I don't usually write book reviews, but this one just kind of happened...
I spend most of my days at Oxford thinking “I love my course. It’s the perfect course for me.” And there’s plenty of reasons for me to think that: I enjoy writing my essays, solving my problems, I feel I get a lot out of my tutorials and lectures, mathematical and philosophical problems prevent me from falling asleep often enough for me to satisfy any definition of a nerd. But all these are, one might say, positive reasons for believing one’s course of action is the right one – but what about the negative ones? I have evidence that what I’m studying is a thing I enjoy, not that it is the thing.
It was quite different in my high school – biology, chemistry and Polish lessons were all living proof that math and physics were the two sole interesting (or at least understandable) subjects of study in the universe (we didn’t have philosophy at our school). But how much of this was bad teaching, how much my prejudice, and how much actual boringness of the non-mathematical subjects and my lack of talent in those directions? At university I don’t have to go through boring biology classes – instead, I go to a popular lecture or two every once in a while, enjoy conversations over dinner with people studying wide varieties of subjects, and my interest in everything under the sun grows all the time, threatening to reach the level of a five-year-old soon.
And so I’ve spent the book vouchers I received for proving in exams that my course was made just for me on biological/ neuropsychological literature which is threatening to provide a counterexample to my proofs... One of the books I bought was Lewis Wolpert’s “How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells”.
I almost gave up on it in the middle of the second chapter. “When tall and short plants were crossed, the offspring were tall, and when these were crossed, one third were short, the others tall,” I read in the part about Mendel’s pea experiments... Now if I understood anything in biology lessons, it was Mendelian tables. And if I understood Mendelian tables, then one fourth, not one third, of the peas would be short. TT crossed with tt gives four Tts, Tt crossed with Tt gives one TT, two Tts and one tt. One tt. One short plant, three tall ones. So one fourth of the plants were short, and the short to tall plant ratio was one to three. How difficult is it to understand this distinction? If Lewis Wolpert can’t tell the difference between p/q and p/(p+q), how can I trust him to tell the difference between DNA and RNA, say, and explain that difference to me?
One slip could happen to anyone, of course. But there were other reasons for me to give up on Lewis Wolpert at that point. First and foremost – he can’t write. Or at least he can’t write popular science. He writes like a child, maybe a student – chopped up simple sentences, hardly a relative clause in there, he tries to glue the whole with some “so”s and “therefore”s, but the connection between the parts seems superficial. He has problems with his paragraphs – he starts completely new thoughts in the middle of one, as if pressing that “enter” button was too hard a job.
Many of his sentences are, I feel, ones about which my tutor would ask – “Can you explain why you wrote that? What was the overall structure of your essay? What were you trying to get across?” – to which I would respond with shamefaced silence. One maxim I got out of last year’s tutorials is surely “When in doubt, don’t write it” (this applies to sentences in essays, not in blog posts) – but Wolpert’s text seems to me full of sentences that serve no purpose (he pours out lists of diseases caused by viruses, bacteria, genetic disorders, sometimes only explaining the nature of the disease in a single line – in short, he forms a shopping list, the entity, when discovered within an essay, frowned upon by my tutor with endless disapproval.) Sure, Wolpert isn’t writing a philosophy essay – but he’s not writing a Wikipedia article either. And his text, at the heights of its style, is only as good as one.
If it was just bad style, I’d maybe let it pass without mention. Even things like “The cells of all animals and plants have evolved from much smaller single cell organisms such as bacteria and other single-cell organisms”. (Though the way he tops up the repetition with an inconsistency in his spelling of “single-cell organism” is infuriating.) Or like his hypercorrect “it was basically downhill all the way to we humans” (even my Word tells me to change the “we” to “us”). But when Wolpert’s linguistic clumsiness turns comical, the urge to share it with the wide world becomes to strong...
“The region that will give rise to human eggs and sperm can be identified about halfway through gastrulation in the mouse and thus probably at a similar stage in humans.” “Are you man or mouse?” acquires a whole new meaning in this context...
Or this: “there are a thousand million synapses in a tiny piece of our brain the size of a grain of sand – and think how many grains of sand there are in our brains!” I should hope none...
So much for Wolpert’s inability to write. I did end up finishing his book, so it can’t have been all that bad. Indeed, sometimes I was laughing with his sentences, not at them. Like “We have ten times as many bacterial cells in our body as we have normal body cells – a fact so surprising that you may need to read that again.” I read the first part of the sentence three times before I read the second, and I almost laughed out loud when I got to that. There were some fascinating facts presented in the book, and I must say for its defence that it’s immeasurably more interesting than my high school biology textbook. I was amazed at how fascinating all those things I had hated in high school were – but then I thought that they obviously should be. It’s the way our bodies, we, are built we’re talking about. Sure it’s interesting! What I can’t understand is that I’ve never yet found a book which actually presents it as such. Wolpert manages to do it a few times, but not, in my opinion, enough.
Stephen Hawking was allegedly told by his publishers that every equation decreases book sales by half – why hasn’t the same been said about biological terms? I’d love it if Wolpert exchanged some of his technical terminology for equations... Of course, our bodies are fiendishly complicated – that’s part of the beauty of the subject matter – but do we really have to name every molecule before we can talk about it?
Another thing which made the account in “The Secret Lives of Cells” difficult to follow was the complete lack of illustrations. I remember diagrams of mitosis and meiosis in our old textbook, and though I understood very little of what I was learning back then, I would have understood even less if it hadn’t been for them. And because Wolpert didn’t include such diagrams in his treatment of the matter, I still don’t understand the process completely.
Finally, there is the question of the opinion part of “How We Live and Why We Die”. “Poor argumentation,” my tutor would surely say. Wolpert spits out assertions with all the certainty of an anti-religious, anti-philosophical “Scientist”. He argues that genes determine some of who we are, saying: “Only someone blinkered and unthinking could believe that all the differences are cultural” and proceeding to talk about the differences between men and women. Sure, men and women are different, of course they are! But once he begins to treat the fact that boys and girls play with different toys as evidence for further genetic differences and expects us to continue believing that only someone “blinkered and unthinking” could not agree with him, his only argument is a statement of his conclusion...
Wolpert is well known for his claim that “It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life”. It’s a nice phrase – but one which on reflection I think he is not entitled to utter. For he believes that the embryo is not a human being until it is roughly 36 days old. Gastrulation takes place at around 10 days – can he then, if it is not yet a person who gastrulates, call the process a part of your life, let alone the most important part of your life? There is a debate going on among philosophers of mind as to whether we are essentially persons or animals – for Wolpert’s beliefs about gastrulation and the status of the embryo to be consistent he would have to opt for the latter option. That is probably the option one would expect him to choose anyway, but it is nonetheless quite a claim to make!
From finding Wolpert’s mathematical mistake in genetics to frowning upon his lack of style and argumentation, writing this text has convinced me that I need not worry whether my course is the right one. I would like to take this moment to thank Professor Wolpert for bringing certainty into my life.
