DNA need not apply: Books in brief

Good Nature
Kathy Willis Bloomsbury (2024)
Trained as a palaeoecologist in the analysis of plant fossils, Kathy Willis began to study live plants only when she started working at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in Richmond, UK. There, she noticed visitors relishing plants’ fragrances, textures and shades. Then, a scientific paper alerted her to people in hospital wards having a quicker recovery when they had a view of trees rather than brick walls. Her inspiring book presents the fresh science behind such interactions. “We cannot survive without a diverse nature around us,” she concludes.
Oceans Rise Empires Fall
Gerard Toal Oxford Univ. Press (2024)
This book’s title, from a song in the 2015 musical Hamilton, refers here to the threat that climate change poses to geopolitics. For example, the world’s largest institutional consumer of hydrocarbon fuels is the US military, notes political scientist Gerard Toal — and reducing its consumption would weaken the armed forces. His book analyses competing world powers in terms of three concepts: geopolitical “fields” and “cultures” and “geospatial revolutions”. He grimly warns: “Oceans are rising. And empires may fall sooner than we expect.”
Understanding Human Diversity
Jonathan Marks Cambridge Univ. Press (2024)
Crucial as it is, our DNA does not define what makes us human, argues biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks in his short, catchy appraisal of human diversity. No chimpanzee, he remarks, ever gave her daughter a twig and said, “Use this well for collecting termites. It belonged to your grandmother.” Humans do pass on such cultural knowledge, along with their genes. Marks tactfully tackles the controversial and complex intersection of genetics and culture with ethnicity and sex, noting “Human variation is not race.”
The Story of Nature: A Human History
Jeremy Mynott Yale Univ. Press (2024)
Should humans think of themselves as “observers, participants, managers, beneficiaries or custodians” of nature, asks author Jeremy Mynott. His lively tour of an immensely diverse subject — nature’s human history — is illuminatingly illustrated with artistic images of nature such as poet and painter William Blake’s portrait of Isaac Newton obsessed with measurement. Beginning with prehistoric cave-painters, then covering agriculturalists, medievalists, romantics and more, he ends with climate change and the future.
AI Snake Oil
Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor Princeton Univ. Press (2024)
Why is there “so much misinformation, misunderstanding, and mythology” about artificial intelligence (AI), ask computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor in perhaps the best book on this controversial subject. They find that researchers, companies and the media are all responsible for this public distortion and, as with snake oil, they do so to some extent knowingly. The authors criticize companies for training their AI tools on the works of writers, artists and photographers without credit or compensation.