David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (Penguin)

David Deutsch is the most visionary thinker writing today. His scope is breathtaking. The essential premise of The Beginning of Infinity is that the scientific revolution that began in the 17th century need have no end; the only things that are not possible are those forbidden by the laws of physics. In practice, this means that Deutsch is sure that we shall be able to colonise  space, creating artificial ecosystems to sustain us.

Dutch believe that human knowledge – good explanations for natural phenomena – is the most powerful forces in the universe. True knowledge always has reach beyond its immediate sphere of application. He cites the alphabet. In early systems of written language, a symbol represented a single object; beyond that it had no reach. But an alphabetic language has no difficulty in coining new words all the time.

Even more basic is the different between tallying and mathematics. A tallying system simply counts, making notches on wood or stone. The tallies cannot be manipulated except by lining them up to see which is the largest. But mathematics can open up the electromagnetic spectrum or explain why the earth goes around the sun; or even tell us how to make an artificial sun.

Deutsch has plausible answers to some of the greatest mysteries of all time. Why, for instance, are flowers beautiful to us as well as the insects they have evolved to attract? Insects and flowers have the problem of communicating across an evolutionary gap. Within the same species, communication is easy – a single chemical can attract the moth to its mate. But how does a plant signal to an animal?

Flowers employ objective beauty – graded curves, symmetry with subtle variations, colour harmonies. Deutsch points out individual humans can be as different from each other, in signalling terms, as a plant and an animal. We recognise the universal symbols used by plants because by necessity we use them too. Within less varied species it is different: the hippo is beautiful to its mate but not to us.

Deutsch's overriding concept is universality. Animals have limited repertoires which are genetically programmed and can only be extended by a mutation once in a blue moon. Human beings are universal problem solvers. We can solve problems we don't yet know exist; our language is universal in that it constantly invents new concepts, and our computers are universal machines, capable of performing tasks for which they were not designed. It is this universality that leads Deutsch to conclude that human development will now extend infinitely into the future, even beyond residence on planet earth.

This is the great Life, the Universe and Everything book for our time and the answer is not 42: it is infinity. To understand precisely what Deutsch means by this, you will have to read him. Do so and lose your parochial blinkers forever.

At end of year the papers publish their lists of Books of the Year and highlights from the forthcoming year’s catalogues. There is a wood-for-the trees problem here. A single year often contains no truly great books. But the last few years have seen some truly mind-expanding popular science books. Our knowledge of life on earth is growing so rapidly and the picture that is emerging is so at odds with our lazy received viewpoints, it’s not going too far to claim that these books are essential reading if there is to be a future not entirely horrific.  This is the raw list. Over the next few weeks I’ll post commentaries on each book.

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (Penguin)

Nick Lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution (Profile)

Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Quercus)

Philip Ball, Shapes (OUP)

Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire (Profile)

Steven Mithen, After the Ice, Phoenix

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, the 10,000 Year Explosion (Basic Books)

Guy Deutscher, the Unfolding of Language (Arrow)

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (Vintage

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail (Profile)

Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now (Profile)

Wolfgang Behringer, a Cultural History of Climate (Polity Press)

Bill McGuire, Waking the Giant: How a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes (OUP)

I was very pleased to see Will Hutton, in the Observer, making a point I first made in a review of Acemoglu and Robinson’s book Why Nations Fail. The book presents analysis of wealth-making that describes what is happening to our world better than any other I’ve seen, and Hutton agrees.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the book is to demonstrate why some nations have become rich whilst others, despite possessing obviously useful resources, have remained poor.  Its great virtue is that, for all the case studies and figures, the thesis is blindingly simple. Acemoglu and Robinson divine two kinds of society: inclusive and extractive.

In inclusive societies there is no totalitarian power base; no one group has a stranglehold on wealth and innovation; there is the rule of law that protects commercial enterprise against expropriation and restrictive practices.

In extractive societies, a monopolistic group stifles commercial and technical development and retains all of the country’s wealth for a few cronies. There is no recourse to law because it only operates in favour of the ruling group. There are many case examples. Before the Civil War the American South was desperately backward because the economy was run to suit the slave-owning ruling class. There was no industry, hardly any railway lines. This was a recipe for stagnation. Acemoglu and Robinson cite the case of Sierra Leone, in which a railway  originally built by the British was torn up by the ruler (who had originally been democratically elected)  because it would threaten the trading monopoly of his friends.

