Right, since I’m getting complaints from my mother that I don’t update my blog often enough, you have to suffer my thoughts on the two most recent books I read —
The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins
You might well think, “another in Richard Dawkins seemingly endless variety of books explaining evolution which will be ignored by the people who need it most”. And you’d be right. I really enjoyed The Selfish Gene. Climbing Mount Improbable was an interesting new take on the matter. But The Extended Phenotype was a bit too extended for my liking — so why did I think my book shelf needed this one?
It was mostly because of the fundamental premise of using The Canterbury Tales, a pilgrimage with varied storytellers, to tell a backwards story of evolution. I liked the idea of each animal telling a story — a scientific story, about what we learned from its fossils or its DNA or its behaviour. And it works very well. Starting from present-day Homo sapiens we step back in time through our recent ancestors, learning the problems of differentiating species across time and how it is we can say that humans are brainy for their size. At some point we reach our first waypoint, where the chimpanzees meet us. This is our common ancestor, some 6 million years ago, and we learn a little about common chimpanzee and bonobo social behaviour and why these can’t be generalised to find “human nature”.
Then we step further back in time to the common ancestor between us chimpanzees (naked and hairy) and the other great apes. And so on, learning what each animal probably looked like and where they fit into the wider scheme. At times I felt slightly overwhelmed by the names, which got worse as the book travelled further back in time — I could never tell when we were meeting several varieties of obscure worm or sponge or something else entirely. To say that the obscuriae family contain the thingimiumins and the whatchacallioids was not so enlightening.
Each chapter had a prologue and sometimes several ‘tales’ but sometimes the prologues dwarfed the actual tales. Sometimes a section seemed little more than an excuse to reference other tales without saying anything substantive. At many points I felt confused by the sequencing — I couldn’t really remember if a particular Tale was still to come or had already passed. At many points an interesting discussion is omitted because it is covered in another of Richard Dawkins’ books.
The flaw in the idea of delving backwards through time is that while we can follow the slow ‘regression’ of our line, occasionally another entire troupe would arrive that utterly dwarfed our own. The common ancestors of humans and insects is a long way into the past, but when we reach that point in the past all the interesting speciation of the insects has been ‘undone’ since they now look just like us! And so on for other major groups. There is great variety in fishes and plants and fungus but their interesting recent stories have to be ignored for the sake of scale. Which I guess is another way of saying that there are at least half a dozen further books to made from this idea, but not starting at the human leaf on the tree.
Borderliners by Peter Høeg
Peter Høeg’s a slippery one and no mistake. It is not surprising that this book is quite different to his others, though there is still a common style. The narrator is an orphaned(?) boy growing up in the institutions and child homes of 1970s Denmark. Seemingly by chance he ends up at a prestigious private school run on strict disciplinarian and ideological lines. He has trouble concentrating and keeping to the exacting timetables of his life. He becomes friends with an older boy and a younger girl, all outcasts and misfits in this school, and they try to find out why they are tolerated at the school despite being “defective”.
Alongside this story of institutional life is a strange dissertation on time, written by the author as an older man, but weaved into the main parts of the story in many places. It’s largely incoherent and contradictory, and what it tries to say comes across as either obvious or obviously wrong. At one point the author, or the narrator (the young boy’s name is also Peter Høeg), get to the point of denouncing all progress, much like the miserable people with their digital watches:
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
If you’re willing to sit through the babble there’s an interesting story in there, but it’s largely been smothered.
