Category Archives: Science

Arts, Books, History, Nature, Science

Book Review: The Origin of Language

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: According to an evolutionary biologist, it takes a village to raise a child. And that’s why we started talking to each other

THE story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by strutting and brawling males, with females tagging along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.

The origins of our species’ exceptional communication skills constitute one of the more nebulous zones of the larger evolutionary narrative, because many of the bits of the human anatomy that allow us to communicate – notably the brain and the vocal tract – are soft and don’t fossilise. The linguistic societies of Paris and London even banned talk of evolution around 1870, and the subject only made a timid comeback about a century later. Plenty of theories have been thrown into the evidentiary void since then, mainly by men, but now evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman, of the University of Sydney, has turned her female gaze on the problem. Unlike a baby chimp that can cling to its mother, a human infant is entirely helpless for years.

Her theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is compelling: language evolved in parallel with caring for our “underbaked” newborns, because looking after and caring for a helpless human baby on the danger-filled plains of the African savannah required more than one pair of hands (and feet). It needed a group among whom the tasks of food-gathering, childcare, and defence could be divided. A group means social life, which means communication. Social bonding meant language evolved to negotiate help, share information about infant safety, and for those bonds to be necessarily strengthened to keep “helpless” infants alive.

The evidence to support Beekman’s theory isn’t entirely lacking, but a lot of it is, as a matter of course, circumstantial. We know that the compromise that natural selection hit upon to balance the competing anatomical demands of bipedalism (walking upright and narrowing pelvises) and an ever-expanding brain was to have babies born early (before that brain and its bony casing were fully formed).

One of the discoveries of the newly feminised wave of evolutionary science has been that alloparents – individuals other than the biological parents who contribute parenting services – played a critical role in ensuring the survival of those half-developed human children. Another is that stone-age women hunted alongside men. In the past it was assumed that hunting bands were exclusively male, and one theory held that language arose to allow them to cooperate. But childcare was another chore that called for cooperation, probably also between genders, and over years, not just hours or days.

Fortuitously, the reconfiguration of the head and neck required to accommodate the ballooning brain had a side-effect of remoulding the throat, giving our ancestors more control and precision over their utterances. With the capacity to generate a large range of sounds came the ability to convey a large range of meanings. To begin with, this was useful for coordinating childcare, but as speech became more complex and sophisticated, alloparents – particularly grandmothers – used it to transmit their accumulated knowledge. This nurtured infants who were even better equipped to survive. The result of this positive feedback loop was Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of a once diverse lineage.

Regrettably, critics are likely to highlight that Beekman takes a very long time to get to this exciting idea. She does spend about half the book laying the groundwork, padding it out with superfluous vignettes as if she is worried the centre won’t hold. Once she gets there, she makes some thought-provoking observations. Full-blown language probably emerged about 100,000 years ago, she says, but only in our line – not in those of our closest relatives. “We may have made babies with Neanderthals and Denisovans,” she writes, “but I don’t think we had much to talk about.”

And whereas others have argued that language must have predated Homo sapiens, because without it the older species Homo erectus couldn’t have crossed the forbidding Wallace Line – the deep-water channel that separates Asia and Australasia – she draws on her deep knowledge of social insects to show that communication as relatively unsophisticated as that of bees or ants could have done the job. Having made a persuasive case for the role of alloparents in the evolution of language, Beekman concludes that we did ourselves a disservice when we shrank our basic unit of organisation down from the extended to the nuclear family. Perhaps, but historians including Peter Laslett have dated this important shift to the middle ages, long before the Industrial Revolution where she places it, and the damage isn’t obvious yet. Language is still being soaked up by young children, and is still a vehicle for intergenerational learning. It may take a village to raise a child, but as Beekman herself hints, a village can be constituted in different ways.

Beekman presents a radical shift in how we understand the birth of human speech. While traditional theories often credit hunting, toolmaking, or warfare as the primary drivers of complex communication, the author argues that the true catalyst was the inescapable need for cooperative childcare.

– The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman is published by Simon & Schuster, 320pp

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Arts, Books, Science, Technology

Science Books of the Year 2025

LITERARY REVIEWS

2025 felt like the year that AI really arrived. We now have access to it on our phones and laptops; it is creeping into digital and corporate infrastructure; it is changing the way many people now learn, work, and create; and the global economy rests on the stratospheric valuations of the corporate monoliths vying to control it.

