A Review of Our Mathematical Universe, by Max Tegmark

Knopf, 2014

432 pages

The book opens with a chiller: “A second later, I died.” What follows is not a murder mystery being narrated by the deceased victim, but a whirlwind explanation of cosmology, quantum physics, and theoretical evidence for the idea of multiple universes. Welcome to the world of Max Tegmark, professor of theoretical physics at MIT, whose brain roams across the entire history of human scientific inquiry into the ultimate question: what is reality?

Our Mathematical Universe is Tegmark’s first book-length project, following his publication of over 200 academic papers, numerous essays for popular science outlets, and appearances in TV and radio documentaries. While a book on such a broad, esoteric topic could easily veer off-track into Ph.D. jargon, Tegmark keeps his expansive, quirky voice focused, transitioning smoothly between topics and helping bring the average Joe impressively close to understanding his world with, ironically, as little reliance on math as possible. Full Review »

A review of Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures, by Virginia Morell

Crown, 2013

304 pages

One fateful day in March 1838, a twenty-nine-year-old Charles Darwin met a female named Jenny. Observing her in her exhibit in the London Zoological Garden, Darwin noted that Jenny, a young orangutan recently acquired by the zoo, “kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child” when a keeper teased her with an apple. Having never met an ape face to face before, Darwin wrote furiously and excitedly in his notebooks, speculating on the thoughts and feelings of Jenny the orangutan over multiple visits. “Let man visit Ouranoutang in domestication,” Darwin wrote, “hear its expressive whine, see its intelligence when spoken (to); as if it understands every word said—see its affection—to those it knew—see its passion & rage, sulkiness, & very actions of despair.” Darwin found such instances enough to convince him that animals (the “higher” ones, at least) are intelligent, that they can feel pain, jealousy, happiness, and boredom.

But Darwin had been criticized for using stories like Jenny’s as scientific evidence. They are anthropomorphic, other scientists said; they bestow non-human animals with human emotions that we cannot prove they feel. This anti-animal-mind mindset ruled psychological science for decades, and its grasp is still felt today. Full Review »

A review of Alex & Me, by Irene M. Pepperberg
232 pages
MJF Books, 2008

“He’d sometimes say ‘You tickle,’ and bend his head so I could scratch his face. As I did, the white area around his eyes turned a subtle pink, blushing as Greys do when being intimate. His eyes would squint almost closed.”

How often pet owners must fantasize that their cat or dog will tell them, in speech, to initiate a favorite belly rub. But Alex the African Grey Parrot was not a pet. He was a science experiment. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Alex packed plenty of personality into a pound of feathers. Upon his death in 2007, he was mourned not only as a television star but as a scientific icon. Irene Pepperberg, an associate research professor at Brandeis University who teaches animal cognition at Harvard University, had worked with Alex for thirty years, teaching him a limited vocabulary of English words, which he used to interact with humans and his surroundings. She chronicles their journey in her book Alex & Me, first published in 2008. Full Review »

A review of The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Can’t Solve Our Global Problems, by Henry Petroski
274 pages. Knopf, 2010. $26.95

If would-be pocket-protecting scientists were the kids that received wedgies on the playground and were nearly forced into malnutrition by bullies stealing their lunch money, I wonder what would-be engineers endured in Henry Petroski’s school.

“Engineering can be as much of an assault on the frontiers of knowledge as is science,” asserts Petroski in The Essential Engineer, sounding the battle trumpet of engineering. A professor of civil engineering at Duke University, Petroski’s out to get engineers some respect. He’s tired of bully scientists hogging the spotlight of public esteem and relevance. Full Review »

A review of The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear. By Seth Mnookin. 308 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $26.99.

In a small, sleepy corner of Arizona in August 1994, a child who seemed wholly ordinary was born. Her parents named her Michelle. At sixteen months, the toddler was hit with a 106-degree fever. Soon afterwards, she began talking noticeably less. By her third birthday, hundreds of quiet days later, Michelle’s physician suspected she might have a cognitive disorder. Visits to a neurologist and a developmental psychologist confirmed this suspicion: Michelle was diagnosed with severe autism. Thinking back on her medical history, searching for signs and grasping for causes, her parents remembered the fever. Michelle had burned up shortly after the day she received her first measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Full Review »

In a small, sleepy corner of Arizona in August 1994, a child who seemed wholly ordinary was born. Her parents named her Michelle. At sixteen months, the toddler was hit with a 106-degree fever. Soon afterwards, she began talking noticeably less. By her third birthday, hundreds of quiet days later, Michelle’s physician suspected she might have a cognitive disorder. Visits to a neurologist and a developmental psychologist confirmed this suspicion: Michelle was diagnosed with severe autism. Thinking back on her medical history, searching for signs and grasping for causes, her parents remembered the fever. Michelle had burned up shortly after the day she received her first measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

Today, one in 110 children has an autism spectrum disorder, a ten-fold increase from the 1980s. Scientists usually credit this rise to a growing awareness of autism, with more cases today being recognized and labeled as such. Autism’s causes are still not thoroughly understood, but the idea that vaccines are to blame has recently seeped into society: the MMR vaccine has been widely used in the United States since the 1970s, making its rise coincide with the autism toll.

