Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears About Encountering Extraterrestrials
By Michael A G Michaud
Copernicus Books (Springer Science + Business Media),
£17.50 (hb), ISBN 0-387-28598-9

Probably. Or possibly. We don’t know. But it is worth thinking about it. That in essence is the message of this 460-page book. The author is a scientific administrator and investigator in various American government agencies. In the absence of any direct evidence, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) rests ultimately on two observations, which have so far been consistent. The first is that, as Lucretius pointed out two thousand years ago, nature does not produce singularities. The second is that there has always turned out to be far more in existence than appeared at any point. We have not reached the limits of our unimaginably vast universe, and cosmologists are thinking seriously about multiple universes. Beyond that, all is speculation. The author reviews comprehensively and dispassionately the attempts to calculate probabilities. All involve numerous variables, to most of which we cannot attribute firm values. For example, how many Earth-like planets may exist, how necessary or sufficient Earth conditions are for life or intelligence, what forms such might take, how possible or likely communication might be, etc. And there is what one might call the Jim problem: if life exists “but not as we know it”, how shall we know it? Nevertheless, systematic speculation is a step towards preparedness, which could turn out to be vital. And it gives us valuable new perspectives on ourselves. Michaud discusses the relationships of SETI with politics, law, mythology, religion, science fiction (a prime source of much serious and original thinking) and much else.
The text is stimulating and very readable. A serious criticism, however, is that there is no bibliography, and the 71 pages of references are organized in the most unhelpful way I have ever met. This mars an otherwise excellent book.

John Radford

Newton: A Very Short Introduction
by Rob Lliffe
Oxford University Press, £6.99, ISBN 978 0 19 929803 7

Rob Lliffe is well placed to analyse the life and work of Sir Isaac Newton (or SIN as Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed dubbed him in view of his overbearing manner) as editorial director of the Newton Project, which aims to make the great scientist’s complete works available online.
Lliffe has made a brave stab in catering to the non-specialist. Unfortunately he had two obstacles: the first is the small space available, a problem when dealing with someone active in as many fields as Newton, and the second is that the magnitude of Newton’s achievements are difficult for the layperson to grasp, even without the mathematics, which are mercifully absent.
So Lliffe tries to sketch the context — Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes — in just a few pages. We skip through Newton’s career, from his childhood which showed early promise, through the Fellowship at Trinity Cambridge, occupation of the Lucasian Chair, his time at the Royal Mint, and Presidency of the Royal Society. Against this career progression we are given gobbets about his researches on optics, celestial mechanics and mathematics, as well as his work in theology, astrology and chronology. Then there are the feuds in which he engaged and an overview of how he has been treated by previous biographers to squeeze in. Unfortunately, if the reader does not have some grounding already, the descriptions are often too brief to be of much use. Terminology is left unexplained, and while Lliffe conveys Newton’s range of interests, topics are skimmed over with little detail.
This is not Lliffe’s fault. The problem is that Newton just cannot be squeezed into such a small compass. Despite its tag as an introduction, some prior knowledge helps enormously.
Fortunately for those who come away puzzled, the literature on Newton is a huge one, and the interested reader has plenty of choice when delving further into the accomplishments of this fascinating polymath.

Tom Ruffles

Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
by Paul Boghossian
Oxford University Press, £14.99 (hb), ISBN 0-19-928718-X

The glorious Sokal booby-trap of 1996 seems to have done sadly little to lessen the attraction and durability of that intellectual plague known variously as relativism, constructivism or constructionism. The view that there is no such thing as objective reality, that truth is only relative to a society, conceptual framework or even personal perspective, is entrenched in a range of “disciplines” (if they still merit the term) taught at colleges worldwide, from sociology, psychology and history to music and media studies.
The laborious, intricate, principled, collective effort to find out how the world is, known as science, enjoys no support from fellow academics in thrall to a fashionable ideology that sees the theories and findings of science as merely socially-constructed texts devoid of literal reference to causal processes in a material world. How many thousands of graduates per year promote and apply this approach in their work and social interactions?
Mainstream Anglophone philosophy departments have not, reports Boghossian, Professor of Philosphy at New York University, succumbed to the exotic charms of postmodernism, and this concise book neatly explores the deep flaws in the view that facts are only social constructs, or that theory choice in science is caused by social factors rather than by empirical evidence. Boghossian analyses the work of historian Thomas Kuhn, philosopher Richard Rorty and sociologist David Bloor, among others, concluding that, “on the negative side, there look to be severe objections to each and every version of a constructivism about knowledge that we have examined. A constructivism about truth is incoherent. A constructivism about justification is scarcely any better. And there seem to be decisive objections to the idea that we cannot explain belief through epistemic reasons alone. On the positive side, we failed to find any good arguments for constructivist views.”
The taste for supernatural fancies often draws support from theories undermining appeals to factual evidence. This book is another contribution to the defence of the view, underpinning science, that there is a way the world is, independent of human opinion.

