Richard Dawkins’s The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie (Bloomsbury) relates a delightful gallimaufry of stories about the evolution of everything from camouflaged frogs to “weakly electric fish” as though the emeritus zoologist were holding forth from a lightly distressed leather armchair. In mellow mood, Sir Richard revisits his own greatest hits (The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype), while toying with curious conjectures, such as the idea that with careful experimentation you could “breed a race of pigeons who enjoy listening to Mozart but dislike Stravinsky”.
Hippos, relates Dawkins, are more closely related to whales than to any other land animals. They also, along with dwarf elephants, used to roam the island of Cyprus, one of many pleasing facts in Alex Christofi’s Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of Cyprus (Bloomsbury). Blending millennia of history with modern-day travelogue, the author covers the island as both the birthplace of Stoicism and a centre of the war trade, from the forging of Alexander the Great’s favourite sword to its present use as a platform for RAF jets. Did Jesus’s friend Lazarus even move to Cyprus after being raised from the dead? We can’t rule it out.
The current online fascination with videos of ravens and crows speaking in eerily realistic ways may give rise to a more general curiosity about animal communication, to be fed by Arik Kershenbaum’s Why Animals Talk (Viking). Many animals have syntax (the order of notes in birdsong, for example, is important); individual dolphins have unique whistle “names”; and the howling of wolves is a way for them to keep in touch with one another across vast forest spaces, like texting “I’m just over here” to your friends.
If rats could talk, they might recall the remarkable metropolises that some of their ancestors used to live in. Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B Calhoun, by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden (Melville House), tells how from 1947 to 1977 the titular American scientist Calhoun built an elaborate series of wooden habitation complexes for rats and mice, and recorded the rise and fall of entire rodent societies. Once overcrowding set in, things fell apart: a result widely misused in the media to feed “population bomb” anxieties about human cities in the 1960s. In fact, as Calhoun found out, the rats got depressed only when they had no smaller group hangouts to retreat to. Meanwhile, human‑scale terrace housing was being demolished in favour of anomic tower blocks.
It is unclear whether some rats are by nature sociopathic, but one in 20 humans is. One of them, Patric Gagne, has written a deliciously wicked and insightful memoir about her condition, Sociopath (Bluebird). She first noticed that something was wrong with her as a child, when she loved to steal things, break into other people’s houses, and occasionally attack other children with sharp pencils. Unlike psychopaths, whom pop culture encourages us to believe are simply evil, Gagne argues that sociopaths have trouble internalising “learned social emotions” such as “empathy and remorse”. Useful to know, especially if you plan to go into the music industry: when Gagne worked as a talent manager, she relates, “my psychological horizons began to expand. Suddenly, I no longer felt like the only sociopath in the world.”
Troubles of the mind, it is often suggested, might be related to troubles of the guts: inflammation or the wrong kind of bacteria in the viscera. Elsa Richardson’s Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut (Profile) surveys ideas about our digestive organs, from the suggestion by the Greek physician Galen that the stomach has its own intelligence, through dramatic metaphors of the body politic, and ideas of the intestines as a bustling Victorian kitchen, a delicate garden or an implacable enemy of human progress. In the 17th century, a hermit named Roger Crab became famous for eating only “Herbes and Roots”, which may be going a bit far in the wellness stakes.
A man’s “guts” could also describe his propensity to fight wars, and Kelly Clancy’s investigation into how mathematical game theory has infiltrated the institutions of state and commerce, Playing With Reality: How Games Shape Our World (Allen Lane) also contains a superb history of Kriegsspiel, or war-gaming. First invented by Prussian generals with wooden figurines and buckets of sand on tabletops, Kriegsspiel not only foreshadowed Dungeons & Dragons but came to influence geostrategic policy: a 1980s series of war games codenamed Proud Prophet in the US concluded that any limited use of nuclear weapons would escalate into global thermonuclear war, and alarmed Ronald Reagan sufficiently to pursue arms-control talks.
Could games nonetheless be diverted to emancipatory ends? That is the hope of Marijam Did’s engagingly idiosyncratic Everything to Play For (Verso): partly an exposé of modern video game production, dependent on technologies built in sweatshop conditions, and partly an ideological critique of games about shooting men in the face and so forth, in which even the colours of maps are seen to be coded: “Yellow for Africa and the Middle East signifying ‘dusty’, ‘historical’; blue for the west, that is, ‘modern’, ‘civilised’.” Luckily there exists a swath of indie games more to the author’s taste, about subjects ranging from 16th-century Bavarian monks to “a 100-metre-tall policeman overlooking a gloomy industrial Russian town”.
After all that play, what will become of our high scores when we die? Carl Öhman’s The Afterlife of Data (University of Chicago) is about what he calls your “digital corpse”. Within 50 years the number of Facebook profiles of dead people will outnumber those of the living; meanwhile, many Muslims have signed up to automated prayer services that continue to send “supplication tweets” after their deaths. We need, the author argues, a new cultural and legal framework to manage the data of the departed. Living as we do in a giant archive that surrounds and perfuses our daily lives, we are all “archeopolitans” now.
No such problem of too much information faces inquirers into the distant past, but new archaeological findings illuminate our sense of the world in bygone millennia. As Josephine Quinn’s magisterial How the World Made the West (Bloomsbury) shows, globalisation got going thousands of years ago, with the export around the Mediterranean of iron cauldrons and worship of the god Baal. Cypriot kings were writing letters to Egypt and Babylon; Cretans drank wine from Syrian goblets. All this cultural commingling should make it impossible, the author argues, to think as we used to of a monolithic “western” civilisation separate from its innumerable Indian, Levantine and Chinese influences. It’s a historiographical argument, but also one that is all too topical in an age of renewed populist irredentism and war games played out for real.
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