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Book Review: The Secret Life of Flies by Erica McAlister


In his vibrant ‘social history’ of the Natural History Museum Dry Store Room Number 1, Richard Fortey gives the reader a glimpse into the more obscure corners of the museum. Some of the more curious researchers disturbed by Fortey’s prying, like woodlice fleeing an upturned rock, are the dipterist. Fly experts have a reputation for spending their days counting hairs on legs down a microscope, one of the key identification features for fly species. Erica McAlister is a dipterists of a very different generation to the solitary creatures of Fortey’s study. Modern curators must leave their dusty corners and go out into the world to justify their obscure interests to the general public.

With public engagement in mind, the Natural History Museum has published a number of popular science books by their researchers on topics ranging from lichens to bats, the latest of which is McAlister’s The Secret Life of Flies. From the outset, McAlister faces the challenge of the poor public image of flies, as most consider them to be filthy pests which should be swatted quickly and not studied. But McAlister is a persuasive champion of flies in all their forms, and the book gives an overview of this surprisingly diverse and fascinating group.

Forcipomyia sp.

McAlister stresses early on in the book the useful roles flies play in providing some of our favourite foods. Flies are important pollinators of many plants including mango, black pepper and carrots. But the choicest evidence for the pro-fly case is the chocolate midge Forcipomyia, pollinator of chocolate. But the flies have their pollinating prowess overlooked in favour of the bees, which McAlister clearly thinks is unfair.

Flies are far more diverse a group than those familiar only with the house fly would think. One in ten of every species described is a fly, and McAlister stresses throughout the book the understudied nature of the group, even in compared to the beetles, let alone the mammalian charismatic megafauna. Therefore, McAlister makes a case for the charismatic minifauna.

The book is structured so that each chapter details one of the ways of life that flies have evolved to carry out. There are the detritivores, who help rid the world of rotting vegetation, such as the adorable drain fly. The coprophages include the living punchline to the old joke “what do you call a fly with no wings?”. It is referred to as the bat fly, or Mystacinoba zelandica, rather than a walk, and has lost its wings in favour of clinging to the fur of bats. Then there are the more grisly species; the predators like the fearsome soldier flies and the parasites including the flesh-eating bot fly larva and the parasitoid thick-headed fly larvae who kill their hymenopteran hosts. But even these species can be useful, as McAlister stresses that the parasite of a pest is an ally. Then there are the bloodsuckers, most infamously the mosquitos. McAlister never vilifies the species she describes, and she finds beauty in even the more unlikable groups, such as the vivid metallic female Sabethes tarsopus mosquito.

Sabethes tarsopus

The book is written in an informal style. I counted two “by gum”s, included presumably to fulfill the publisher’s quota of delightful British idioms. McAlister takes an intellectual and aesthetic delight in her topic. She finds charisma in her minifauna, the grey bee fly and Cuterebra emasculator must be vying for the honor of being McAlister’s cutest flies.  The book does not try to be a textbook introduction to the dipterans, rather takes interesting or illustrative species. This does run the risk of not giving the reader a conceptual understanding of the topic, so the case studies become unmoored without the appropriate context. McAlister does provide this basic information throughout the book, but often later than would be most appropriate. For instance, halteres are only mentioned over two hundred pages in, is a key distinguishing feature of the flies, though not terribly interesting, I admit.

Grey bee fly

The book is lively and richly illustrated and gives an impression both of the enormous complexity of the order Diptera and the life of a curator, which is spent as much collecting flies in far flung locations as pushing pins through specimens. The profession has come a long way since the days of curators hiding away in dusty corners, now more curators enter the public stage to defend their work and earn their keep. This book shows that public engagement is not merely a box ticking exercise but a vital part of shaping knowledge and helping preserve biodiversity.

