Oxford University Press, 2008
Chapter 1: Just Going Round to the Shop
Trust: The Page 99 Test
A Reason For Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination
Faber & Faber, 2004 (paperback 2005).
Praise for the paperback:
'Brilliant' - Sunday Telegraph
'Beautifully written' - Times
'Brilliant ... beautifully written' - Daily Telegraph
And for the hardback:
'a supremely intelligent author’ - Graham Farmelo, London Sunday Telegraph
'A marvellous
book' - James Flint, New
Scientist
'a wonderful writer' - A.C. Grayling, Literary Review
'yet another brilliant
book' - Neal
Ascherson, London Observer
'a talented and witty
writer' - Paul Harvey FRS, Times
Higher Education Supplement
As We
Know It:
Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind
Granta, 1999.
"Utterly fascinating
... a
beautiful and moving picture of evolution." - Andrew Marr, Observer
Dope
Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground
Latest
edition Granta,
2003.
"The best,
most
perceptive and most authoritative account of the British drug scene
ever." - Will Self
Interview about Dope Girls, Waterstone's Online.
This is a site I created to accompany my book The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science, which appeared in 1995.
All
my articles on the New Statesman
site
Who
can you trust? (New Statesman
26 June 2008)
How
Britain can help Poles (newstatesman.com, 5 June 2008
Review of Richard Fortey's Dry Store Room No. 1 (London Independent 15 February 2008)
Review of James D. Watson's Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science and J. Craig Venter's A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life (London Independent 2 November 2007)
Work, save,
go
. . . or stay?: Poles in Britain (New
Statesman 11 October 2007)
Review
of Stephen Murdoch's IQ: The Brilliant Idea That Failed (London Independent 20 July 2007)
Review of Steve Jones's Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise and Mark Lynas's Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (London Independent 13 April 2007)
A
Very Modern Migration: Poles in Britain (Catalyst March 2007)
Review
of James Hopkin's Winter
Under Water (London Independent 24 February 2007)
Review
of Michael Ruse's Darwinism
and its
Discontents and George Levine's Darwin Loves You (London Independent 13 January 2007)
It
Depends What
You
Mean by Difference (from 30:At
the Turning of the Tide,
Commission for Racial Equality,
November 2006)
Ideas: Neanderthals (New Statesman 30 October 2006)
Review
of Richard Dawkins's The God
Delusion (London Independent
20 September 2006)
Unknown Knowns: The Relationship
between
Inequality and Health (conference paper, September 2006)
Ideas: Enemies of the
People: on populism (New
Statesman 28 August 2006)
Ideas: Sex
on the Brain : on sex differences (New
Statesman 7 August 2006)
Ideas: From
Top to
Bottom : on equality (New
Statesman 10 July 2006)
Review
of Joel N. Shurkin's Broken Genius:
The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age
(New Statesman 3 July 2006)
Savannahstan: Beyond Africa and Asia (author's version of 'Made in Savannahstan', New Scientist 1 July 2006)
Ideas: Colour Shift: on race and science (New Statesman 12 June 2006)
Review
of Lewis Wolpert's Six
Impossible
Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief (London
Independent 21 April
2006)
Review of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (London Independent 10 March 2006)
This
Racist Undercurrent in the Tide of Genetic Research (London Guardian
17 January 2006)
Review
of Robert Sapolsky's Monkeyluv, and
Other Lessons on Our Lives as Animals (London Independent 11 January 2006)
Poland's
Beacon for Europe (openDemocracy 25 October 2005)
Review of
Paweł Huelle's Mercedes-Benz
(New Statesman 3
October 2005)
Review of Richard Wilkinson's The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick
Societies Healthier (Prospect
September 2005)
Review of Travis Elborough's The Bus We Loved: London's Affair with the Routemaster (London Independent 27 September 2005)
Dad
and Son Walk the South Downs (London Guardian
24 September 2005)
Review
of Steven Mithen's The
Singing
Neanderthals (London Independent
29 July 2005)
Ebu Gogo, Dwarf or Hobbit? (author's
version of 'The Little Troublemaker', New
Scientist 18 June 2005)
Down Town (The Brighton Moment)
Review of Ian McEwan's Saturday (London Independent 4 February 2005)
Why an Unequal Society is an
Unhealthy Society (New Statesman
26 July 2004)
Review of Michael Marmot's Status Syndrome (London Independent, 18 June 2004)
Darwin Day and the Peppered Moths (Independent on Sunday London section 29 February 2004)
Nasal Gazing: the Common Cold (London Big Issue 12 January 2004)
John Maynard Smith (New Statesman 14 July 2003)
Dad
and Son Read E. Nesbit
(2nd
article on page, London Guardian 23 April 2003)
Genes and the Nation State (Independent on Sunday London section 16 March 2003)
Review of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of
Human Nature (London
Independent 14
September 2002)
Boom
or Bust: intro to
'Drugs
Uncovered', (London Observer, April 2002)
Unity
is Health: An Evolutionary Left (author's version of 'An
Evolutionary Left', Prospect
October 2001)
So What Tribe Do You Belong To? (New Statesman 30 July 2001)
Market Eugenics (Prospect May 2000)
Handaxes: Products
of Sexual Selection? Marek Kohn & Steven Mithen (Antiquity
73, 1999)
Views for the Left (London Independent on Sunday 24 May 1998)
The Chemical
Generation and its Ancestors: Dance Crazes and Drug Panics across Eight
Decades (International Journal of Drugs Policy
8/3, 1997)
Cinderella Revisited (London Independent on Sunday 24 November 1996)
Drive an Escort, not a Ferrari, and be happy (London Independent on Sunday 16 June 1996)
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In July 2007 I had the privilege of accompanying a group of British school students on the Ice Edge expedition, sailing around Svalbard to the edge of the Arctic ice. I wrote an article based on the trip for the New Statesman. |
Edinburgh International
Book Festival, with Robert Hinde, Thursday 14 August, 2pm.
Thinking
Allowed, on Trust, with Onora O'Neill; presented by Laurie Taylor,
BBC Radio 4.
Interview
with ReadySteadyBook
The Royal Institution asked scientists, writers and the Archbishop
of Canterbury about their favourite
science books. My response:
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Mason & Dixon, by Thomas
Pynchon.
‘”The mists rise up out of the Bog. There she is, full, spherickal ...
the last time I shall see her as a Material Being ... when next
appearing, she will have resum'd her Deity.” Maskelyne will edit this
out, which is why Mason leaves it in his Field Report.’ Thus Pynchon
imagines the eighteenth-century astronomer Charles Mason observing a
Transit of Venus: subtle phrasing, prose that sustains lasting
pleasure, mischief, irony and wit; powerfully imparting a sense of
science in a world still haunted and occult, and reminding the reader
of all that is absent from conventional science writing. |
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The right, of course, is still
with
us; robust structures remain to uphold individualism and the pursuit of
wealth. There is also plenty of room in the current orthodoxy for
liberalism and conservatism of all kind of stripes. What’s left out?
Equality and solidarity—which takes us back to the egalité and
fraternité of the French
revolution, where the terms 'left' and 'right' came in. These seem to
be fundamental values, intuitively recognised as the basis of fair and
healthy social relations, so we may expect that they will reassert
themselves. But as dominant ideologies fail to give them their fair
dues, they will reappear in marginal and often disagreeable guises.
Social solidarity may be advanced within narrow group solidarities;
equality may be appropriated by demagogues. |