But the sting in the tail of Acemoglu’s  thesis, as I pointed out in my review, is the Britain is the textbook model of inclusive society. Or used to be. The current economic model of “maximizing shareholder value”, private equity, hedge funds, huge tax avoidance schemes, very low investment in research and development, escalating inequality (exclusiveness), are all prime extractive traits. Britain is throwing away centuries of inclusive enterprise and making the transition to an extractive economy. This is catastrophic because once such as system is in place – see Zimbabwe or Russia or Egypt or countless more  – it is hard to ever escape it. How is it that the virtues of inclusiveness are being forgotten and that it has required an American and a Turkish-Armenian-American  economist  to point it out? Perhaps Will Hutton lending his voice will hasten awareness of the calamity facing us. No argument in the world deserves to be better heard and understood than this.

For me, the most memorable thing Virgina Woolf ever wrote was:  “You can't think with what fury we fall on printed matter, so long denied us by our writing!” It is an inevitable irony that the writing of books, which began in the delight  we experienced in reading them, comes to make the pleasure of reading impossible during the most intense phases of writing. With illustrated non-fiction the last stages are especially inimical to surrendering to the pleasures of  the text:  proofreading, fact-checking, writing captions, fixing layout problems, compiling the index, acknowledgements, picture credits, further reading.

I completed all these, for the book Nanoscience: Giants of the Infinitesimal (co-written with the sculptor Tom Grimsey, to be published by Papadakis in April), just in time for Christmas. I then experienced the genuine Virginia Woolf moment, falling with Woolfian fury on the rediscovered  novel Stoner, by John Williams. Highly recommended by Julian Barnes in a recent Guardian article, it is the kind of novel that Philip Larkin might have written, had he continued with fiction after his two early works.  Not exactly a cheery seasonal read, then, but the kind of book that makes you re-examine your life.

Since regulatory genes were discovered, the control of cellular processes has been seen in terms of genes switching on and off, or being driven to produce more protein or less.  Since genes are often linked in cascades, the idea took hold that they are arranged in circuits rather like the electronic circuits in a computer. In synthetic biology, simple circuits have been identified and can be used almost like electronic circuits, forming logic gates for instance.

But no one ever suspected that these genetic circuits might pulse on an off like an electrical circuit. The reason that this behaviour was obscured is that until recently gene expression was seen as the average of the activity of many cells. Now the gene expression in single cells can be detected, this pulsing behaviour is apparent.

Pulsing enables new systems of control just as it does in electronics. Instead of merely being on-off switches, genetic circuits can be modulated by frequency, amplitude or duration to achieve different effects. An important example is the human tumour suppressor gene p53. This responds differently to gamma radiation and UV light for example. Gamma radiation produces p53 activity pulses whose number is controlled by dose, whereas UV produces a sustained non-pulsing response, with amplitude and duration dependent on dose.

Reinforcing the parallels between genetic signalling and electrical circuits, Levine et al in Science write of “a simple ‘AC to DC’ convertor’ in the bacterium Bacillus subtilis.

Joe H. Levine et al, ‘Functional Roles of Pulsing in Genetic Circuits’, Science. 2013, Vol 342, pp. 1193-1200.

One of the revelations of nanotechnology has been the discovery that familiar materials, apt be overlooked, can have a new lease of life at the nanoscale. So cellulose, the basis of old-fashioned industries such as paper and cardboard, when nano-processed, has potentially many new applications as a cheap nanostructured material.

The latest candidate is rust: iron oxide. The November 29 issue of Science has a very beautiful cover image of a scanning electron micrograph of iron oxide crystals. These nanoflowers are not merely pretty. They can replace expensive, rare ruthenium, rhodium and platinum  catalysts in key organic chemistry reactions: for example, the production of anilines. Perhaps it is a good time to look again at all over-familiar materials.

Science, 2013, Vol 342, pp. 1054-55.

A fine piece by Ian Jack in the Guardian today on the folly of privatisation and outsourcing but there is more to say. It was the nation state that brought an end in human history to thousands of years of tribalism, warlordism and the rule of the robber barons. Those who come to power in government to dissolve it risk reversing all the gains that made the West successful (as detailed by historians such as Ian Morris and Neil Ferguson) and tipping us back into the nightmare of private fiefdoms, privates armies and perpetual squalid civil strife.  Only the state can run an army, a police force, have the right to tax (at present the energy utilities are taxing a helpless citizenship). If you don’t believe this you’re probably a Serco shareholder. Incidentally, it is either crass in the extreme or deeply sinister that this corporation should choose so perfectly Orwellian a name for itself.