Book Review: Tristimania by Jay Griffiths


Writing a good memoir of mental illness must be like navigating rough seas. It is easy to have your boat buffeted by the storms of trite melodrama, glamourising of sickness (or accusation of), boring the reader with the wasteland of depression or a scaring them off by a display of wounds still bleeding. But with her latest book Tristimania, Jay Griffiths sails as if on a smooth lake. She at once conveys the raw truth of her experiences of mental illness and synthesises it into a network of literary and cultural associations to form an effortless whole.

The book is subtitled A Diary of Manic Depression, evidently added by the publisher to make plain the subject of the book; the term “tristimania” is a now obscure 18th century term for manic depression. Referring to the book as a diary is probably to fit it into the market for confessional non-fiction writing. The book does have a large element of this, but anyone expecting it to be a journal written in an acute hypomanic episode will be misled. As Griffiths would no doubt point out, the word “diary” derives from the Latin diarium, translating as daily allowance. Tristimania has few dates and the this retrospective charting of a rough chronology of a recent year of hypomania is frequently interspersed with exploration of the figure of the manic-depressive in culture. She draws upon myths of Mercury, the trickster and the shaman and explores etymology and Shakespeare. The book shows a mind agile and eager to make sense of herself in the world, but this does give the narrative a sense of disjointedness..There is not a clear tug of narrative through much of it; it meanders and I found myself flicking through the book to see where exactly this was going and little would have been lost by excising some discussion of Mercury and trickster. But such nebulous writing is rather like acute mental illness itself. A spell of illness is a break from the narrative flow of life as planned, in its place are days that all run into one another, which is why sculpted mental illness narratives so often ring false. The book is complicated and knotty, it is not a matey autobiography of a comedian or a celebrity self-help memoir, but much more can be learnt from this than something more easily digestible.

Griffiths has mixed-state manic-depression, an under-discussed condition where mood cycling is rapid and rather than the summit of mania, there is hypomania in the foothills. She acknowledges her hypomania and depression is not as dramatic and destructive as it can be for some. A more pedestrian telling of her experience would be rather dull, she spends the year hunkered down at home with friends and her wonderful doctor, no gambling, promiscuity or drug use. Eventually the medication starts to work and whilst she is still rallying she sets out solo to walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. It is not a story of a miraculous recovery; she is incredibly fortunate to have a good doctor that leads her out of her acute spell of madness as well as meds that work and supportive friends, as well as of course the written word.

She takes a romantic, humanistic approach to mental illness. She doesn’t dwell on her brain misfiring and neurotransmitter imbalance, instead talks of the psyche, myth and etymology, digging down into the hidden histories of the words in our mouths. She is a writer enraptured with words, their meaning and importance. She is most luminous on metaphor: “’Meta-phor’, in its etymology, means a carrying-across of attributes from one thing to another. […] If a person uses a metaphor, they are carrying themselves over, towards the listener, but in madness this need becomes infinitely more intense. In a manic-depressive episode, metaphors are heavy with meaning, and the metaphors one chooses must carry an almost unbearable weight. This, I think, is why people are so stubborn about repeating the precise metaphors which tell their truth.” She places her doctor’s following of her metaphors as key to her recovery. The book is profoundly literary, though naturally my library has shelved it in the “Shelf Help” section, as this is rapidly becoming the NHS mental health services. But worthy of the librarians’ decision, this literarity is tied to a belief in the healing power of words, texts and stories.

The retrospective layering of scholarship and intertextual references is making plain what all recollections of a personal spell of madness are, a reconstruction. The prose is not from the eye of the storm, she makes it clear she would have not been able to, but at a few years’ distance. What struck me within the first fifty pages was the poeticism of the prose, and surely Griffiths writes “What does it want, this madness? Language. In my case, specifically, poems.” She yearns for and writes poems during her months of hypomania, and on the Camino de Santiagio de Compostela reads and gives out poems to fellow pilgrims from an anthology compiled by friends. After the prose testimony, where we leave Griffiths “small but alive”, there are a series of luminous, acute poems written during hypomania. The poetry and prose deal with the same events, such as the night thoughts of suicide were scuppered by the cat bringing in a dead treecreeper from the snow, but with different aspects of authorial mood, form and temporal relation. It is an interesting exploration of the two forms, but the unexepected appearance of the poems could lead the prose to feel superfluous, especially to the reader bored by Griffiths banging on about Mercury and The Winter’s Tale.

