born in Bhopal, India and migrated to Pakistan in 1952. The vengeful Khan carried an undying anger against India across the border. He had his university education in the Netherlands and Belgium, after which he managed to obtain a job as metallurgist in FDO, a subsidiary of Urenco, an European consortium for nuclear technology. The enrichment facility provided Khan with blueprints, old parts and knowhow about the suppliers of critical technology like uranium enrichment centrifuges, who were also happily reluctant to ask any difficult questions if the price was right. 1971 came and Pakistan embarked on a disastrous war with India at the end of which the country lay dismembered with an added humiliation of the surrender of nearly 100,000 troops along with their supreme commander. Close on the heels of the victory, India conducted a nuclear test in May 1974 which sent the Pakistanis helter-skelter in search of national security. Khan returned home in 1975 to help then Prime Minister Bhutto to procure an Islamic bomb for which he was ready even to eat grass! Libya and Saudi Arabia extended financial support to Pakistan in the quest for a nuclear bomb to be shared as the legacy of Islam. Khan founded a research facility in Kahuta, which was later renamed as Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) and began processing of uranium based on the stolen designs from Urenco. China’s support was evident during the early stages.

Natural uranium consists of U238 which is useless as such, having only 0.7% U235 which is the fissile material. Concentration of U235 is called enrichment, using ultra-high speed centrifuges to separate the isotopes which weigh different by a minute quantity. U235 at the level of 5% is suitable for power generation while the purity is required to be at least 90% for weapons. There is also a plutonium route in which plutonium is separated from spent nuclear fuel from civilian reactors.

In Dec 1979, Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, paving the way for a new stage in US-Pak collaboration. Money and weapons poured to Pakistan to arm the Mujahideens fighting the Soviets. U.S. turned a blind eye to Pak’s own nuclear program so as not to upset the camaraderie. Pakistan, under the theologizing dictator-General Zia Ul Haq developed the bomb. However the relations with U.S. soured after 1988, after Soviet pullout from Afghanistan. Sanctions were imposed on Pakistan. During the 1990s, after perfecting the bomb design, Khan began to sell his wares to various customers around the globe – North Korea, Libya and Iran among them.

India performed nuclear tests again in 1998 under a Hindu nationalist government. This put immense pressure on Pak to test their own devices. Economic sanctions from the West threatened them, but Saudi Arabia promised a huge amount as compensation and also pledged 50,000 barrels of oil per day for free! Enmity between Pakistan’s bureaucracy also came out in the open, as the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) was assigned the task of actual testing, snubbing Khan’s KRL. Its chief boasted, “We invited Dr. A Q Khan to the Chagai test site to show him what a nuclear test explosion look like”. Building a nuclear weapon is worthless, if the delivery mechanism is not developed. Khan obtained designs of North Korea’s nuclear-capable Nodong missile and rechristened it Ghauri, a medieval plunderer of India’s wealth.

Khan reported only to the top most leader, whether in government or the military and remained autonomous in his work. He sold enrichment technology and weapon designs to Iran and Libya for money – for himself as well as for the state. The deal with North Korea was a barter, with Korean missile technology assimilated by Pak, while it received nuclear knowhow. Corera analyses Khan’s motivations behind the naked proliferation he conducted. Greed was definitely the most important factor, which was also peppered with visions of global Muslim brotherhood and a dislike for the West, even though he had had a European wife and owed his education to the West, bringing out the ungrateful character of the man. Pakistani society hailed him as the Father of the Bomb, made him a national hero, perhaps even greater in stature than the nation’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Khan was supremely arrogant and flamboyant. He was above the law. He built a palatial house on the shores of Rawal lake in Rawalpindi amd spewed untreated sewage to the lake from which public water supply was taken. When municipal authorities tried to stop him by sending a bulldozer to remove the unlawful structure, his armed guards shot dead its driver. There were no actions against Khan.