Yet, the unchecked rush to go faster and further could extinguish humanity, according to the surprisingly readable and chillingly plausible If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Written by computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, the narrative argues against creating superintelligent AI able to cognitively outpace Homo sapiens in all departments. “Even an AI that cares about understanding the universe is likely to annihilate humans as a side-effect,” they write, “because humans are not the most efficient method for producing truths . . . out of all possible ways to arrange matter.” Not exactly cheery festive reading but, as the machines literally calculate our demise, the reader will finally grasp all that technical lingo about tokens, weights, and maximising preferences.

Human extinction is not a new idea, muses historian Sadiah Qureshi in Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction, shortlisted for this year’s Royal Society Trivedi science book prize. Colonial expansion and the persecution of Indigenous peoples implicitly relied on Darwinian theories about some species being fated to outcompete others. Extinction, she points out, is a concept entwined with politics and social justice, whether in the 19th-century elimination of the Beothuk people in Newfoundland or current plans to “de-extinct” woolly mammoths so they can roam the land once more. Whose land, she rightly asks.

The idea of the landscape, as well as people, having rights, is explored by Robert Macfarlane in the immersive and important Is a River Alive? By telling the stories of three rivers under threat in different parts of the world, he offers a thesis that is both ancient and radical: that rivers deserve recognition as fellow living beings, along with the legal protections and remedies that accompany it. The book shortlisted for the Wainwright prize for conservation writing, “was written with the rivers who flow through its pages”, he declares, using pronouns that cast away any doubt as to his passion for the cause.

That awe at the natural world is shared by biologist Neil Shubin, who has led expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica and takes the reader to the Ends of the Earth (Oneworld), also shortlisted for the Royal Society science book prize. “Ice has come and gone for billions of years . . . has sculpted our world and paved the way for the origin of our species,” Shubin says. But those geographical extremes are increasingly vulnerable, as climate change intensifies and treaties come under strain. Polar exploration it may be, but without the frostbite.

Just below the north pole, inside the Norwegian permafrost, lies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, intended to help humanity revive after an apocalypse. It contains a consignment from the first ever seed bank, started in the 1920s by Russian plant scientist Nikolai Vavilov, who desired to see the ending of famine. In The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad (Sceptre), a highly rated contender for this year’s Orwell prize, historian Simon Parkin uncovers the moving story of Vavilov and his colleagues, who fought to protect their collection as the city came under siege in 1941. Vavilov fell out of scientific and political favour, and was imprisoned with terrible consequences.

Super Ages (Simon & Schuster), by Eric Topol – the cardiologist and medical professor who recently conducted a review into the digital future of the NHS – has been studying the “Wellderly” effect, those who seemingly defy the rigours of ageing, by offering evidence-based tips on longevity. Breakthroughs such as weight-loss drugs and AI will further change the game on chronic diseases, he promises. There’s hope that 80 really is the new 50.

Two elegant offerings this year from neurologists stand out, for using patient stories to tell us something about ourselves. In The Age of Diagnosis (Hodder), Suzanne O’Sullivan courageously questions medicine’s well-intentioned enthusiasm for attaching labels – such as ADHD, or anxiety – to aspects of the human condition. This is sensitive political territory, given the public conversation about the 2.8m people who are economically inactive due to long-term illness, but it deserves a hearing. And in Our Brains, Our Selves (Canongate), winner of the Royal Society prize, Masud Husain sensitively explores how our sense of identity can go awry when disease strikes. The story of the woman who thought she was having an affair with a man who was really her husband illustrates that “the way in which people behave can be radically altered [by brain disorders], sometimes shockingly so”.

Proto (William Collins) features in a geography-of-sorts publication. Science writer Laura Spinney’s fluid account of how Proto-Indo-European – a painstakingly reconstructed ancient tongue – became the precursor for so many languages, whose descendants gave us Dante’s Inferno, the Rig Veda (the oldest scripture in Hinduism), and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. “Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European,” Spinney writes, who sets out on a global scientific odyssey that uses evidence from linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to piece together its history.

The biography Crick (Profile) by Matthew Cobb deserves a special mention, which gives us the definitive backstory of one of the towering figures of 20th-century science. Born in Northampton into a middle-class family, Francis Crick was an unexceptional young physicist who, with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, went on to codiscover the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, and win a Nobel prize. Cobb captures the intellectual restlessness of a man who chased problems (and women) rather than disciplines, and who mixed with artists and challenged poets. Crick, who died in 2004 in California, spent his later career trying to unravel the secrets of consciousness.