What is so often left out of the “miracle recovery” mental illness narratives is how even illnesses that can manifest so acutely as Griffiths’ does cannot be comparentmentalised from the self. As she writes: “To me, the experience of having manic depression can never be separated from my sense of who I am. It runs through me like wine through water: everything is coloured (or tainted) by it.” She certainly doesn’t glamourise her hypomania, it makes her dependent and physically weak, but also takes a rather culturally relative stance on the nature of illness and society. In the right environment, the manic-depressive aspects of her personality that are always there can be an asset; in the past they were for the court jester, the shaman and to an extent the modern artist. As she writes “it seems to me that we, the bipolar-mad of today, take the role of the unemployed court jester, crying for our demeaned status as living ruins when, in the remains of magic, mystery and majesty, we are reduced to pathology. If we do not have a role worthy of our wodness [an Old English term, referring to a frenzied madness] , then we will be ill, for illness is the only category which our culture allows us in this age of literalism […]”. The task of society is not to ameliorate the dysfunctioning mind, but to make viable ways for these people to apply themselves to what they do best, art or magic or both, for the sake of the wellness of all in society. Those with the skill, vision, bravery and honest of Griffiths must tell their stories and reveal their minds in order for us to inch day by day closer to such as world.

Book Review: Flower Hunters by Mary Gribbin and John Gribbin


I’ve spent a fair amount of the last six months in the quiet corridors of the Manchester Museum Herbarium, helping with a lengthy transfer of packets of the General Moss collection from filing cabinet to boxes. Sifting through sheets and packets, I can trace the patterns that the personalities of the different collectors etch in the collection. I see the differences in packeting; ‘stuffers’ who see the size of the envelope as the minimum target and the ‘folders’, who encase tiny scraps in tissue-thin paper, the localities visited and the specimens selected which different personalities pick. It is inevitable that any Herbarium collection is filtered through the collectors’ passions and whims. Therefore, when I found a copy of Mary and John Gribbin’s Flower Hunters in the library, I picked it up out of a desire to learn more about the collectors whose specimens fill the shelves of herbaria throughout the world.

The book traces a history of botany up until the 20th century, when there still existed territories unaltered by human hands. There is a distinct horticultural slant, but does cover scientific and economic botany which interests me more. There is also more of a stress on Hunters than Flowers; biographic minutiae trumps botanical detail. I would have liked to have seen more on the bryophytological loves of Richard Spruce, for example, to get a feel for his mind and passions.

Across the biographical chapters of individual botanists, what piqued my interest was how class influence how these collectors could practice and were rewarded for their work. Whilst all suffered on arduous, years long journeys around the world, the gentleman (and gentlewoman) naturalist had a retinue and global connections. Their resources permitted the intellectual freedom to see global patterns in vegetation, which fueled evolutionary and ecological thinking. In contrast, working-class commercial plantsmen were sent out on their own and expected to keep their heads down, looking for the economically not intellectually fruitful, but only seeing the smallest slice of the profits their seeds and plants made.

The book is structured roughly chronologically, with each chapter on the life of a plant collector (or collaborating pair), hence showing the changing shape of science and adventure. The structure works well in the beginning, the early classification system of John Ray (1627-1705) is followed by the more familiar classification of Linnaeus (1707 – 1778). I was surprised to learn that Ray’s somewhat cumbersome classification based on essential features of the plant (such as the dicotyledon/ monocotyledon division still current) blended with Linnaeus’ user-friendly classification system based on somewhat arbitrary features (Crytogamia, anybody?) to create the bones of modern plant taxonomy. Linnaeus is not the origin of plant taxonomy, he had his own forerunners as well. We then move to Joseph Banks (1743 – 1820), the de facto first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and friend of George III who accompanied Captain Cook on the Endeavour. Here scientific curiousity is inseparable from imperial ambition, Banks saw the land and flora of the Pacific as ripe for “improvement” and exploitation.

