Biology

In the not-too-distant future, if your T-shirt starts giving fashion advice or we’re all enslaved by a race of disease-resistant metahumans, then blame Martin Amis. More precisely, blame his obsession with Space Invaders. With a foreword by Steven Spielberg, Amis’s 1982 Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines gave intellectual heft to a pursuit – videogaming – that had hitherto been the preserve of glassy-eyed youths. His advocacy proved prescient. Over the next couple of decades, the best minds of a generation dedicated their lives to making pixellated worlds as compelling and realistic as possible.

Consciousness is thought by many to define what it is to be human. We know that animals are conscious to some extent, but they don’t have what we have in that department. So if we can explain how human self-awareness works it will be a Rosetta Stone to understanding what makes our species so odd, or, depending on your view, so special. Also: big brains love exercise. And the great thing about this topic is that it can be tackled by biologists, neurologists, philosophers, physicists and even novelists. It’s an interdisciplinary, no-holds-barred intellectual wrestling match. Michael Pollan, an American journalist and academic who works at both Harvard and Berkeley, comes from a literature background but is fluent in the relevant science.

In a tiny town tucked into the desert an hour’s drive out of Nevada, a legal brothel operates. Its ‘menu’ of services range from less expensive sexual intercourse to the most expensive, ‘the White Whale’, starting at $20,000. Dr Justin Garcia, there with his colleagues doing research, asked the manager, a woman with bright yellow hair and a Minnie Mouse voice, what the White Whale was. She explained: ‘Oh, that’s the full Girlfriend Experience… sex isn’t necessarily part of it, but you’ll get a hell of a cuddle.

The idea was revolutionary – yet there was something ancient at its heart. The scientist Nikolai Vavilov, arriving in Petrograd in 1921 to take the helm of the Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, was on a sacred mission: to make, in his words, ‘a treasury of all known crops and plants’. The world’s first seed bank would shape the future of agriculture – possibly even eliminate failed harvests and hunger. This was gleaming scientific idealism, but there was also an element of the Old Testament Ark about it. Throughout the siege, the botanists had to find the superhuman strength not to eat the seeds themselves The vision would collide with the brute reality of Stalin’s own efforts to bend nature to his will, and then the nightmarish Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941.

The peculiar career of John Bumpass Calhoun (1917-95), the psychologist, philosopher, economist, mathematician and sociologist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was the subject of a glowing article in Good Housekeeping, comes accompanied with more than its fair share of red flags. He studied how rodents adapted to different environments and specifically how the density of a population affects an individual’s behaviour. He collected reams of data but published little, and rarely in the mainstream scientific journals. He courted publicity, inviting journalists to draw from his studies of rats and mice apocalyptic conclusions about the future of urban humanity.

While I was reading Most Delicious Poison, I visited a herbal garden in Spain which features the plants grown by the Nasrid rulers of Granada hundreds of years ago. They cultivated myrtle for its medicinal uses and jasmine for its fragrance. How did they know of myrtle’s properties? Some ancient ancestor must have figured it out. And that ancestor might be more ancient than we realise. Noah Whiteman explains that DNA from plants found in Neanderthals’ teeth tartar suggests even they were self-medicating with herbs. We have been entangled with the chemicals around us for as long as we have been human. The author of this book, a professor of biology at Berkeley, takes us on a global trip through plants and their chemicals.