Paul Taylor

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
by Lewis Wolpert
Faber and Faber, £8.99 (pb), ISBN 978-0-571-23166-3

In some ways I feel these 243 pages are too few. There are so many interesting leads that cannot be followed up (there are references, of course). Occasionally the ideas tumble out so quickly as to muddle the words. “According to the ancient Greeks and their humours, mental illness came from the gods”. The theory of humours was essentially a naturalistic explanation: two ideas seem to have got jumbled. Again, in some places the author is so keen to tell us more, that (it seems to me) the balance of the book is upset. Many false beliefs are listed, particularly in health and religion. Interesting, but perhaps not really advancing the argument.
The essence of the argument is that a “belief engine” has evolved in humans because it was useful, but it may also be inappropriate. The origin, in Wolpert’s view, lies in tool-using. Early hominids used found objects as proto-tools, e.g. stones to break open bones or shellfish.
Unlike other species, they took the next step of modifying their instruments, for example to produce sharp edges, and then the further jump of combining two disparate elements to make a completely new tool, such as a spear from a stick and a sharpedged flint. This involved a new mental process, the realization of what leads to what, that is causality. Envisaging a new product was the origin of belief.
Thus we have a strong tendency to seek causes, even when there are none or they are unknown. Illness is attributed to witchcraft or some incorrect natural cause, and so on. Scientific thinking, which is the only reliable way to discover true causes, is not evolutionarily based, but was invented by the Greeks. Some might think that causality is also the foundation of science. Some may query Wolpert’s view of what a ‘belief ’ is, or think it a long way from flint-knapping to beliefs that daily produce martyrs and murderers. But overall, this is a fascinating and rewarding book.

John Radford

Fakers, Forgers and Phoneys: Famous Scams and Scamps
by Magnus Magnusson
Mainstream, £9.99, ISBN 978-1-84596-210-4

I must begin by admitting that the author of this book, who died in January 2007, was a friend of mine. However, if he weren’t I would still say it’s an excellent and fascinating work. There are four sections, on art forgeries (Keating, van Meegeren, the Cottingley fairies); archaeological frauds (Piltdown Man, the Vinland Map); impostors and hoaxers (the Tichborne claimant, George Psalmanazar); and literary forgeries (Thomas Chatterton, William Henry Ireland).
A constant theme is how easy it is to fool people, even experts: Magnus begins, somewhat inevitably perhaps, with the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Van Meegeren, facing imprisonment or even death for selling a ‘Vermeer’ to Goering, said he had painted it himself and was, of course, disbelieved by the experts who had authenticated it until he painted another before their very eyes. The Cottingley fairies were a joke by two girls that got out of hand: after Conan Doyle fell for it, the perpetrators felt they had to carry on rather than reveal that such a famous and distinguished man had been fooled.
Some of the most interesting stories are those told more briefly than as the subjects of complete chapters, such as: the woman who claimed to be Anastasia; the Hitler diaries; Dr James Barry, the woman who masqueraded as a man and had a successful career as a naval doctor, which might be understandable if she had been big with a deep voice, but she was small and slight with a high voice; the Kensington Stone, allegedly found in Minnesota (the most Nordic state in the USA) and apparently showing that Vikings penetrated that far, but in fact an obvious fake, its ‘runic’ inscriptions being a bizarre mix of modern Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and English; and Nat Tate, a nonexistent artist about whom a book was published with great fanfare, no-one daring to admit never having heard of him. As Magnus says: “The fact is that credulous people can be persuaded to believe anything; there seems no end to people’s gullibility, no matter how crude the forgeries might be.” A good read, and a fitting epitaph to a splendid man.

Ray Ward

The Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day
by David S. Katz
Pimlico, £8.99 (pb), ISBN 9780712667869