Then follows the plantsmen, sent as the somewhat disposable employees of private companies into unmapped territory. These include David Douglas (1799-1834) sent alone on starvation pay by the Royal Horticultural Society to discover and collect plants including his eponymous fir and the Sugar Pine in North America. Expected to live on the land and employ local guides, his health was ruined, losing most of his vision and becoming rheumatic. He died in a bizarre, tragic manner; on Hawaii, his poor eyesight caused him to fall into an animal trap where he was gored by the trapped bull.

We then move onto a pair of similarly intrepid plantsmen, William and Thomas Lobb, who also brought large trees back to their employers. But with the later plant hunter, Robert Fortune (1812-1880), the voyages become more routine. His work involved trading, officially and unofficially, with other plant breeders in China. His notable achievement was in service of the British Empire, he was the first to take viable tea seeds out of China to establish successful plantations in India, ending China’s monopoly on tea. Though economic considerations went into even Linnaeus’ botanising, consideration of profit becomes more naked and unscrupulous.

Bucking the arch of the narrative is the figure of Marianne North (1830-1890). A wealthy woman, she circled the globe without the expected chaperone, not plant hunting for profit or for a scientific institute (as none would employ a woman to do so) but for her art. She was an incredible prolific botanical artist who, unusually for the time, painted plants in situ. She worked rapidly and in oils, producing what the Gribbins describe as not highly detailed but more importantly accurate. They are not plants “murder[ed] to dissect” but alive in their habitat, an ecological not an anatomical painter. I am hesitant to criticize the inclusion of North as I admire her as an intrepid artistic woman. But she does stick out of a narrative trend of increasing commercialization of plants precisely because she was not a plant hunter, with all it’s masculine connotations. She did not bring back the plants themselves as trophies, but her own impressions of the plants and their environments captured in the paintings. If her story was in the context of a discussion of the growing ecological understanding, amongst the stories of Alexander von Humboldt and Alfred Russell Wallace for example, it would make sense. But here it feels like she was shoehorned as “the woman” in a history of a period and profession which was more or less uniformly masculine. The best way to appreciate women’s contribution to science is to place them in their intellectual context, not to include them in a place where their lives seem superfluous and dismissable.

The final story is that of Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), who I know best for the Bentham & Hooker System of classifying seed plants which the Manchester Museum Herbarium (and many other herbaria) arrange their specimens by to this day. This is not discussed in the book, sadly, as it would make a nice narrative circle from Ray and Linnaeus to Hooker. The focus is instead upon Hooker’s botanising in the Himalayas. He was one of the earliest Europeans to explore the Tibetan Plateau, and is largely responsible for the flourishing of rhododendrons in the gardens (and countryside!) of Britain. Less destructively, his collections form integral parts of many herbaria in Britain, including Manchester’s.

A book such as this does run the threat of superficiality and glaring omission (Darwin is conspicuously but understandably absent, but aside from Linnaeus there is an absent of the non-Britons). But more important is cohesion, which it ultimately lacks. It doesn’t make any conclusions about the state of botanical science in this period, merely presenting fascinating stories.  A book which treated the hunters and their plants on the same level, giving biographical and evolutionary detail alongside each other, would have made maybe a more enjoyable, tightly structured book.


Book Review: How To Survive a Plague by David France


My generation are some of the first to grow up with HIV infection as a treatable condition. We only know a world where combination HAART can give those newly infected an undetectable viral load and a nearly normal lifespan, so we largely lack the fear and stigma which surrounded AIDS from its beginning. It is easy for us to think, yes, HIV/AIDS was and is tragic, but the modern treatments are as good as a cure, so it’s no real problem now. But such complacency is wrong.

