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Book Review: The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth, by Stuart Clark

Hardcover: 272 pages

  • Publisher: Polygon (1 May 2011)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1846971748
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846971747
  • Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 15.4 x 3 cm

 

 

 

 

Galileo Galilei’s scrape with the Roman Catholic Church is well known.

His suggestion that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits around the Sun was an afront to scripture that got him branded as a heretic and almost burnt at the stake. How he first became aware of the full peril of his situation is less well known: on a rooftop in Rome, eavesdropping whilst taking a pee behind a bush.

Maybe that’s how it happened, maybe not – either way, the Earth won’t stop turning.

But it’s through these touches of imaginative license: sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, on occasion disturbingly vivid, that Stuart Clark breathes life into the characters of his first novel, The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth.

The title comes from an episode in the book, where Galileo explains the hopelessness of trying to understand the universe without the correct language – mathematics; to do so is to “wander about lost in the dark labyrinth of the sky.”  But don’t panic, it’s an equationless drama.

In this first part of a trilogy that reaches from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, we follow the lives of the astronomers Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) as they challenge the religiously inspired orthodoxy of the times: an Earth-centered universe with the Sun and planets orbiting around in perfect circles – just as God intended.

Each astronomer has special skills and his own ideas about the cosmos:

Tycho, the meticulous naked-eye observer, happy for the Sun to orbit the Earth, yet convinced the other planets revolve around the Sun.

Galileo, arguably the father of evidence-based thinking, points his telescope skyward to see mountains on the moon, satellites around Jupiter, moon-like phases on Venus and Mercury, and spots on the Sun (Clark reminds us Galileo didn’t actually invent the telescope) – each observation a blow to the accepted model of the universe and Aristotle’s concept of a perfect heaven.

And Kepler, obsessed with geometry, turns a rigorous mathematical eye to his compatriots’ data to derive a model of eliptical planetary motion that, relativistic effects aside, is valid to this day.

On the journey, we share starry rooftop nights with Tycho and his armillary spheres and sextants; and with Galileo and his telescope. We encounter scientific concepts, painlessly embedded in the story, from stellar parallax to Kepler’s defining relationship for a planet’s distance and period round the Sun. 

We meet the landmark publications that captured these ideas: Kepler’s discussion of perfect polygons Mysterium cosmographicum, his treatise on Mars: the Astronomia nova, and the Rudolphine Tables of star positions; Galileo’s telescope observations in Sidereus Nuncius and his more troublesome endorsement of Copernican ideas in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.

The whole is delivered through a pacey narrative that switches back and forth through time and space.  One moment we’re in Rome, then Prague, then Florence, then Rome again.  Thus Clark weaves his factually-based interplay of lives and ideas.

As in any drama, characters are developed in contexts that resonate with our personal experience: relationships, families, squabbles, births, marriages and deaths – as far as that’s possible 400 years on.   Is that illusory?  Can we ever really see from behind 16th century eyes?   No, we can’t.  But how else to share Kepler’s wonder as he steps out onto the observatory roof, or taste Tycho’s not-so-scientific bon vivre lifestyle and lordly pride, or feel Galileo’s chill dread as he anticipates what a rabid Inquisition has in store?

And that, in a nutshell, is Clark’s proposition.

It’s one where he’s shown due respect for the underlying history, reflected perhaps in a favouring of credible human vignettes over elaborate manufactured sub-plots.  So, lots of expansion on the meetings, schemes, and conflicts that must have taken place but would never be recorded – scenes that  can be directed and embellished to divert and entertain without compromising the main account.

In this regard, it’s a very different book to, say, Edward Rutherfurd’s London, where the main story lines are totally fictional.  Clark’s work comes over as based on historical record and scientific fact.  It’s important, as historians of science in particular can, understandably, take issue with inaccurate or controversial portrayals; I’m thinking of a recent defence of Nevil Maskelyne, the 18th century Astronomer Royal, demonised in the film version of Dava Sobel’s Longitude.

The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth begins in Rome, where a defiant Giordano Bruno, comfortable only with his conscience, waits in a cell to be burnt at the stake for heresy.

Johannes Kepler, an outcast Lutheran, arrives in Bohemian Prague to join the service of Tycho Brahe, and get a first sniff of the observational data he’ll one day build into a planetary model.  He also hears about one Galileo Galilei of Padua, and the wonderful discoveries he’s made with his telescope (before long Kepler will have one of his own).

And all the time the Roman Catholic Church is watching, keeping tabs on these dangerous individuals, their troubling independence and inconvenient appeal to evidence.   Kepler is spyed on – his mail intercepted. Galileo, at first encouraged by the Pope, is told in no uncertain terms to leave theological interpretation to the Church; but his thoughts are already committed to print. Thus the slippery slide to persecution, recantation, and repression is joined.

The plot moves between the bloody war-torn streets of Prague and the red robed intrigue of Vatican corridors.  Current events in Reformation Europe are dominated by the struggle between an increasingly Jesuit-influenced Catholic Church and a rising tide of Lutherism.  And our astronomers are in the thick of it.

