Science

Saturday

Anthony Daniels

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky by Bryan Appleyard

With all the advances of science, we may be no nearer to understanding ourselves than before, says Anthony Daniels — but we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility outright Some years ago I had a patient who believed that his neighbours, unskilled workers like himself, had developed an electronic thought-scanner whose antennae they could, and did, direct at him in order to know his thoughts as and when he had them. He heard them laughing and jeering at the banalities with which, inevitably, his mind was filled most of the time. Needless to say, he found this intrusive and oppressive, and it made him murderously angry. As life follows art, science follows

Friday

Matthew Sinclair

Let Them Eat Carbon

After a Spectator debate on climate change in March, Fraser Nelson wrote about whether or not we should try to engage in the debate ourselves or “trust the expert”. Simon Singh had argued in the debate that the most credible experts supported the view that the human contribution to potential global warming was real and serious. The response to my new book Let Them Eat Carbon shows how much that kind of debate is turned on its head when it comes to policy. The science is much less important than people make out. No argument about historical bristlecone pines is going to settle whether or not we should pay handsome subsidies to

Saturday

William Leith

Speak, Memory

One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He can’t find a definitive answer. One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He can’t find a definitive answer. But he sees that a man called Ben Pridmore is the world’s ‘memory champion’. Foer is instantly intrigued. He himself has, he says, an average memory. He forgets lots of things — where he put his keys, for instance. And

Saturday

Anthony Daniels

The mind’s I

The quasi-religious zeal with which certain popularising neuroscientists claim that man is no different, essentially, from the animals, and that consciousness is but an epiphenomenon, strikes me as distinctly odd. The popularisers seem to take a sado-masochistic delight in it, in the way that some people get a thrill from envisaging the end of the world. They also seem to imply that we now understand almost everything about ourselves, apart from a few odd details to be filled in by ever-more-sophisticated scanners. In other words, man has finally come to understand himself. Here is an addition to the fast-growing genre of books that claim scientific authority for the idea that

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

The nature of evil

Simon Baron-Cohen has spent 30 years researching the way our brains work. His study of autism led to The Essential Difference, which asked, ‘Are you an empathiser or a systemiser?’ The book was highly influential; its ‘male-brain’ and ‘female-brain’ definitions have entered common parlance. In Zero Degrees of Empathy he aims to move examination of the nature of evil ‘out of the realm of religion and into the realm of science.’ Will this project also prove persuasive? ‘Extremes of evil are typically relegated to the unanalysable,’ he says, but they shouldn’t be. Evil, he believes, is best understood as absence of empathy. We are all situated at some point on

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: 50 years of human spaceflight

Here at Coffee House, we normally exhume a piece from The Spectator archives on Fridays. But we thought we’d make an exception, today, for the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s ascent into space. The piece below is actually the only one that the magazine ran at the time, and is by the politician/journalist/author Desmond Donnelly. If you can get past the dubious generalities about “less sophisticated peoples” and “magic carpets” — which themselves say something about the shift in what public figures may and may not commit to print — there are some thought-provoking and quite prescient points to be found within it:   The Magic Carpet, Desmond Donnelly MP,

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

When it comes to global warming, rational debate is what we need

We had a sell-out debate on global warming at The Spectator on Tuesday and, as I found out this morning, the debate is still going on. The teams were led by Nigel Lawson and Sir David King, and I was in the audience. I tweeted my praise of Simon Singh’s argument as he made it: it was a brilliant variation on the theme of “don’t think – trust the experts”. He seems to have discovered the tweet this morning, and responded with a volley of five questions for me. Then David Aaronovitch weighed in, followed by Simon Mayo. At 8.35am! I had the choice between replying, or carrying on with

Saturday

Judith Flanders

Massacre of the innocents

‘La justice flétrit, la prison corrompt et la société a les criminels qu’elle mérite’ — Justice withers, prison corrupts, and society gets the criminals it deserves. ‘La justice flétrit, la prison corrompt et la société a les criminels qu’elle mérite’ — Justice withers, prison corrupts, and society gets the criminals it deserves. With that terrifying and depressing thought, the fin-de- siècle criminologist Jean-Alexandre-Eugène Lacassagne summed up his views at the end of his long career. A hundred years later, they are still worthy of attention, for Lacassagne was, perhaps, one of the greatest pioneers of forensic science and medical jurisprudence in his century or any other. It was he who

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Debunking the Antarctica myths

In January 2009, Nature magazine ran the a cover story (pictured) conveying dramatic news about Antarctica: that most of it had warmed significantly over the last half-century. For years, the data from this frozen continent – with 90 percent of the world’s ice mass – had stubbornly refused to corroborate the global warming narrative. So the study, led by Eric Steig of the University of Washington, was treated as a bit of a scoop. It reverberated around the world. Gavin Schmidt, from the RealClimate blog, declared that Antarctica had silenced the sceptics. Mission, it seemed, was accomplished: Antarctica was no longer an embarrassment to the global warming narrative. He spoke

Saturday

A.N. Wilson

Perchance to dream

This book reads like an interesting after- dinner conversation between intelligent friends. That said, it is a rambling conversation, and although it is extremely entertaining, it does not add up to much. Its ostensible subjects are two instances of scientific intelligence being brought to bear on the possibility of defying, or surviving, death. In the first case, John Gray investigates those, such as Freddie Myers and Henry Sidgwick, who formed the Society for Psychical Research. In the second instance, Gray tells again the bizarre story of the cult of Lenin, and Leonid Krasin’s belief that, if Lenin’s body could be kept in a state of cryonic suspension, there might dawn

Jervoise Andreyev

Care or cure?