Ironically, Khan’s star began to fade after 1998 nuclear tests. The Pakistan regime, in its new status as a nuclear weapon state had to act responsibly for which Khan was a hindrance, with his rampant proliferation and little regard to international law. The Nuclear Command Authority put up by Pervez Musharraf for the control of weapons made Khan redundant – he was made an advisor to the chief executive of the state. Allegations appeared in local press about Khan’s involvement in a swindling affair involving US$ 8 million. The ISI investigated the charges and found them to be true. The CIA and MI6 latched on to Khan network in the 2000s. The tipping point came when they intercepted a German vessel carrying nuclear enrichment material produced by Khan network in Malaysia to Libya in 2003. Gaddafi was afraid of his own skin, after Saddam was ousted by American intervention that same year. He made a clean breast of his country’s nuclear ambitions, disclosed details of his suppliers and renounced the nuclear path in return for re-engagement with the West. The collected data was so huge for Pakistan to ignore. Khan was forced to make a humiliating self confession on national television. He was also removed from all official positions and held under house arrest. The network also broke down under the pressure of international investigation.

The book brings out the motive behind poor, undeveloped countries going after nuclear technology. The most important element is the perceived status which comes along. This is helped in no small measure by the utterances of none other than Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister in 1958, when he said that Britain had nuclear weapons because, “it put us where we ought to be, in the position of a great power”. The disincentive is really not much, as the non-proliferation regime is toothless. The book is easy to read and conveys the ideas unambiguously. Extensive journalistic research is evident in the way events and details are handled.

The book, unfortunately lacks a sense of authority. Whatever the author has written is forcefully, but slightly unconvincingly. Some events like Libya are blown up to unnecessary detail.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Proust and the Squid

Title: Proust and the Squid – The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Author: Maryanne Wolf

Publisher: Icon Books 2010 (First published 2008)

ISBN: 978-1-84831-030-8

Pages: 229

A deserving book from a cognitive neuroscientist researching in child development, it tries to reveal the secrets behind the act of reading – how it developed in humans, what changes it brought inside the brains, and how it paved the way for the surge in information dispersal around the corners of the world. Wolf is a professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University. She holds the John DiBaggio Chair of Citizenship and Public Service and is the director of the Centre for Reading and Language Research. Coming on the heels of being a researcher on child development, the author’s first son developed dyslexia, a form of reading disorder, which urged her to tackle the issue with a determination few would possess. The book is endowed with inputs from various branches of knowledge like history, neuroscience, brain mapping and psychology. The strange title attempts to focus on the measure of incongruity existing between the two extreme figures of Marcel Proust, a renowned French author and the squid, which is an underwater animal, obviously incapable of reading. Proust once remarked that Reading is the miracle of communication in the midst of solitude.

Man is the only species evolved to have the facility of reading. Surprisingly, we don’t possess any genetic framework for reading, or by extension, to writing. There are no genes for these features, like they do for speech, cognition or vision. When reading and writing was invented about 6000 years ago, man was stepping into a new world of unnatural effectiveness. The existing regions of the brain, designed for quite different functions were recruited to perform reading and gain information from it. The brain thus become reorganized, making it suitable for forming new thought patterns and better survival potential in a society teeming with competing individuals. Since reading is not the result of genetic machinery, this trait cannot be inherited from parents. Each child is required to develop this talent anew. The neuronal associations readers make in their brains differ, based on the nature of language they use. The brain wiring put in place by Chinese readers are different from English readers, since Chinese is a logosyllabic language. The failure to form the associations of neuron result in dyslexia, a reading disorder found in quite a large proportion of the people.

Tokens marked on stone were the first reading material used by ancient people, often for accounting purposes. By using these cryptic symbols, a novel form of neuronal connectivity began to form in brain, which developed to handle more complex and varied inputs. By late 4^th millennium, cuneiform script emerged in Sumer, which revolutionized the way information was carried. The transition from pictographic symbols to logographic (depicting concepts) letters provided a turning point in human history. Cognitive and logical capabilities developed over generations. It formed the prototype for languages around the world. Even though not related in any way, modern Chinese is the nearest relative in architecture to the ancient Sumerian language. Numerous dialects and variations of the base tongue soon came to evolve, with women in the palace using a quite different tongue of their own! Writing systems also developed independently in Egypt, Crete and Mesoamerica. By 8^th century BCE, the Greek alphabet came into being, helped in no small measure by Phoenician influence, who had a very ancient writing system of their own. The Greek alphabet reproduced sounds of words, hence number of symbols reduced. This freed the minds from allocating a great amount of working memory for cognition, paving the way for great thoughts to arise, bypassing carefully remembered oral traditions. Wolf says this helped the flowering of classical period in Greece. Powerful opponents decried the use of written language. Socrates passionately disapproved of it, arguing that the written words are immutable, conferring a false sense of truth to them. His disciple, Plato was ambivalent to writing – we owe our knowledge of Socrates’ speeches through Plato’s writing. Plato’s glorious disciple, Aristotle, immersed headlong into reading. Socrates’ tirades against writing found echoes in ancient India as well, as the written word were supposed to destroy memory power and the loss of control of language, with its fine intonations and stresses for orators. Ancient Sanskrit scholars too valued oral tradition as the truest vehicle for intellectual and spiritual growth. In the present century, we fear the digital revolution for whisking away cognitive power from children, much as Socrates feared more than 2000 years before.