Far from being godless atheists, they aim to explain God’s works – not undo them.  Yet a Catholic Galileo and a Lutheran Kepler still each grapple to rationalise their ideas to themselves and to a world of dogmatic orthodoxy.  A world where political, theological, and philosophical considerations hold sway over rationalism; where solidarity of belief and allegiance to the group is prized over individual will, conscience, or even physical proof; where mathematical descriptions are acceptable as professional tricks, but will never define truth; where witchcraft is a burning issue, and astronomy is inseparably tied up with the superstition of astrology.

Indeed, Kepler makes a good living drawing up horoscopes for wealthy patrons and courtly sponsors – a trade he revisits as the need arises (Clark actually credit’s him with a rather modern pragmatism on these issues).

Reformation Europe is also a great background for some of Clark’s more vivid visualisations, reminiscent of a Terry Gilliam movie in their medievalism.   I love the “gobs of some thick unguent” Kepler spies clinging at the margins of Tycho’s prosthetic nose when they first meet, and the mood-setting ‘unpleasant tang of tallow’ in Kepler’s study.

Life is dirty, smelly, and not a little dangerous.

On the downside, I occasionally lose track in the switching interplay of events and locations, feeling the need to draw little timeline diagrams – lest I get totally lost in the labyrinth.  And oblivious to any description or other literary signposting, I only ever thought of our heros as bearded old men.  I’ll call it William Shakespeare syndrome- there just aren’t enough ‘before they were famous’ portraits out there.

But none of that detracted from The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth as a thoroughly entertaining and recommended read.

In capturing that essential excitement of the night sky, unchanged over the centuries, Clark has created a work accessible to all comers, and one that astronomers and history fans in particular will doubtless lap up.

I look forward to meeting Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble in future installments.

Stuart Clark’s website is at stuartclark.com

 


 

 

Book Review: Second Nature – The Inner Lives of Animals by Jonathan Balcolme

Book review: (Link to Amazon.co.uk) Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals

Author: Jonathan Balcombe

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Language English
ISBN-10: 0230613624
ISBN-13: 978-0230613621

I remember as a child eating meat products with names like ‘jellied veal’, ‘liver-sausage’, ‘corned beef’, ‘hazlet’, ‘ox-tail soup’ and ‘tongue’.  They were just labels at the time, for things I put in my mouth.  Only much later would I associate them with animals.

Now, reading Jonathan Balcombe’s new book ‘Second Nature – The Inner Lives of Animals’ I’m asking myself why it took so long to make that rather obvious connection.  In fact, it’s got me thinking about a whole host of issues related to how we as a species perceive and treat other animals – nonhuman beings as Balcombe prefers to call them.   For the issues Second Nature addresses have as much to do with human morality and ethics as they do with animal behaviour.

Balcombe wants to open our eyes to the possibility of accepting animals as fellow sentient beings, with feelings and emotions as real to them as ours are to us; beings with lives that are pleasurable and worth living for their own sake; lives worthy of  sensitivity and respect.  As Balcombe puts it: “My chief aim in this book is to close the gap between human beings and animals – by helping us understand the animal experience, and by elevating animals from their lowly status.”

He begins by setting out the evidence for animal sentience, emotion and feeling, then discusses the implications this has for human attitudes and actions.

Part I summarises the findings of numerous field and laboratory studies that demonstrate a range of animal capabilities, experiences and sensitivities we usually associate more with people.  Part II is a description of how animals use these qualities to interact and communicate between themselves and with other species, including man.  Part III focuses on the relationship between humans and animals, and includes a discussion on popular perceptions and how they are changing with what Balcombe sees as an emerging new paradigm in attitudes and awareness.

Central to Balcombe’s plea is the assertion that humans and animals differ in degree rather than kind.  Each type of animal, Balcombe says, including man, has evolved to operate in its own world, or ‘umwelt’, equipped with an appropriate package of sensory experience and feelings suited to that world.  We shouldn’t assume life experience in one umwelt is inherently superior to that in another.   Humans can never directly experience another animal’s umwelt (who can say what personal echo-location or magnetic navigation feels like? – to use Balcombe’s examples) but we accept that animals have complex sensory capabilities.  Which begs the question why, when emotions and feelings are at least as real and necessary to us as senses in explaining our lives and behaviours, would we deny them in animals?   Second Nature is certainly thought provoking on these questions.

Many readers will I expect, from watching natural history on TV or casual reading, recognise something of the better known case studies about Washoe the chimp, grieving elephants, and intelligent ravens.  That said, the number and diversity of cited studies is impressive, and most of the content is new to me.

Take Kelly the dolphin for example, who was taught to trade paper litter found in her pool for fish, but discovered the fish flow could be maximised by trading smaller pieces of paper torn from a larger sheet she had stashed away at the bottom of the pool.  And tests for empathy, where increased stress reactions were measured in animals who witnessed the suffering of another animal – not necessarily of the same species.

Consciousness is a key theme in Second Nature, with Balcombe describing how chimpanzees have demonstrated a ‘theory of mind’ by showing they are consciously aware of consciousness in other chimps.