David France opens How to Survive a Plague with the funeral of Spencer Cox, a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) who suggested that HIV researchers test  the drug Crixivan in large simple trials to produce data fast and get the drug on the market. This scene is not at the height of the plague but in 2013. The drug combinations he and many others were saved by in 1996 became ineffective, as his HIV strain mutated to snake past all available HIV drugs. What it is vital for those born after the plague years to know is that treatability does not entail dismissal. And France’s book details the struggle and stubbornness, as well as plenty of setbacks and self-aggrandizement, it took to get to where AIDS is today.

France runs a history of the science of HIV/AIDS alongside and intertwining with the history of activism. His writing is less pacy when writing on the research compared to when writing about the high drama of drug trials, but forgivable given his background. France is an AIDS activism insider. He is among the crowds of plague survivors at Cox’s funeral and is connected to the story’s main players. Though the scope and tone of the book somewhat resembles Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “Big Book of Cancer”, it does not attempt to magisterial objectivity. This means the book is How to Survive a Plague (as a gay male activist and journalist in New York, 1981-96). At the books heart is a small world of New York activists. San Francisco is a distant oasis separated by the dry sands of prejudice, to say nothing of the rest of the world. But narrowness is key to the intimacy France creates by following key figures like characters in a novel through what would otherwise be a fog of names, dates and acronymns.

Some of his stars include the musician Michael Callen, Richard Berkowitz and their physician Joseph Sonnabend, who together authored a 1982 book advising on safe sex. There is Larry Kramer, the mercurial playwright crucial in ACT UP’s founding and Peter Staley, the ex-Wall Street trader who protested against the high price of the drug AZT at the New York Stock Exchange. The book is rich in the tales of these and others fighting have AIDS taken seriously by scientists and law-makers.

What was new about the AIDS epidemic was how activists engaged with research. Theatre major and high school dropouts were reading the scientific literature on HIV/AIDS and presenting their own illnesses at conferences so they could challenge drug companies and government officials on funding and clinical trials. ACT UP’s famous mantra was “drugs into bodies”, they intended to get as many people on the best drugs quickly. This was strikingly at odds with a government and medical establishment characterized by it’s neglect, greed and indifference.

Successes finally emerged when researchers and activists worked together. AIDS activists suggested the parallel track method of clinical trials, which generated good data from a carefully controlled clinical trial, but those who aren’t the ‘perfect patient’ trials need can get the drugs. The drug Crixivan appeared promising in the early 1990s, so was rapid rushed from test tube to human trials via the substitution of animal trials for a ‘big chimp trial’, a scientist heroically took the drug themselves. But the manufacturer Merck faced was slow in producing enough of the drug for the Phase II trials, so driven by love and despair activist Tom Blout on Merck’s community advisory board was getting the drug bootlegged for lover Jim Straley, who died after his supply ran out.

Such a personal history of an emotive topic runs the risk of whiggish hagiography, but France’s acknowledgement of the failures and successes of activist groups keeps it balanced. The pitfalls of activist-driven medicine as shown in the case of AZT. Pressure from activists to value hast came at the cost of efficacy, when the good outcomes early in the Phase II clinical trial of the drug meant the trial was stopped prematurely and the drug approved in record time. But AZT was ultimately found to have no effect on lifespan, not captured in the short trial. But the scientists have plenty of flaws as well. There was a narrow focus by the NIH on trials of drugs which targeted the HIV virus, at the expense of developing treatment for the opportunistic infections which actually kill AIDS patients. But by the end of the plague, activists and scientists largely collaborated to temper each others’ faults. There is comedy in some of ACT UP’s stunts, such as the unfurling of a giant condom over the house of anti-AIDS research Senator Jesse Helms. But throughout the book runs a sense of the great, howling injustice of the willful ignorance of the AIDS crisis by those in power.

