I was thirteen when I sank my teeth into my first science book, George Gamow’s classic, “One, Two Three,…Infinity”. A friend of my father, taking pity on my Erich Von Daniken collection, loaned the book to me. “Read real science, Dinesh”, he said. “Why ? What is wrong with what Daniken says ?”, I bristled. I had just discovered godlessness and thought that he wanted to brainwash me back into godliness. I picked up Gamow with some skepticism. Though a little hard to follow, the writing grabbed me like a thriller. Soon, I was poring over Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction works. His book “The Collapsing Universe” made a lasting impression. Black holes and big bang and universes that collapsed only to be reborn again! Far more fascinating than those mythologies I was raised with, I thought, because the wonder was of the real kind, not the believing kind.
Till I turned 22, my existence was defined by the limits imposed by small provincial towns of the 70′s and 80′s India, towns that my father found himself transfered to. One such constraint was the complete lack of a decent bookstore. Pulp fiction for adults and some Enid Blyton for kids marked the boundaries of literacy. Once I graduated past Enid Blyton, I found nothing to bridge the chasm between her and James Hadley Chase. And forget about non-fiction works. In those backwaters, I couldn’t even create a list of books that I wanted to read! The public libraries in most of these towns was filled with “classics”, rows upon empty, dusty rows of books that hardly interested the general populace. Any denizens were usually older people finding ways to kill time or maybe some college students looking for textbooks to borrow or reference. Only when we went to Bangalore could I attempt to quench this hunger for books. Gangaram’s Book Bureau, located conveniently on Bangalore’s main thoroughfare, M.G. Road, became a favorite haunt. Once inside, I found myself so half-crazed from this hunger for books that the rows and rows of books only made me dizzy. Like a starving man who finds himself in front of a sumptuous buffet, I ran from row to row. Which one to pick, which one to reject. So many to read, so little money to buy, so little time to decide. The experience was simultaneously intensely exciting and painful.
Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” and “Dragons of Eden”, Bertrand Russell’s “ABC of Relativity”, Gary Zukav’s “The Dancing Wu-Li Masters” and Fritjof Capra’s “Tao of Physics” are the science books that I most remember from those days. Physics and cosmology were worthy of reading as I moved swiftly past the biology titles.
As I grew older, I moved away from these works into reading more about history and politics. My political awakening came rather late in my life, well past my thirties. The lack of political discussions in my house (The emergency Indira Gandhi declared unconstitutionally barely got mentioned) probably contributed to this singular lack of interest in politics. As I grew older still, my interest swung back to science, but this time to biological sciences such as evolution and cognitive science, how we became who we are and what keeps us here. Melvin Konner’s classic work, “The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit” got me started down this current road.
In this realm, I encountered several lucid expositors. Carl Zimmer, Matt Ridley, V.S. Ramachandran, Michael Ruse and Daniel Gilbert easily come to mind. To read just about anything written by these folks, I consider a worthy use of my time. Robert Sapolsky is the most recent addition to this pantheon. I had heard of Sapolsky’s work “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” while helping prepare the coursework for the course at Stanford University taught by the non-profit organization I volunteer with, Magic. Being all the rage at the time, I never managed to get a copy from the local public library. A couple of years went by and a month or so ago, looking for some other book, I ran into Sapolsky’s “Monkeyluv and Other Essays On Our Lives As Animals”. Right from the start, the book reached out and grabbed me. Wonderfully witty writing, lucid explanations of complex subjects and a wonderful choice of subjects made him delectably unputdownable. While we stayed at our friend’s place for a month, I ran into his other book, “The Trouble With Testosterone” which only solidified his reputation with me. Writing such as his, makes me envious, makes me want to stop writing in disgust. What’s the point of writing when you have such talented people, I ask myself sometimes.
Here are some samples of his writing:
“As a scientist doing scads of important research, I am busy, very busy. What with all those midnight experiments in the lab, all that eureka-ing, I hardly have time to read the journals. Nonetheless, I stopped everything to thorougly study the May 10, 1999 issue of People magazine, the double special issue, “The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World”. It was fabulous. In addition to full-color spreads and helpful grooming tips, the editors of People have gone after one of the central, pressing issues of our time. “Nature or Nurture ?”
“As most newlyweds quickly learn, intimate relationships, even the most blissful, can buzz with tension. Couples typically find themselves struggling over money, in-laws, ex-lovers, and how much the woman’s placenta should grow when she is eventually pregnant. That last one’s a killer.”
“We all have encountered Reinhold Neibuhr’s serenity prayer at some point: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference’. Behavioral biology is often the scientific pursuit of that prayer.”
Each essay starts with some mundane observation and then dives deeper to reveal some brilliant nugget of biological research.
In all of biology, evolution and instinct are top dog these days, taking over years of rule by behaviorism. A lot of science is reductionism, the attempt to understand large, complex systems by breaking them down into smaller, more understandable subcomponents. The attempt to define all physical laws using quantum mechanics is one example of such a method. In biology, sequencing the human genome is considered by many scientific and lay people to be the key to understanding human behavior. “Gene for happiness” found, reads one headline while another proclaims, “The God Gene found”. We’re nothing more than the sum of our genes. If a cause has a strong genetic component, there is squat the environment can do, so the proclamation goes. In both “Monkeyluv” and “The Trouble with Testosterone”, Sapolsky eviscerates this mania and style of thinking (The New Scientist had a similar article about taking a more nuanced approach to Dawkins’ Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype metaphors).
“One of the most important concepts in all of biology is that you can’t really ever state what the effect is of a particular gene, or what the effect is of a particular environment. You can only consider how a particular gene and a particular environment interact. Gene/environment interactions are so important that you can’t be taught the biologist secret handshake until you use the phrase in conversation at least once a day”, he writes in Monkeyluv, in the introduction to one of the three threads than runs through the book. The second important thread that the book deals with is the “intertwining of our brains and bodies, their mutual capcity to regulate each other”. The final subject addressed in the book is the intertwining effects of biology and culture on each other. Meaty subjects, but dispatched with wit, erudition and lucidity.
“The Trouble With Testosterone” is a collection of 17 essays on “the biology of the human predicament” dealing with some aspect or the other of human behavior and the roots of such behavior in the animal kingdom. Some of the essays such as “Beelzebub’s SAT Score” and “The Dangers of Fallen Souffles in the Developing World” are more cultural and political than they are biological and except for Beelzebub, I found every one of the essays eye opening at some level.
Sapolsky teaches at Stanford University and is an active researcher unlike many other science popularizers. He continues to publish scientific papers while writing remarkably erudite works for laypeople. Talking about his writing style, he says that he never took a course in writing. He says that he honed his writing skills in Africa where he spent countless months of lonely existence studying the life of baboons. To counter the loneliness, he took to writing letters to his friends, family and colleagues back home, explaining the discoveries of the day. Writing the same thing, over and over again, helped him to whittle down the inessential and find ways to write the same thing differently each time. He commutes from San Francisco every day via public transport which takes up two hours of his day. He uses this time to spend writing, a time that is protected, regular and accessible.
I can’t recommend his books enough.
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