Exposure to reading – in the form of stories read to them – is essential for children to develop reading skills and acquire vocabulary later on. Learning multiple languages cause strain on the capabilities, but if it occurs at an early age, the brain easily adapts to it. Neural scans indicate the brains of such bilingual people show similar activity to native monolingual speakers. There are several stages of reading development in children to adulthood, namely, pre-reading reader, novice reader, decoding reader, fluent comprehending reader and expert reader. Brain activity is different for all these classes, with some form of automaticity developing in the later stages. The book is also gifted with a good discussion on dyslexia. New developments in neuroscience is given in support of the arguments. Affected persons use the right hemisphere of the brain, which is usually used for creative purposes in normally abled people, but which is not suitable for precision, which reading demands. The use of the right part and the delays in coordination between the two hemispheres result in reading disabilities. This problem should be properly addressed by teachers when handling children of impressionable ages. There is no one size fits all approach to instruction today. We need teachers with a toolbox of principles which can be applied based on children’s needs.

The book exudes confidence and earnest effort to guide reading-disabled children to the path of being successful in life. Having the history of dyslexia running deep in the author’s own family, and being the mother of a dyslexic child, she is rightfully diligent in her arguments to show to the world what needs to be done in such cases, instead of the humiliation and isolation of such children.

The book is unfortunately not good for casual reading. With copious inputs from doctoral fellows, it rarely becomes one. The Notes section at the end of the text occupies a quarter of the entire book, revealing its true colours. A serious drawback is the title which confuses readers. While claiming to be a history of reading and the development of brain for this feat, it diverts its attention to describing nuances of teaching children how to read. Many people would definitely desist from taking the book if the nature of content was more discernible – certainly myself among them. Readers are compelled to wade through the profusion of learning behaviours of children. Though a lot of illustrations are provided, they are handdrawn and not much illuminating. It seemed that they are included just for its own sake. Also, too much reliance on anecdotal evidence mars the scientific rigour of the work.

The book is not recommended for general readers.

Rating: 2 Star

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Title: Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Author: Sean B Carroll

Publisher: Quercus 2011 (First published 2006)

ISBN: 978-1-84916-048-3

Pages: 305

Sean B Carroll is a big popularizer of science, having the authorship of many extremely successful works to his credit. Two of them, Remarkable Creatures and The Making of the Fittest has already been reviewed in this blog earlier. Those books prove to be the cornerstones of how science could be brought in to the lives of ordinary people. Though this book is not as appealing as the above mentioned two, Carroll’s reputation and sincerety of expression places it in a special niche. This volume is owed more to the professional work of Carroll, being the subject matter of his own research, rather than to his superb communication skills. The title find its source in a fine sentence by Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species, asking his readers to see the grandeur in his new vision of nature, in how from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful have been, and are being evolved. Carroll attempts to figure out the embryological development which attributes such an infinite variety to animals.

Though Darwin’s books, Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871) put evolution firmly on the scientific mind, nobody was sure of how the evolutionary mechanism operated – how the changes actually came about. In 1900, the field split into embryology, heredity and evolution, each going their separate ways, denying an integrated approach for the world. Development of a fertilized egg to a full fledged animal required careful study, but it gained acceptance and recognition only in the 1970s. Since Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA, microbiology gradually developed to full bloom in the 1980s when genes were studied and the machinery through which it affected development of body parts, using the ubiquitous fruit fly as the model. This overturned conventional wisdom that various animals proceed by different developmental mechanisms. The surprise was that the same genes which were responsible for body parts in various animals were also responsible for quite different body parts in some other animals or even in different regions of the same animal. This led to the growth of a new discipline, seeking comparison of developmental genes between species, named Evolutionary Developmental Biology, or Evo Devo for short.