The book ends in 1996, the end of the plague years, the survivors dissipated. But the plague still shuffles on, wreaking havoc for those lacking access to treatment and bruised by previous treatments. AIDS casts a long shadow over the LGBTQ community, but the grief and anger spurred activists into becoming more vocal in demanding their own humanity be respected. The consequences of their actions reverberate in every pride march and every newly-out teenager today.

The “Deep Otherness” of Plants: On Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl


I’ve spent much of the time since reading Hope Jahren’s memoir Lab Girl in November pressing the book into the palms of anyone whom asks for recommendations. This is not because it is something tritely described as a science book which non-scientists can enjoy, as if this means it has been specially dumbed down. This book is not concerned with explaining scientific concepts about how the world works, which won’t attract a person not interested in thinking in causal mechanisms. Jahren is not concerned with detailed explanations of her work, instead the book starts prior to this and explores what draws us to look at the world with a curious mind, a thing we all inevitably do whatever our day job. It is more impressionist than explanatory, with the tautness and rhythm of literature, dealing with what drives a particular sort of person cram themselves into small lightless rooms with big questions and anxious hearts.

Lab Girl is Jahren’s autobiography of becoming and painfully establishing herself as a scientist. She works at the intersections of many disciplines and  could be described as a plant geochemist, one of the few scientists who spend their time sifting and sorting data extracted from rock samples to constructing landscapes millions of years gone. I enjoyed this spotlight on an under-hyped branch of science whose way of looking at the living world we all should learn from. Jahren and her colleagues see with the panorama of the palaeontologist and the eye of the environmental scientist for the interplay of living and non-living and so understand the environment as ever shifting, the present world should not be taken for granted.

Jahren structures chapters about her life and work around short vignettes about how plants live. Though she writes of the “deep otherness” of plants, plant scientists do find that the organisms so often on their mind inevitably colours their experience of their own lives. The perils and the struggles of life as a plant mirrors Jahren’s as a scientist, a woman and a person with bipolar disorder. For instance, a chapter on the curious S-shaped growth curves of corn which suggests the traumatic process of making seed is followed by a chapter detailing Jahren’s pregnancy; the emotional turbulence of going off medication in the first two trimesters and in the final trimester being formally barred from her lab as a “liability”. This juxtaposition is more than metaphor. What Lab Girl does best is to convey what it is like to think like a scientist, to have your mind percolated by your subject matter and methods until you yourself become entwined within it.

This is not to say Lab Girl is a romantic account. There are numerous horror stories about funding struggles, scrabbling enough money to pay the salary of Bill, her career long collaborator who spent much of the early days sleeping in the lab or his car. Bill is Jahren’s colleague, but they act more like siblings than two professional.They spend blissful nights in the lab constructing experiments and defrosting hamburgers, pepped up on a steady stream of dark humour. Rather pleasingly, both Bill and the many Mass Spectrometers Jahren has had in her life appear far more frequently than her husband. But Jahren does not dismiss family life, a scene towards the end of the books sees her refer to the two halves of her heart, both full when she puts her son to bed and goes off to the lab to put the half given over to science to use. She doesn’t see either side of her life as detracting from the other, they are all components of what she is.

Jahren does not make her bipolar disorder explicit for the first part of the book, no doubt mirroring its emergence in her life,though this did mean it took me a while to realise that her long hours and nocturnal lab habits are not typical, and shouldn’t be purposefully emulated. I’m cautious around first person account of bipolar disorder as they can be interpreted as glamourising mania and making it desirable for people who don’t have bipolar, which it ultimately never is. Thankful, Jahren avoids this.

On the flip side, except for her pregnancy, her bipolar or the stigma associated with it does not seem to have subtracted from her career significantly. I suspect however that Jahren was of the first generation to do so in significant number, as they would be doubly perceived as irrational and unscientific for being mentally ill and women. Jahren discusses the sexism she has faced, and locates its burden to the “the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can’t possibly be who you are”, the knee-jerk assumption of what a scientist can be which affects more or less all but the white European, wealthy middle-aged able-bodied man.

