Of these two books, both of which contain many fascinating facts about animals, I found Do Animals Think? much the more puzzling. Clive Wynne writes that what interests him is "the range of attitudes in our society towards animals". But in fact only one such attitude interests him - that of people who think non-humans are more like ourselves than used to be believed. As the dust jacket puts it, [...]

James Lovelock is the inventor of the idea of Gaia, which, in his own words, is "the hypothesis, the model, in which the earth's living matter, air, oceans and land surface form a complex system which can be seen as a single organism and which has the capacity to keep our planet a fit place for life".

Earth, then, is not just an inert lump on which we happen to [...]

James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis proposes that life on earth acts as a whole in a way that keeps the planet habitable. Life is not just a passenger, but part of the system. The history of this theory illustrates in a richly entertaining manner how deeply science is entangled with the rest of our thought. Officially, scientists are supposed to judge each new theory impartially and on strictly objective criteria. In [...]

Discussions about the political nature of human beings have been violently polarised since at least the 17th century. Christopher Boehm, a professor of anthropology and director of the Jane Goodall Research Centre at the University of California, says of this feud: "One tradition is hawkish and the other dovelike, and they lead many scholars to view humans as essentially nice or essentially nasty . . . As an admirer of [...]

Steve Jones has boldly rewritten Darwin's best-seller. He closely follows the plan of the original, keeping most of the chapter headings and sub-headings, and he reprints the tremendously powerful chapter summaries by which Darwin rammed his points home. But the rest of the book simply supplies evidence from modern discoveries to complete the argument. Sometimes this involves large contributions on matters quite unknown to Darwin, notably about genetics and the [...]

Why does anybody today need to write a book proving that animals are conscious? Does anybody doubt it? The answer is yes; people doubt it if they have been put through the kind of behaviourist-inspired training that students of biology and psychology received during much of the 20th century. That training was intense. Academic prestige in many professions depended on abjuring all thought and all talk of consciousness. Only exceptionally [...]