The fruit fly and humans share 29000 genes, of which 1.5% codes for production of 25,000 proteins in the body. So where is the difference in form comes in? 3% of the DNA is regulatory in nature, which determines when and where a specific organ or trait is to be switched on. Animals share modular structures repeating in varying numbers and kinds. A basic pattern can be discerned in these serial homologs. An example is the vertebra in chordates, termed cervical (neck), thoracic and others, which is repeated in many species. There are hundreds of such links in snakes, while there is only 33 in humans. The fore- and hind-limbs also share the same prototype in a bewildering range of animals. The serial homologs tend toward reduction in number in later life forms, a law found by Samuel Williston. However, in biology, there is hardly any law which is not violated at least once by a little known organism.

Research on fruit flies generated exciting conclusions. Great similarity in the body building genes was noticed among them. Genes for specific functions like formation of eyes were found. The most exciting part was that the gene was exactly similar in mice, making eyes. When a mouse eye gene was transferred to fruit fly…..it created an eye, but not a mouse eye. A normal eye of the fruit fly was developed using the mouse gene. It showed that expression of a gene is strongly dependent on the context. Also, the same DNA is present in all cells (except reproductive organs), but the switching on of specific parts is different for a variety of organs. This action is controlled by a regulatory portion of DNA which contain switches (chemicals which attach to DNA) that manage the operation of genetic coding. These switches act singly or in digital combination for complex operations. Great bursts in animal diversity were shaped by evolutionary changes in genetic switches.

Carroll correlates the study of genes and genetic switching mechanisms to explain the surge in life forms observed around 500 million years ago in the Cambrian era. This sudden swell is termed the Cambrian Explosion. What was the cause of this? Not the development of new genes, as the genetic tool kit was almost assembled in its present form much before in pre-Cambrian life forms. However, we see shifting of proteins and switches in DNA during this period. This led to larger, complex life forms to evolve. Biologists were sometimes confused at the origin and evolution of similar looking, but different body parts or different looking but similar in origin body parts. This trouble is abundantly solved by Evo Devo, by pinpointing the genes responsible for development of the parts and thus obtaining hints about the origins.

Genes acquire new abilities over time depending on the selection pressure on the animal. The eye spots on butterfly wings provide a very good case in point. These are essential for the survival of the creature, as predators are either turned off by ferocious looking spots, or attracted to it, thereby the main body of the butterfly escaping unhurt. Analysis of genes forming these patterns imply that genes responsible for making limbs from the body trunk (termed distal-less) are also in charge of the formation of spots when expressed on the wings! When those genes are switched on by the regulatory machinery on wings, it produces a distinct colouration, rather than limbs. This logic is extendable to humans as well. Homo species began divergence from other hominids around 2.3 million years, marked by the higher brain sizes. Climate change is suggested as a cause, resulting in quick cooling of the planet. Rain forests in Africa shrunk, forcing the hominids to venture into expanding savannahs. Modern man was evolved around 200,000 years ago, but the Neanderthals separated much before. There are no mixing of the genes of these two human species. A curious observation of human genome is that it is 98.8% similar to a chimpanzee genome. The author puts this in clear perspective. There are about 3 billion base pairs in a human DNA, out of which 1.2% (the difference with chimps) constitutes about 36 million base pairs, which is huge! Two mutated genes between us and apes are MYH16, which reduces size of jaw musculature and FOXP2, helping in speech and language processing. It is to be remembered these genes are also found in other animals, but in mutated forms. Carroll specifically asserts that there is no single gene or change which resulted in the enormous differences between humans and apes.