Cancer is usually associated with death. For the cancer specialist, however, cancer is more about life: not just patients’ lives; the cancer itself often lives the life of Riley. If it has a life, then, it is entitled to a biography. Here, Siddhartha Mukherjee, an obviously compassionate oncologist, provides that biography. The basis of any biography is the story. In this book, there are four interwoven stories; that of people with cancer, full of fear, but increasingly often, surviving; that of scientists and doctors: stories of genius, perseverance, integrity, serendipity but also arrogance and fraud; the statistical story which tells us that the global burden of cancer doubled (thank you

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: What do you mean ‘Happy Christmas’?

A more scientific view of proceedings, courtesy of a Yale professor writing for The Spectator’s Christmas issue in 1994:What do you mean ‘Happy Christmas’?, Robert Buck, The Spectator, 17 December 1994 It is the time of year when the pursuit of happiness is at its most frantic. People believe they should be happy in the holiday period because they are surrounded by tradition, mercantile enthusiasm and a desire to return to childhood, where, for the most part, it did not require an effort to be happy. Is the experience of happiness only psychological? We know that the reductionist trends of science must be leading towards a molecular theory of practically

Thursday

Alex Massie

New Life-Form Discovered

In California: Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything. At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks

Monday

Max Chambers

A harmful double standard

Professor David Nutt, the former Chief Drugs Adviser to the Government, has sparked controversy again today by pronouncing that alcohol is more harmful than heroin, crack, powder cocaine and methamphetamine. His findings are based on a paper published today, which builds on a 2007 journal that explored the same issues. So, is Professor Nutt right? If he is, what should the consequences be for public policy and, in particular, our systems of drug classification and alcohol taxation?   To find out, it is worth returning to Professor Nutt’s 2007 academic paper.  The relative harm of drugs is measured according to nine meters, taking into account the various aspects of physical

Saturday

James Walton

Learning to listen

How Music Works opens with a blizzard of reassurances. First, John Powell establishes his ordinary-bloke credentials by means of a slightly tortured analogy between many people’s attitude to music (‘pleasure without understanding’) and the time he went to the chip shop after the pub and realised he couldn’t tell the Chinese owner exactly what gravy was. He then lays out in some detail what prior knowledge of musical theory, maths and science we’ll need for what follows: absolutely none. The message, in other words, is a firm ‘Don’t panic’. This might be a book of musicology by a classically trained composer and physics professor, but it’s aimed squarely at the

Saturday

Alexander Waugh

A plague of infinities

Stephen Hawking is the most distinguished living physicist, who despite the catastrophe of motor neurone disease has been twice married, is a bestselling author and a media super-star. He is blessed with an extraordinary intellectual energy and fearless resilience. One might also add chutzpah. In The Grand Design he aims to give a concise and readable answer to the ‘Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.’ In fact he offers three such questions: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other?’ It will come as no surprise to learn that he fails to provide a satisfactory

Saturday

Gilbert Adair

In and out of every dive

Robert Coover’s Noir is a graphic novel. Robert Coover’s Noir is a graphic novel. Not literally, in the contemporary sense in which the phrase is used to designate a highfalutin words-plus-pictures album; but figuratively, in that its language cannot help but be converted, in the reader’s inner eye, into a series of monochromatic images, images suggestive less of a film than of, precisely, the layout of some neo-noir comic-strip. Frank Miller’s Sin City, for instance. Like Miller, Coover pulverises the film noir aesthetic to a hallucinatory essence. In a conceit subsequent pasticheurs will find it hard to improve on, he actually has the nerve to name his private eye Philip

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Smoking Bans = Fewer Heart Attacks? Up To A Point, Lord Copper

Oh my, what a credulous press corps we have. Selectively credulous that is. Put it this way: if a report compiled by a Philip Morris board member suggested smoking was good for you it wouldn’t be taken terribly seriously. But let an ASH board member – in this case Dr Anna Gilmore – put together a report that says the smoking ban in England & Wales “caused” a “dramatic” fall in heart attacks and the newspapers will be happy to be spoon-fed their reporting. Now, you may say that the existence of the report is itself news. Perhaps so. But, again, the provenance of the report matters too and should

Saturday

Raymond Carr

Faith under fire

Giles St Aubyn, in this long, scholarly book, sets out to chronicle the shifts in the Christian churches from the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and the Enlightenment of the 18th, to the apparent triumph of secularism in the 20th. H. H. Asquith, as leader of the Liberal party, was not an enthusiastic Christian. Nor did the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee waste much time on religious concerns, which bored him. What mattered was the NHS and the welfare state, which saved men’s bodies rather than their souls. The Reformation had shattered the universal Catholic church of the Middle Ages, leaving in its wake what the Catholic apologist Blaise

Saturday

Sam Leith

A cosmic comedy

Not long ago I had an email from a friend, wondering if I’d yet read the new Ian McEwan. Not long ago I had an email from a friend, wondering if I’d yet read the new Ian McEwan. ‘Talk about a bolt from the blue,’ she said. ‘McEwan does slapstick. I never saw that coming.’ She added (unfairly, I thought) that you might class On Chesil Beach as slapstick of an unintentional sort, but her point holds. Here, in a book around a scientific theme of considerable seriousness — global warming and renewable energy — McEwan has written the closest thing he’s ever done to a farce. Told in three