Whilst the title suggests the book’s subject is the “girl”, I think Jahren intended the stress to be on the “lab” in which the girl happens to be in. Jahren grew up in her father’s lab, and sees the labs she has built over the world as her home, a refuge from the outside world where she can be herself. The book is a love letter to the physical and mental space to think, play and discover that a lab of one’s own brings to the female scientist in particular.

Lab Girl is not a The Double Helix style account of one extraordinary discovery, Jahren sees science as work and herself as “like an ant, driven to find and carry single dead needles [..] and then add them one by one to a pile so massive that I can only fully imagine one small corner of it”. Whilst a science appears to be progressing in leaps and bounds from the outside, as seen from the individual point of view science stagnant with your budget or regresses as your work is made irrelevant.Whiggish narratives are irrelevant or dangerous on a day to day basis, so Jahren explores the pleasure of her work itself; to try to understand the logic of plants, from the inside. But the moments of discovery are beautiful when they happen, such as the blissful moment when Jahren is standing in the lab in the sunrise thinking herself the only one in the world with a newly discovered gem of knowledge, making her “unique existentially”.

As a young woman with designs on making a (increasingly circuitous) route into research science, I have absorb Lab Girl not as a manual for being a scientist, but rather as a suggestion of a way of being as a scientist, a path already flattening down the grass. A path which shows the principle is possible, but does not dictate the route. But it is more important to me as a showing how a life scientist can draw upon their subject – these strange ways of being as a way to reflect upon your own life, to use the subjectivity of another as a way to root yourself in the chaotic seas of your own subjectivity.

The Self in the Data: review of Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

Futurology is a notoriously difficult field; difficult to practice and difficult for the practitioner to be taken seriously. There is an art to avoiding both Nostromdamusian vagueness and the retrospective naivety of Thomas Watson’s mythic comment on the “world market for maybe five computers”. A good futurologists needs to be aware of the aims and abilities of modern technology and scientific research, but crucially must understand how the political and social environment could channel or outright block scientific and technological development. Futurology is more than simply predicting what shiny new inventions will be out in the next five years. Rather, it is the skill of locating the core philosophical underpinnings of modern technology, science and politics to predict what would happen if they were allowed to proceed to their logical conclusions, the tech being the means to this social end.This is Harari’s aim in Homo Deus, not to prophecy but rather to give a warning of there we are going. It is left to the reader whether we should, or can, fight this.

Early in the book, Harari defines the New Human Agenda as to achieve happiness, immortality and deification, or supreme knowledge and manipulation of nature. Harari argues that despite having mostly solved issues of famine, war and disease in the West and increasingly in the rest of the world, we are still not content. Rather we sapiens strive to achieve the next items on the list. In doing so, Harari notes sees many unknown unknowns opening up. With our measly sapiens brains, we struggle to comprehend what a future of cognitively enhanced Homo dei would be like, what Ray Kurzeweill terms the singularity. Such adherence to uncertainty is refreshing in a book about the future, but does not serve as a cop out for refusing to consider what the future may hold.

I disagree with Harari complacency over the eventual conquest of infectious disease. It rather reminds me of a review paper by Rodney Wishnow and Jesse Steinfeld published in 1976 entitled precisely The Conquest of Infectious Disease in the United States. After the emergence of the AIDS epidemic, Hughes and Berkelman gave their similarly titled 1993 paper the despairing blunt subtitle Who are we kidding? It would be fallacious to predict that no major infectious disease could emerge in the future and take a significant toll on the population. Rising anti-biotic resistance makes this a growing likelihood. But even many non-infectious diseases are caused, worsened or treated by the shared environment, so the effect of the person’s community in a future healthcare cannot be ignored. Whilst I do agree that happiness, immortality and deification will become major goals of the wealthy into the 21st century, the trials previous human civilizations – disease, famine and war – will be persistent problems, faced as we will be with dwindling natural resources and changing opportunities for pathogens to spread in a climate altered, post-antibiotic world.