The book is endowed with a great treasure of illustrations pointing out the finer nuances conveyed in text. The supremely knowledgable intellect of Carroll is apparent in every chapter, probing behind every single detail until it is clarified beyond an iota of vagueness. As the book includes subject matter of the author’s own research, a scholarly treatment is guaranteed and provided. There is also a good discussion about the religious concept of creation vis-à-vis evolution. The urgent need for modern society to implant the concepts of evolution to children, who are the promises of the future is very important. When the leaders of religious denominations are slowly veering around towards acceptance of evolution, at least in principle, time should not be lost in accepting it wholeheartedly. There are opponents on both sides of the divide, like the scientist Michael Behe opposing evolution (though with improper application of newly realized ideas) and theologians like John Haught, who are supporting it.

Unfortunately, the book is not enjoyable as the previous two titles from the same author mentioned above. This book uses complicated terminology and is unappealing to the ordinary reader. Sentences like “chordin is produced by cells around the dorsal lip of the blastopore” (p.99) does not help poor mortals like me. Regrettably, for once, Carroll seems to have rode in the path of scientific reporting instead of popular science. For biologists, or for those who have a background on the field, it may prove to be exceedingly worthwhile, but the targeted audience is not about to benefit from it. Even though the author claims that several ahas and wows are forthcoming as the readers move along the chapters, we can only surmise that the claim is a small embellishment on the actual state of being.

The book is strongly recommended for persons having a good background in biology and genetics.

Rating: 2 Star

The Vanishing Face Of Gaia

Title: The Vanishing Face of Gaia – A Final Warning

Author: James Lovelock

Publisher: Allen Lane 2009 (First)

ISBN: 978-1-846-14227-7

Pages: 168

James Lovelock is a lone voice among scientists, who preserves a sense of the poetical while doing serious research. Opinion is sharply divided in the scientific world on whether this man can be reckoned as a true scientist, reflecting on the quite unconventional ways in which his talent had wandered on. Lovelock, along with Lynn Margulis postulated in the early 1970s that life on Earth keeps the surface conditions always favourable for whatever is the contemporary ensemble of organisms. This is famously called the Gaia Hypothesis, the name suggested by the Nobel-laureate litterateur William Golding who was also his neighbour. Gaia was the goddess of Earth in Greek mythology. Lovelock has produced an earlier book on similar terms, titled The Revenge of Gaia (Reviewed earlier in this blog). This book brings to light the irrevocable damage man has effected on the face of the Earth, so that Gaia could not maintain an equilibrium at a temperature favourable for him. The Earth system, consisting of all life, including man is too potent to be impaired by human activities. Whatever man has done, he has to get paid for it, because the equilibrium Gaia arrives at would be at a higher temperature which would be unfit for man.

Gaia, being the biosphere constantly shape and fine tune the parameters for its existence. Man is only a humble part of the whole, and what is best for Gaia may not even be livable for us. Global warming – also called Global Heating by the author to accentuate the effect – due to human induced climate change is a reality. There is not much we can do about it – the slide to destruction had begun centuries earlier when the Industrial Revolution changed the way things were made and laid before man a whole new way of life, full of comforts and contrivances which were objects of pure conjecture for people who lived only a generation before. The excess carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases force Gaia to adopt higher temperatures for its existence, but even in such a hot world, there will be some islands of opportunity and habitable climate. Lovelock claims the U.K and New Zealand to be two such places. Whether English-speaking was a criterion, we don’t know! We have gone past the point of no-return. Climate mitigation efforts would have been successful if implemented in 1800, but not now.

The UN watchdog, Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stewards all effort to fight climate change. However, the predictions of IPCC scientists are proving to be way beyond the mark, like sea level rise. In 2007, the prediction was off by a factor of 1.6. Climate models assuming the Earth to be a dead planet, thus ignoring the effect of life are bound to doom. Many of them seek to measure the temperature rise, which is not as representational as a measure of the heat contained on Earth as the sea level. Human pollution is sometimes helpful in reducing the effect, as in the case of aerosols produced by pollution and automobile emission. The haze resulting from the discharge reflects a part of sunlight back to space. If IPCC’s target of reducing emission by 60% in 2050 could be achieved in a single year, the aerosol will be wiped off and atmosphere warms up. Theories being formulated by talented scientists must take into account all these factors and should consider the Earth as a single unit instead of being pigeonholed into compartments like atmospheric physics, geology and the like. The theories should be tested with long term experiments and analysed. This is to be our primary concern, rather than formulating policies on untested theories.