In his fast-paced non-fiction account, Seth Mnookin confronts the debate over whether or not childhood vaccines, specifically MMR, can cause autism. He develops Michelle’s story as a main example of the misunderstanding that has resulted. Despite a growing body of reliable studies that have found no relation between the two, a quarter of American parents cling onto the idea that vaccinating their children is the wrong choice. With more families electing not to vaccinate, we are seeing the re-emergence of viruses, such as like pertussis, that had very nearly been eradicated. Full Review »

A review of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
320 pages
W. W. Norton & Company

What happens to us when we die? There are few activities more unsettling than the contemplation of your own mortality. Religious or not, no one relishes dwelling on the subject at length. And whatever you may think about the afterlife, the material realities of death are disconcerting to say the least. A short list of possible fates: being buried and left to rot inside a wooden box, being burned into a pile of gray ash in an industrial oven, or being taken apart bit by bit by medical students in the name of science. Regardless of the specific outcome, these are all rather disturbing destinies to consider.

Mary Roach, on the other hand, dares to tackle this taboo with raw honesty and enthusiasm. “We are biology,” she writes without equivocation. “We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.” In Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Roach explores the topic with great journalistic gusto and turns the uncomfortable subject into a quite unforgettable narrative.

Stiff is a wildly entertaining (if occasionally meandering) account of the many ways human cadavers are used, reused, and abused. Certainly not for the weak of stomach, Roach’s foray into this largely unexplored subject opens on a scene of forty disembodied human heads arranged neatly on roaster pans for a plastic surgery practice session. Drawing on extensive first-hand research, Roach then guides the reader through a menagerie of cadaveric fates, including dissection, crash-testing, forensics research, organ donation and more, while also providing captivating anecdotes from the history of anatomy. Her frank narrative style is pleasantly irreverent, yet still quite respectful, providing a tactful amount of wit and humor to a subject that might otherwise be intolerably morbid.

Full Review »

A review of How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
320 pages
Mariner/Houghton Mifflin

We all know what it’s like to agonize over a decision. It’s usually not the insignificant ones that bring us grief, but rather those poised to take us in entirely different directions: whether to attend college, if and when to marry, to move to a new city—the ones that, by opening one door, may close another door forever.

Our ability to make these decisions well determines not only the route our life takes but also the quality of our experience. So we weigh all of our options, explore all possible outcomes, and choose one path forward. But in that moment just before the path is set, what many of us wouldn’t give for even the briefest glimpse into the future.

Science writer Jonah Lehrer, while he may not possess the magical gift of foresight, does offer insight on strategies to face such decisions in his captivating and informative new book How We Decide. The idea came to Lehrer one day when he was at the supermarket. He was trying to choose between several flavor iterations of Cheerios and found himself at an impasse. Right there in the cereal aisle, he decided to investigate recent brain research in the hopes of solving the mystery of decision-making mastery. At the risk of slipping into the self-help genre, Lehrer promises in his introduction to reveal not only how we make decisions, but how we can improve in making them. Full Review »

A review of Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
256 pages.
Vintage

We can walk because we have teeth. More than 500 million years ago, in some primordial sea, a soft-bodied, worm-like creature developed hard, pointed growths inside its mouth. These growths were a mutation, a freak accident in the replication of its genetic code, but they proved quite useful when it came to eating other soft-bodied, worm-like creatures. The code for these hard growths was passed on, and over eons, it was muddled even more. Eventually mutants arose with hard growths that covered their entire heads, and these new features also came in handy—this time to fend off all the soft-bodied, worm-like creatures swimming about with big teeth. After this, the genetic code for the hard structures continued to morph, giving rise over the ages to backbones, ribs, fins, and then, some 375 million years ago, legs.

Your Inner Fish comes in the aftermath of Neil Shubin’s historic co-discovery of Tiktaalik, a “found link” between prehistoric fish and the world’s first amphibians. Shubin, a paleontologist and professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago, found the fossil in 2004, after years of scouring Devonian aged sedimentary rocks in the high arctic of Ellesmere Island, right where a chronological sandwiching of other fossils said it should be. In this quick, enlightening, and entertaining read, Shubin recounts the motivation for hunting for Tiktaalik and the details of its discovery, and then he uses this “fish with wrists” as a jumping off point for a discussion—conversational in tone but compelling in content—on the origins and implications of many of our distinguishing features. Full Review »