A collection of new books delves into various topics including human evolution, hormones, and cooperation in nature, offering fresh perspectives and insights.
This is a month to look out for some powerful new books, with authors taking on challenges of all sorts and imagining whole new worlds.
There are fresh ways to think about a cancer diagnosis, a book tackling the real inner world of hormones, in which we are all hormonal all the time, plus a major re-envisioning of the natural world where we abandon the shallows of competition for the depth and intricacies of connection and togetherness. Welcome to the symbiocene.
It’s quite hard going to get an up-to-date grip on human evolution, even for the best-briefed adult, so a book with sophisticated text and excellent illustrations and diagrams can only be a good thing. Especially if it is curated and edited by Alice Roberts, biological anthropologist, palaeopathologist, broadcaster – and professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham, UK.
She worked with a generous-sized international team of experts in many fields of human evolution, including archaeology, palaeontology, anthropology and cognitive science. Each chapter is devoted to the evolution of a part of the body, including hands, lungs and the digestive system, building a complex picture of our origins and nature. There are so many questions to address: when did we invent clothes? Why are our babies altricial ?
What happened to the other modern humans? Are we the only animals to have become quite so self-aware? Just the kind of book to take on a very long trip. For Saira Hameed, we are all hormonal, all of the time – it’s not colloquial shorthand for feeling tired, moody, puffy or all three.
But then, as a consultant endocrinologist, she knows that the tiny hypothalamus controls the myriad processes that are all about everyday life and that we barely notice when they work: appetite, body weight, thirst, stress, sleep, growth, metabolism, puberty, reproduction and sex drive. This all makes for a fascinating book built around her clinical practice, featuring patients whose lives have been interrupted by the faulty signalling of any of the 50-plus hormones that run the human show.
A sneak peek reveals a young boy whose life has been shattered by a brain tumour too stuck onto the hypothalamus for a clean excision. His sleep is erratic, his weight is soaring and it’s going to take more operations and tweaking hormones to approach giving him a life that works. And there are stories of terrible exhaustion and crushing infertility.
It looks to be compelling stuff – and she sounds like the kind of consultant you would want on your side. An exploration of how biological cooperation underpins all life – and why we’ve overlooked its power until now – makes thrilling reading, finds Penny Sarchetpod meister and a senior editor here for many years.
His third book sets out to change all our minds, and to replace the dangerous shallows of competition that have brought us to the brink with a knowledge and sense of the small miracles of cooperation that have forged our natural world. The ubiquitous, lifelong partnerships between animals and plants, insects and fungi, fish and bacteria are an essential guide for a better future.reveals the intimate connectedness of nature through stories of symbiosis.
From the female wasp venturing deep inside a fig, and the intricate relationship between corals and the algae that sustain them, to the symbiotic gut microbes that influence our moods, Hooper explores how cooperation is fundamental to life and to protecting our shared future. The hope, the plan, is to change how we see the world, our place in it – and our obligation to it, so we can forge a symbiotic future.
We can build nothing less than a symbiocene. Darby Saxbe is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California who has conducted one of the world’s largest longitudinal studies on men’s brains as they become fathers.
She should be in a great place “to shift the narrative by showing that great parents are made, not born” and to answer the question that some might consider it premature to celebrate fathers when our culture still does so little to support mothers.
“I’d answer that parenthood is not a zero-sum game… Understanding the influence of fathers helps us build the tag team of adults who are cray about their kids. That, I hope, is a cause we can all champion,” she writes.
It looks like a book for a deep read and a terrific addition to the increasing number of fatherhood books, like the excellent 2024Join our friendly crowd of fellow book club members in reading and discussing the latest in science and science fiction. What could be more fun than a counter-intuitive climate book? Psychologist Elizabeth Dunn and climate behaviour scientist Jiaying Zhao assembled a pile of what sound like too-good-to-be-true propositions.
Take this: can you improve your happiness and wellbeing while also reducing your carbon footprint? Or, what if the most effective ways to fight climate change made you happy? And suppose we could make ourselves, and our planet, happier at the same time? Dunn and Zhao have a point: if you like the changes you make, you’re more likely to stick with them – and spread them across friend and family networks.
So, you don’t have to become a vegan or give up flying: sub chicken for beef, and take carry-on bags. Both make a decent dent in emissions at a lower personal cost. They also urge us to approach your emissions the way you do your finances: strategically, thoughtfully and with the long-term firmly in mind. But above all, do, a book stuffed with climate facts and hopeful solutions) approves.
“Many would argue that this is too good to be true; Dunn and Zhao expertly show us that it is not,” she writes of the book. What would you ask an astronaut if you could have lunch with them? Few people know how interstellar exploration feels better than Leroy Chiao, a retired NASA astronaut, former International Space Station commander and veteran of four space missions.
He most recently served as commander and NASA science officer of Expedition 10 aboard the International Space Station . Chiao is one of the first Asian-American astronauts, and, say his publishers, using his “unique perspective from flying with fellow American, Japanese and Russian professionals”, he can answer burning questions such as: what is the new space race, and who are the next generation of competitors? What is NASA working on these days?
What feelings did you experience looking out at Earth from space? What does the future of space exploration look like? Will we ever make it to Mars? So, what would you ask over a three-course dinner?