Lovelock envisages the face of the planet as a result of Global Warming. It would turn most continents to deserts. Overpopulated countries like India and China are doomed from the outset. Mankind can hope for redemption only in the temperate latitudes. Increased rainfall accompanying soaring temperature won’t provide any succour to tropical countries since water cannot be held in the soil at elevated temperatures. Wartime effort and action plans need to be initiated to tackle the crisis, when it will inevitably crop up.

The author examines various forms of renewable energy as a viable alternative. Generally, he is loathe to embrace wind power as it is ugly to place them in pristine country. In fact, Lovelock compares the installation of wind turbines in his picturesque Devon to placing sewers in Hyde Park in London. Solar energy, whether voltaic or thermal is an ideal source of renewable energy. A square-meter area receives a solar radiation of 1.35 kW. This could be harnessed with a 10-12% efficiency, opening up Southern Spain and Sahara for efficient solar power generation. However, Lovelock’s preferred choice of energy generation is nuclear. He flays the media and energy companies with vested interests behind the anti-nuclear protests. Nuclear energy is cheap, highly efficient, and non-polluting. In a half-century of operation, the Nuclear industry is accused for causing the death of only a hundred people (Chernobyl included), while the figure runs to tens of thousands for any other alternative energy production. The emission rate of carbon in a nuclear power plant is 4 g/kWh while for coal it is 955 g/kWh. Energy companies, particularly Russian-owned ones which distribute Russian gas in Europe is behind the vicious campaign against nuclear.

Geoengineering is way to meet the challenges of increased presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This is not something new, organisms had already successfully tried this out, 3.5 billion years ago. The prominence of oxygen in today’s atmosphere was the result of a sudden greening of the planet during the dawn of Gaia. Invention of fire and industry were also forms of geoengineering. There are three categories possible – physical means of amelioration like manipulation of planetary albedo (the amount of sunlight reflected back), biological (tree planting, fertilization of ocean algal ecosystems with iron) and active Gaian engineering which involves use of Earth’s own ecosystems to power the process.

After establishing his point with forceful, if not convincing vigour, Lovelock goes into a firefighting exercise in support of Gaia theory. There are very few scientists supporting the fantastic theory with all its ornamentation. Eminent earth scientists have derided the theory on the grounds that regulation of atmospheric parameters can be fully explained by geophysics and geochemistry alone. The theory was at the receiving end in the hands of biologists led by Richard Dawkins. The opposition had escalated to such heights in the 1980s that Lovelock had much difficulty in getting his papers accepted for publication in major journals, which he describes as amounting to censorship! Any good scientific theory should propose verifiable predictions and should be falsifiable. The author lists out ten predictions and claims that eight out of them have been verified till date. However, the successful eight include such sweeping assertions like Mars is lifeless and Gaia is aged and not far from the end of its lifespan which are quite obvious corollaries of entirely unrelated fields of study.

The book is reasonably easy to read and the author should be credited with the achievement of exppounding in full what he intended to do. It is a clear reminder to mindless exploitation of nature, forgetting the fact that we are only a species among the multitude which constitute Gaia. Green movements are cut to size for their militancy and the lack of love of nature which should be the basis on which nature movements need to carry on. Lovelock is entirely clear that nuclear energy is the promise of the future and the required non-polluting energy source compatible with a reduced carbon world.

Nonetheless, the book needs major restructuring to make the content attractive to readers. The author overemphasizes Gaia, which is in reality a novel appellation of a controversial subject. There is no question of the ideas anywhere attaining near proven status. An odd aspect of global warming which irritates the author is the anticipated banishment of white people! As he says, “When a tribe moves from temperate to tropical regions it only takes a few generations before individuals darken as selection eliminates the fair-skinned” (p.19).  How a person having the pretensions of science stoop to such racist and totally erroneous conclusions? Lovelock may care to look at the Brazilian society which has hosted both white and black people for centuries and the races were in fact interbreeding but still the whites remain whites. And what about the Inuits, who are dark, but still reside in the freezing Arctic cold?