The main aim of occult practices is “to bring together widely disparate aspects of God’s Creation within a complex structure of connections, sympathies and affinities”. In other words, a supernatural Unified Theory. As Katz points out, this does tend to result in “the readiness to relate the unrelated”, a tendency seen in believers in general.
This is a thorough, highly detailed history of the occult, starting with the ancient Greeks, tracing its development through the Renaissance Neoplatonists, Hermeticists and Kabbalists to the Rosicrucians, Freemasons and Swedenborgians. He also notes the Hermetic roots of Mormonism, which were conveniently forgotten about.
In among the believers there were always sceptics; Hermeticism was debunked by Casaubon in the early 17th century, while the poet Blake challenged Swedenborg. But as ever, they were lone voices in the face of popular belief. The Victorian era was a fertile time, with a revived interest in all things supernatural, the start of psychology, psycho-analysis and anthropology feeding occult interest and Indian ‘mysticism’ thrown into the mix. Jung in particular tried to amalgamate psychoanalysis and the occult.
Meanwhile in America, fundamentalism was born. Perhaps the most speculative part of the book is Katz’s description of it as occult because, he says, fundamentalists believe “firmly in the supernatural world, its influences and manifestations”. Focussing on Revelations and Daniel, they “predict the future through deciphering a document whose meaning is occult, hidden”.
Although this element of fundamentalism is occult in that sense, whether the whole of it can be so described is not entirely proven here, as distinct from a more general (and perhaps more lurid) belief in supernatural forces or predicted events common to many religions, myths and superstitions. Belief in the rapture, speaking in tongues, public faith healing and fundamentalism’s grass-roots appeal rather than shrouds of mystery are perhaps a little too overt to qualify as occult.
That said, this is a useful resource, illustrating both the influences of different people and groups on the occult and the occult’s own influence on society, science and modern beliefs, from the born-again to New Agers.

Tessa Kendall

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think
edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley
Oxford University Press,  ISBN 0-19-929116-0

This sparkling collection of essays is published to mark the 30th anniversary of Dawkins’ first, and most famous book, The Selfish Gene. The 25 contributions are parcelled into sections entitled, Biology, The Selfish Gene, Logic, Antiphonal Voices, Humans, Controversy, and Writing. Daniel Dennett lauds that book as a philosophical essay, and Seth Bullock explains the invention of algorithmic biology, showing the broader intellectual significance of Dawkins’ work. Sceptics will be well aware of his outstanding efforts on behalf of rationalism, and Michael Shermer praises his contribution, along with A. C. Grayling, writing of “the virus of faith”.

Unappetizingly sandwiched between their texts, however, is an essay called A Fellow Humanist by Richard Harries, who turns out to be the Bishop of Oxford, but suspiciously resembles the Reverend J. C. Flannel of Private Eye fame, deploring creationism while clinging to “the divine rationality and ordering of all things”, not quite getting how deadly Universal Darwinism is for cosmic purposive design.

Robert Aunger wonders What’s the Matter with Memes?, and psychologist David Barash makes an unexpected connection with Albert Camus: “the greatest triumphs of human existence arise from human beings struggling to make sense of what is, biologically, a purposeless world”. Consonant, at least, with this overture to existentialism, is Dennett’s reminder that, “one of the central lessons of Darwinian thinking is that essentialism must be abandoned”.

From a literary angle, Philip Pullman celebrates Dawkins as “a storyteller whose tale is true”, and Matt Ridley relates that “an unexpected effect of the success of The Selfish Gene was to revive the central role of the book as a scientific art form”.

For philosopher Helena Cronin, that book and its brilliant successor, The Extended Phenotype, “taught me how, holding steadily to a gene-centred view, I could find the way through muddle.” She aptly likens this gene’s-eye view to “Einstein’s imagined ride on a beam of light”, as “an invitation to journey into unreachable worlds for a clearer understanding of reality”.

Overall, this is an illuminating, even encouraging, guide to the invaluable work of a champion skeptic.

Paul Taylor

Freemasonry
by Giles Morgan
Pocket Essentials, £9.99 (hb), ISBN 13: 978 1 904048 87 9

Freemasonry is often called a “secret society”, but this seems to be an example of a common confusion between a body, membership of which is kept secret, and one which possesses secrets. Freemasons would generally claim the latter status. This book offers a short (160 pp) survey of the subject. Frankly it is rather a poor one. The first two chapters give a reasonable outline of the organization and grades of membership within it. The next fifty pages discuss various supposed origins, which the author does not support or refute, but describes as “speculative”. A cynical reader might prefer the word “rubbish”. The usual suspects are paraded: the Temple of Solomon, Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, the cult of Dionysus, the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Gnostic Gospels, Mithraism, Druids, the Essenes, the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, and the Priory of Sion (which the author accepts as a complete hoax, dating from 1956).
The next part is more factual on the development of Freemasonry, though we still wander off into the Invisible College, the French Revolution, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Boston Tea-Party, the death of Mozart and the Order of the Golden Dawn. Finally there is a bit about Freemasonry today, but nothing about its size, or the nature of its membership, or its numerous non-ritual activities. The book is carelessly written, with information repeated unnecessarily and some awkward expressions.
A quick trawl of the internet, or the Encylopaedia Britannica, would have yielded a more informative and factual account. One would like to say that it is good in parts. But the original Punch cartoon (Bishop, at breakfast, to young curate: ”I am afraid you have a bad egg, Mr Jones”. Jones: “Oh no, my lord, I assure you! It is very good in parts”) rests on the fact that eggs cannot be partly good. When so much is (avowedly) speculative, can we rely on the remainder? Perhaps, but only by checking with other sources.

John Radford