Other studies support the proposition that animals, elephants for example, follow individual lives that are the product of their unique experience.  And that animals, like us, deal with feelings over the short and long term; they remember experiences, their memories shaping what they become.  There are even indications that elephants have a sense of the future and their own mortality.   Further examples illustrate conditions ranging from depression in starlings, to post traumatic stress disorder in elephants, to anxiety in mice – including their remarkable ability to self-medicate.

Exploring the relevance of instinct, intelligence and language, Balcombe rejects simplistic models that associate  instinct with animals and intelligence with humans.  Instinct does not preclude conscious experience, and intelligence is not a good measure for moral standing.  As Balcombe puts it: “Animals are as intelligent as they need to be”.   The evidence shows that many animals, far from following some kind of invariant program, are capable of learned behaviour and can adapt flexibly to new challenges.   And as regards language, as it’s not linked to sensory activity, animals are able to suffer with or without it.

Balcombe closes the animal-human gap from both directions, elevating our opinion of animal capabilities while questioning the superiority of our own.  We are reminded that animal senses and capabilities – physical, and on occasion mental – can be superior to ours.  Balcombe points to our penchant for industrial scale cruelty and destruction, questioning our right to label other species as uncivilized.  Our culture, Balcombe says, particularly through the media, overplays the negative aspects of animals’ lives, pushing the ‘red in tooth in and claw’ image of a natural world where animals permanently struggle at the edge of survival, flailing at the smallest injury.

Part III sees Balcolme getting into his narrative stride, explaining where he thinks our relationship with animals might be heading.  Under the heading ‘A New Humanity’ he describes a shift from a traditional attitude of ‘might makes right’ towards a more informed and caring paradigm – a transition he likens to the changes of mind-set that accompanied the end of slavery and the winning of womens’ rights.  The process has already started, with impacts most tangibly captured in animal related legislation for the protection of species, improvements in the treatment of animals we eat, and tighter controls on laboratory animal experimentation.

Interestingly, with Second Nature appealing mostly to our moral sense, Part III includes some purely practical, well stated, arguments for reduced meat consumption based on health, resource conservation and sustainability.  This leads to a brief politico-economic discussion on the compatibility of the capitalist/growth model with sustainable environments; inflammatory territory which Balcombe handles with a welcome non-emotive sense of balance.

The somewhat uneasy relationship science seems to have with the idea of animal feelings is one I find interesting in it’s own right.  Balcolme, a scientist himself, criticises science’s tendency to favour the simplest of plausible theories.  It’s one reason, he says, why we have the dogmatic starting assumption that animals don’t have thoughts and feelings, rather than the other way around.  Conversely, Second Nature and other works on a connected theme (Masson’s and McCarthy’s ‘When Elephants Weep’ comes to mind) are particularly open to criticism when authors use language outside the scientific lexicon.   There may be concensus on what sentience means, consciousness less so; but what to make of words like goodness, compassion, and selflessness?  Personally, I don’t have a problem with Balcombe’s style because I don’t see the issues being wholly resolvable with today’s science; we’d need a workable scientific model of moral behaviour for that.  A scientific proof isn’t going to pop up and tell us to treat animals better, no matter how many books we read.  However, and I suspect this is where Balcombe is coming from, I do think science is the best tool for revealing true animal states that might then be judged logically incompatible with, or at least challenge, established moral and ethical standards.  Of course, how established those standards ever are is a discussion for another day.

On a critical note, and it’s probably the scientist in me kicking up, there were times when I wanted more detail from the case studies, more counter-argument, and deeper discussion of skeptical views.  That the early chapters are crammed with properly referenced case studies is a good thing but, in a work of this length, that means trade-offs in content.  The shear volume of examples also gives the early chapters something of a ‘listy’ feel, although that corrects in the later, more analytical material.   Also, I thought the singling out of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett for criticism was unnecessary and unhelpful, particularly so when Dawkins has discussed the positive implications for animal rights that discovery (or creation) of a hypothetical man-ape hybrid would have.  Examples of the darker side of nature, like the apparently cruel egg-laying behaviour of parasitic wasps, are perhaps over-quoted by the atheist camp, but only as arguments against the existence of a benevolent god, not a celebration.  Moreover, Balcombe might want to keep the secularists on his team.

Despite these minor niggles, I have to confess Second Nature has caused me to think more deeply than I otherwise would about a topic I’d mentally parked.  Commendably, it brings all the relevant issues up to date in one concise volume, and has plenty of references for those who want to dig deeper.

Will Second Nature change readers’ attitudes towards animals?  I think in some cases it will.  What it won’t do is resolve any consequential moral dilemma we might have around that next burger purchase.  That’s something each of us must think about quietly on our own.

Related posts on Zoonomian that may be of interest

Interview with Alan Mootnick, Director of Gibbon Conservation Center, Santa Clarita, CA

The Open Ground. Conference podcast.  Conservation, biodiversity)

Also of interest on other blogs

Carl Zimmer on ‘What it’s like to be a bat’ (Discovery Blog Sept 2010)