Harari places the move from mass to personalized healthcare within a narrative of the diminishing of the value of individuals, in addition “Great Decoupling” of intelligence from consciousness and the decline of mass warfare could make many economically irrelevant. But the infectious and environmental aspects of healthcare will mean it will always be social, as Eula Biss writes “our bodies may belong to us, but we ourselves belong to a greater body composed of many bodies.” Precisely that we are all to a lesser extent custodians of the health of those around us would likely preserve the value of the group in the face of atomised personalized healthcare.

Harari is a professor of world history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His previous work, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, had the focus on broad historical themes expected by someone with that job title. He carries over this historical scholarship to Homo Deus, with a surprising about of the book given over to discussion of the past. But Harari does not use the past in the way endorsed by Santayana’s well-worn quote, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Things are more complicated than this. As Harari so eloquently puts it; “Historians study the past not in order to repeat it, but in order to be liberated from it. […] It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn’t want us to imagine.” On this rationale, Harari spends a significant part of the book exploring the foundational ideology of modern society. Principally, this is humanism – the centering of the value of individual (human) subjective experience in politics, art and ethics, with sapiens rather than deus as the source of all meaning. However, Harari treats this as a religion, broadly defined, and as such holds its claims up to empirical scrutiny, and finds them lacking.

Harari presents a number of arguments drawing on experiments in the life sciences which threaten the idea of the indivisible self and free will key to the liberal religion. After two years of being told by my A-Level Philosophy teacher I do not have free will I am sure are not novel. But more interestingly, Harari argues that as living systems must be conceived of as a algorithmic system, if we are to abandon ideas of the immaterial soul, we can be causally predicted. Throughout human history, the difference between our experiencing and narrating selves in which the latter assess experience based only on the peak and end pleasure or pain means we are a poor judge of our subjective experience.

What Harari describes as the new religion of “dataism” therefore intends to jettison this reliance on the vagaries of our own assessments of our experience and go straight to the data. Human experience is defined as the data patterns that human generates, no messy, qualitative feelings needed. Whilst this description makes dataism sound like a cult from a sci-fi film, many people in the West do make feelings concede to data every day. Harari references the BRCA 1 and 2 mutation tests taken by the perfectly healthy Angelina Jolie, the data on her risk for breast and ovarian cancer lead to her deciding on a preventative mastectomy and ovariectomy. Nothing in her subjective experience told her she was in need of significant surgery, it was rather her genetic data and the population study data relating to her phenotype that lead to her decision.

Whilst reports of the New Human Agenda have been somewhat exaggerated, as the old one still persists, I find Harari to be most illuminating on the role of data in the future. Upon being explain to that I have no free will in my mid-teens, I was remarkably relaxed about this compared to my classmates. I am not alone in being a persistently inconsistent judge of my own feelings. I have often felt lost and confused in a sea of my own subjectivity, grasping for something stable and objective. I gladly concede that a powerful enough algorithm could know me better than I know myself, and maybe would consult such non-conscious, intelligent algorithms when making decisions.

My acceptance of the role of data to supplement human decision-making does not necessarily entail an acceptance of a future unemployable ‘underclass’. Harari grounds his projections for a dataist future upon the continuation of free market capitalism. Such a future is far from guaranteed. Harari makes a good case for the pacifying effects of global trade under capitalism making it a very stable political system. But given climate instabilities and the consequential political chaos will worsen, the future seems far from stable. It is understandable that Harari gives little space to predictions of political revolution given the aims of his book (and his reading of Marx), but the absence of the effects of climate change, given how it could indirectly hamper our attempts to achieve happiness, immortality and deification, is inexcusable.

Harari is honing a niche as a popular historian in the grandest sense, synthesizing much of global history for his readers but his respect for the readers own mind means he refrains from fable-like storytelling. His mind ranges far over history, both tunneling back into the deep past and sending tendrils into the future, giving him a sense of fore- and hindsight which we and our politicians could well learn from.