A compendious work that will intrigue serious readers; others may find it overlong and too comprehensive.
Hands has spent the last 10 years assembling a critical overview of scientific orthodoxy in an attempt to answer the fundamental questions “what are we?” and “why are we here?”
The author, who has had managerial responsibilities in the British government and has tutored in physics and management studies for the Open University, acknowledges the help of more than 50 accredited scientists with expertise in the fields he explores. The first target of his scrutiny is modern cosmologists, who face the dilemma of attempting to explain the putative origin of the universe in a big bang. Hands finds their efforts to be fundamentally inadequate due to their necessary reliance on both Einstein's general relativity theory and the Standard Model of particle physics. Even though “each has been extremely successful in making predictions that have been verified by observation and experiment within its own realm,” they are incompatible theoretically. Another of the author’s bones of contention concerns the rate of expansion of the universe and whether it is constant or cyclical. He examines various attempts to explain the process, including string theory, loop theory, and the existence of undetectable dark matter and energy. In the author's view, an even more fundamental issue is that scientists today mistakenly “conflate mathematical theory with scientific theory.” Moving on to the origins of life on Earth, Hands suggests that Darwin's reputation is overblown and finds fault with the current “gene-focused paradigm.” Although the author refutes the claims of intelligent design proponents, he accepts the views of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that the evolution of self-reflective humans has created a new stage in the evolution of the biosphere by our use of tools, artistic creations, and philosophy. Hands speculates on new stages of development involving “psychic” energy, and he provides an extensive glossary, which is helpful given the amount and depth of the material, much of which is esoteric.
A compendious work that will intrigue serious readers; others may find it overlong and too comprehensive.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1244-7
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Must reading for anyone concerned about biodiversity and the fate of the hotly debated Endangered Species Act, which is up for congressional renewal in 1995. Mann and Plummer (co-authors of The Aspirin Wars, 1991) give an absorbing tour of the current species-extinction crisis. They transform arcane scientific argument into compelling explanation. Using the colorful examples of the endangered Karner blue butterfly, the American burying beetle, and the kanab ambersnail, the authors show how a series of small decisions—to build a highway here, a super-mall there—is squeezing these species out of existence. The authors call it ``The Problem of the Cooked Frog,'' citing the old chestnut that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out and save itself, but if you put it into the same pot with cold water and raise the heat in small increments, you soon have well-done frog meat. The metaphor cuts two ways, however, and therein lies the crux of this book. The authors claim that ``saving all species everywhere would cook our society to death.'' And that, they argue, is what the current Endangered Species Act seems likely to do. Time and again, they demonstrate, the few who live near a threatened species bear an undue burden in saving that species. In Austin, Tex., creators of a plan to save the area's threatened species failed to ask if the local inhabitants were willing to make the necessary sacrifices. Soon, people began destroying evidence of the species or habitat on private property in order not to have to deal with onerous restrictions. Mann and Plummer argue that a middle road must be found between the competing demands of economy and ecology, and that Congress needs to come up with something better than the present Endangered Species Act. While their conclusions will be highly controversial, this book is an admirable effort to deal fairly with both sides of a complex and critical issue.
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42002-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
This account of how US authorities studied the surviving victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ought to be of wide interest, but Lindee's version of the story will not attract a general readership outside academic circles. Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, has described the atomic bomb survivors as ``people who, despite all, didn't commit suicide.'' After the war these people comprised the world's best sample by far for studies of how exposure to radiation affects individuals and their offspring. An Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission was set up under the US Atomic Energy Commission, and the work of the ABCC over nearly three decades is the subject of this book. Lindee (History and Sociology of Science/Univ. of Pennsylvania) refers to the ABCC's work as ``colonial science,'' by which she means primarily that the dominant power could not carry out its work without the cooperation of its defeated subjects. How was the organization and work of the commission affected by this dilemma? Did any kind of systematic bias creep into the many scientific papers published under its auspices? These are the kinds of questions that interest Lindee, but the language in which she cloaks her conclusions sometimes makes it hard to tell what they are. Take the question of why it was decided that the ABCC would not provide medical care to the survivors as it was studying them: ``I suggest that the treatment debate was a forum in which various parties explored the proper relationship of the Americans to the Japanese.'' Although this is an authoritative scholarly work, it suffers from an excess of sophistication and circumspection, so that the questions readers most want answered are not addressed squarely enough.
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-226-48237-5
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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