Author’s justifications of his own child, the Gaia theory assumes comic proportions when he refers his own friends and cronies as authorities on the subject. He seems to forget the maxim of science that it does not respect authority. Unproved or imaginative postulates are elevated to the status of irrefutable principles, like his suggestion of Britain which would become a safe haven in the hot Earth, which might grant climate refugees asylum there. Readers become suspicious that if Lovelock deigns to write a sequel to the present volume, it would be on the eligibility criteria the people of Britain may demand on the refugees queueing at their gates for climate salvation!

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing

-->

Title: The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing

Editor: Richard Dawkins

Publisher: Oxford Press 2009 (First published 2008)

ISBN: 978-0-19-921681-9

Pages: 395

Oxford and Cambridge University Presses keep the light of literature beaming across the globe like two lighthouses. The histories published by them, particularly Cambridge are the pinnacles of the branch of knowledge. The present book on Modern Science Writing is a compendium of articles on science published during the last century. Compiled and edited by the inimitable Richard Dawkins, the book assumes an aura of authenticity and comprehensiveness. With a fine sieve, Dawkins digs deep into the mountain of literature and comes up with representative samples from the heap. The university has entrusted the job to its own Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. A total of 83 essays from various authors are included in this collection. Translations are avoided as far as possible, but one or two glorious exemptions are also admitted. Great writing by professional scientists was one of the criteria of inclusion, rather than occasional science writing by great writers. The book is a celebration of humanity, its ability to understand nature and its faculty to connect minds even across centuries by the powerful medium of language.

The book is sub-divided into four main sections, What Scientists Study, Who Scientists Are, What Scientists Think and What Scientists Delight In. The first part is the subject matter of science, the second being biographical bits. The third and fourth parts seek to bring out essentials of what the scientists think and delight in. The cross section of what was important in science writing of the last century lies bare before the reader through all these subclasses. We see some really nice reproductions from prominent authors, notable among them being Jared Diamond’s excerpt from Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee and C P Snow’s foreword to G H Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. It narrates how human populations established themselves among the continents and how the demarcations came about between the old and new worlds. The fissure lines lie in geography and pack animals human populations had at their disposal. It may be noted that mankind still employs the animals tamed in prehistoric times for his necessary occupations like transportation and warfare. People of the Old World were handicapped in the sense that they had no horse, or rather, had hunted the primitive horses out to extinction. The newcomers like Cortez and Pizzaro had the continent in their palms due to the fear-evoking presence of the horse. In the second article mentioned above, Snow explains how Hardy came to recognize the talent of a young, partially educated and inexperienced Indian whose letter detailing the mathematical scribblings done during leisure times lay before him – Srinivasa Ramanujan. Though Hardy dismissed the letter as inconsequential, as he often received fantastic claims and theorems proving whole lots of anything, his subconscious mind had identified talent in the scramble which prompted him to reexamine the contents along with a colleagure. The rest is history.

There are some very boring articles as well, to point to all aspects of the book. That on Growth and Form by D’Arcy Thompson is one such. Another are the five pieces from Peter Medawar whom Dawkins holds in high esteem, but the selected works do not justify the praise heaped on him. This does not mean that Medawar’s writing is mediocre – not at all – but that the selection was an unfortunate one. The book, however evenly the editor had wanted to balance the topics, is heavily tilted on the side of biology, which is foreseeable, since Dawkins himself is a biologist. The first section, which deals with subject matter of science is practically replete with biological essays. Also, the wide variety of topics covered make the reading artificial and strained. With absolutely no link between articles, the book assumes the character of a reference title which one uses for browsing selected topics rather than going through cover to cover. In the end, readers feel that Dawkins has wasted a real opportunity with unimpressive selection of content. Several such items are only mediocre in quality.

Dawkins has carefully included writing by Fred Hoyle, who was a professional rival of himself during the campaign against evolution spearheaded by the physicist. The selection is a careful one, which is a work of fiction supporting evolution, before Hoyle changed his mind and came down in esteem of his colleagues. Hoyle turned so nasty against evolution that he even challenged the personal honour of Charles Darwin and the authenticity of the well known fossil of Archeopteryx. Einstein’s essay on Religion and Science is an insightful one, specifically when he counters the falseful assertion of the religious that morality originated with religion. Einstein says, “Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way, if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death” (p.238).

The book is not recommended.

Rating: 2 Star