Could you accurately describe an electron, its function, genesis, discovery or future? If not, then enter Brian Clegg, with what looks like a handy refresher in the shape of a biography. Expect to hear everything from when the term was originally coined as a tentative name for the basic unit of electrical charge to the electron’s increasing centrality to our lives through electricity.
Roger Highfield, science director of The Science Museum, UK, reckons that in “34 brisk, brilliantly crafted chapters, he sweeps through centuries of discovery: essential reading for our electrified age”. Clear out your shelves for a bumper new crop of books by authors including Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Xand Van Tulleken, says culture editor Alison Floodby law professor and investigative journalist Kojo Koram is billed by one of its early reviewers as a guide to the new territory in which “yesterday’s banned substances are today’s wellness aids or pharmaceutical miracles”.
Tricky territory indeed. Especially as it’s a bit of a no-brainer that the so-called War on Drugs will only be replaced by an approach based on the same old monopolies and exploitation that caused so many problems in the first place – from poverty to deforestation, pollution and loss of biodiversity.
Koram tracks the tensions along a newly legalised frontier, exploring the possibilities of drug reform versus a new chapter in capitalism creating “a smooth transition from cartel barons to Wall Street oligopolies”. Data from facial emotion recognition, brain-computer interfaces, virtual reality, global emotion surveys and sentiment analysis seem to offer an extraordinary new terrain for scientific exploration. Emotion-sensing promises to decode and even to augment and control the very essence of human experience.
But what if the science and technology of emotion measurement get emotions wrong? In, Jessica Pykett, professor of social and political geography and codirector of the Centre for Urban Wellbeing at the University of Birmingham, UK, describes how technologies create emotional data, how smart cities use sensors to monitor residents’ feelings and how global economies measure happiness. In an age of ever-increasing surveillance capitalism and the rise of neurocapitalism, that should make for an interesting read.
How much do we know about the psychology and neurology of one our companion animals, the charismatic horse? Somehow, say the publishers ofby Janet L. Jones, horses have been largely ignored by cognitive science even though the bond between horse and rider is every bit as strong as any other cross-species relationship. Neuroscientist and horse trainer Jones is up for producing an equine version of An, through her own relationship with a horse called True North.
Her account claims to be the first book of its kind to explore the fascinating science of how horses think, feel, learn and connect with their human companions, as Jones exposes common misconceptions that cause us to fault horses for “misbehaviours” that are normal prey-brain responses. She also explains, among many other features, how horses trade a human-style prefrontal cortex – capable of judgment, manipulation and complex strategic thinking – for powerful memory that supports excellent intelligence.
Given the first MRI scan of an equine brain was not completed until 2019, there is still a vast deal to learn about equine neurology and neural physiology – and how to build trust with a creature whose internal world differs from our own. Just in case there are any lingering doubts about the cognitive capacity of birds, biologist and avian researcher Louis Lefebvre looks sure to dispel them in this book, which sets out to reveal how birds exhibit creativity, social learning and even cultural transmission, delving into the behaviours of everything from crows using cars as nutcrackers to cockatoos crafting tools.
Blending decades of scientific research with anecdotes, Lefebvre derives an “innovation quotient” to measure and rank the innovation of a particular species. He answers questions about how a bird species spreads a new technique, why research on bird cognition is being used to train AI models and robots and what makes certain birds endlessly innovative, while others stubbornly repeat the same behaviours.
Nicky Clayton, professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge, has described the book as “an amazing avian adventure… Like a profound magic effect, there are hidden gems on every page, tailored to both the general public and the in-depth expert. ” What has Bridget Jones got to do with moves to fight back against the excesses of big tech?
The two are united in the person of author Baroness Beeban Kidron, now a crossbench peer and campaigner in the UK’s second house, the House of Lords – and once a film director (is being promoted as an insider’s guide to how politicians and policymakers have sold democracy to Silicon Valley, and what we need to do to take it back. Kidron takes us on a journey from the halls of Parliament and the UN to the White House and Silicon Valley.
Through her encounters with specialist police officers, bereaved parents, lobbyists and tech bros, says the publisher, we witness the unchecked power of Big Tech, as they avoid rules and regulations, and capture governments that are meant to protect us. We see how the issue is not technology itself, but its use and abuse.
How tools built to connect people are redeployed to divide, punish, distract, and control; while tech overlords come to own everything – but continue to be held responsible for nothing. In February, she toldis my answer to the hundreds of people who have contacted me feeling uncomfortable, overwhelmed or simply angry about technology – asking, ‘What can we do?
’ My greatest wish is that readers find something in it that inspires them to act – in their homes, communities and workplaces – and to demand more from those in power. ” Michael Handford’s story sounds like it will be terrible, powerful and ultimately fascinating – probably in equal measure.
He was an academic specialising in intercultural communication when he received a stage 4 throat cancer diagnosis at the age of 42 while living and working in Japan and the UK. According to his publisher, his book “examines how communication – whether with doctors, loved ones, or oneself – can shape the cancer experience”. Hanford even worked on devising his own metaphor for cancer, not caring for the more stereotypical ones involving battles. Now that’s a class act.
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