Anyone left intellectually unsated by Oppenheimer-mania will relish Destroyer of Worlds (Allen Lane), in which physicist Frank Close ventures beyond the Manhattan Project to tell the gripping and unnerving story of the nuclear age. Beginning with the 19th-century discovery of a smudge on a photographic plate, Close spins a history that, via Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and a lot of nimbly explained science, ends seven decades later with the Tsar Bomba, a Soviet weapon detonated in 1961.

It was second in explosive power only to the meteorite impact that wiped out Tyrannosaurus Rex and the dinosaurs. A big enough hydrogen bomb, Close writes, “would signal the end of history. Its mushroom cloud ascending towards outer space would be humanity’s final vision.”

Avoid telling superintelligent AI.

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Health, Medical, Science

Menopause misery. HRT isn’t the only answer

HEALTH

DR MAX PEMBERTON, an NHS psychiatrist and medical doctor, wrote recently on the significant shift in many doctors’ attitude towards Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). For far too many years, peri- and post-menopausal women have to had to fight hard for their right to access this medication.

An increasing number of doctors are now open to the idea that prescribing HRT can have real benefits for their patients – and, undoubtedly, this has made a life-changing difference for many women. Even though some 13million women in the UK are going through the menopause, it is estimated that one in four have to visit their GP at least three times before getting appropriate treatment.

Last year, official draft guidelines were issued to GPs which said alternative treatments should be considered. These included talking therapies “alongside or as an alternative to” HRT to help reduce menopause symptoms such as insomnia, low mood, and hot flushes. These guidelines have now been revised with health officials backtracking after accusations of “medical misogyny” – the implication being that menopausal symptoms were “all in the mind”. The guidance issued by NICE now advises that HRT should be offered as the first line of treatment. Some may believe this a positive development, but Dr Pemberton is unsure.

The medic is known to be a keen fan of HRT and he has seen many patients’ lives transformed by it. But he goes on to say that HRT isn’t suitable for everyone and that talking therapies can help those women presenting with symptoms that have a psychological component.

Dr Pemberton says that many women talk about no longer feeling like themselves, a disconcerting sense of something having changed, a vague undercurrent of unease, despair, and discombobulation. Trying to address what causes this turmoil is far more complicated than simply a blip in hormone levels. And neither can it be explained away by a woman’s dissatisfaction with life and her sense of loss and malaise as a chemical reaction.

That’s not to say that hormones don’t play an important part. Medical professionals know that fluctuations in hormones can be responsible for low and poor mood.

Over the years, Dr Pemberton has seen far too many women struggling to cope and for whom HRT has been hugely beneficial – helping them, for instance, to manage anxiety caused by the menopause.

But the medic also believes there are other factors that contribute to a woman’s sense of losing herself. He points out that low mood and anxiety are a result of complex social and psychological factors, rather than simple biology.

Changes to the body, disrupted sleep, hot flushes, and so on, he says, can make any woman feel out of control and depressed.

Dr Pemberton documents and records other issues he’s heard women talk about – for example, erratic mood swings and out-of-character behaviour. There are stories of women having affairs, quitting their jobs, or leaving their husbands around the menopause.

While some would seek to blame this all on fluctuations in hormone levels, the evidence for this isn’t that compelling.

The clinician says it’s not at all clear that drops in oestrogen and progesterone, the female sex hormones that start to decline in menopause, are entirely responsible.

Rather, the medic believes that the menopause acts like a ticking clock. It suddenly makes women open their eyes and review their lives. Much of the trauma and emotional turmoil that besets many women as they navigate menopause isn’t the consequence of fluctuating hormones but of a re-evaluation of their life’ situation. For many, their sense of self and identity is closely bound up with their roles within their family, particularly those who are mothers, who may feel bereft at the prospect of an empty nest.

It is also a cruel aspect of the inequality between the sexes that women have to contend with a society that’s more judgmental about how woman age than men. For a lot of women in their 50s and 60s, they have given the best years of their lives to other people and their careers, and now they’re not sure why. A vast number of menopausal women now feel invisible.

Dr Pemberton has had many menopausal and post-menopausal women attending his clinics and hearing the sad story that they no longer feel like a woman.

It is here, he says, that these people would surely benefit from having the time and space to explore and discuss their feelings and situation. That’s where talking therapies can play a vital role for many who have become desperately unhappy.

In the opinion of Dr Max Pemberton, the answer to many complex problems precipitated by the menopause aren’t always going to be found in HRT pills, patches, and gels.

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