J.Z. Young

When I saw the title of Carl Sagan’s new book, I was troubled. I was afraid he might have followed the path of other scientists who turn to study the brain because they are disillusioned by the inhumanity of physical science. I need not have worried. He remains an enthusiastic astronomer. The title refers to the sprightly opening piece in which he describes a visit to the backstage storerooms of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. There he happened to come upon the brain, in a bottle, of the famous Dr Broca, who in 1861 first showed evidence of an area in the human brain which controlled speech. The specimen prompted Sagan to speculate that Broca’s memories and insights might still be there in the brain in the bottle. This macabre but imaginative thought is typical of him, and it does indeed prompt reflection in the neuroscientist.

We often read attacks on linguistic philosophy as an arid, inhumane and unproductive academicism. It is refreshing to find a sustained and ingenious attempt to build a whole theory of human action on ‘the extremely subtle analysis of ordinary language developed by the Oxford School of Philosophers’ – especially, one may add, by John Austin. Unfortunately Dr Harré finds it necessary to develop his thesis by the use of language that is very far from ordinary. Those who are not familiar with the jargons of philosophy and sociology will find it hard to follow. Nevertheless, for me, the effort has been well worth while.

It is a pleasure to write about a book that is so well-written. John Tyler Bonner is a biologist who not only knows a great deal about plants and animals but has thought long and carefully about problems of evolution. He has a cool and judicious attitude that allows him to settle contentious questions without fuss. For example, in order to show that ‘there is no need to be tyrannised by words,’ he makes fun of anthropologists who object to the use of such words as ‘slaves’ or ‘castes’ in describing colonies of ants, because it may imply that if these practices are natural to them they are legitimate also for us. The biologist thinks that both the similarities and the differences are so obvious that it is convenient to use the words and ‘unnecessary to drag in all the possible political, psychological, or strictly human nuances’. This question of the use of words is important for Bonner because he proposes to use the word ‘culture’ to cover a great variety of living activities.

It has only been recently that anthropologists have realised that their best friends are volcanoes. The ash falling from a series of eruptions can produce sequences of fossils nearly as good as those that are normally formed by silt in the sea, and their dates can be accurately measured. Skeletons preserved in this way in the Great Rift Valley of Africa have revolutionised knowledge of man’s ancestry. The first were found by the Leakey family at Olduvai in Tanzania. Expeditions were then undertaken by teams from various countries to sites further north, around Lake Turkana in Kenya, in the Omo Valley, and at Hadar in the Afar triangle in Ethiopia.

This is a sort of encyclopedia for people interested in watching animals. The naturalist who wants further information about the habits of his subjects will find much of it here. There are fine articles on things such as flight, homing, nest-building, song, courtship, migration and many other avian activities. Unfortunately, the book will not be so much use to anyone who wants details about particular species. There is no section that deals with the whole life of each type of bird or other animal. But one can learn about the idiosyncrasies, say, of cuckoos, homing pigeons, owls or bower-birds.