Will technology kill humanity?

Colin Barras, contributor

Species don't hang around forever. Homo sapiens has already notched up a mind-boggling 200,000 years on Earth. Is the end nigh? The geological statistics suggest not - the average mammal species celebrates its millionth birthday long before it begins to slip towards oblivion. But we are no average species, and there has long been a niggling fear that we have put ourselves on the fast track to self-annihilation.

The Fate of the Species purposefully scratches that itch. Here, Fred Guterl, executive editor of Scientific American, explores in stark detail some of the many ways in which our technological success could sow the seeds of our destruction. Guterl assumes the role of unapologetic pessimist well, walking us through a series of potential catastrophes in neat and punchy prose. It is compelling and unnerving reading.

But though his subtitle includes "Why the human race may cause its own extinction", Guterl's thought experiments never quite succeed in completely destroying humanity. Granted, he explains how our activities may contribute to the deaths of billions, by accident or design - but billions remain standing after each of Guterl's disasters has run its course. At one point he admits that it will require nothing less than a perfect storm of technological factors to obliterate the human race.

And while the book buzzes with the very latest in potentially lethal threats - synthetic biology that may spawn a devastating virus, sophisticated malware that could take down our power grids - it is revealing that some familiar hazards from yesteryear are relegated to mere footnotes. Nanotechnology, we read, has lost its sinister sheen for an almost disappointingly mundane reason: research has yet to invent a way to deliver enough power to allow tiny machines to achieve their malevolent missions.

Maybe the threats outlined in The Fate of the Species will also lose their killer edge with time. Or maybe not. Either way, as Guterl concludes, humans will probably muddle through.

Book information
The Fate of the Species by Fred Guterl
Bloomsbury
?18.99/$25

How does a bee know where it is heading?

Henry Nicholls, contributor

Clocks, calendars, maps, compasses and technologies like GPS - with these inventions we may finally be able to rival the navigational talents present elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

Animals on the move face formidable challenges and have evolved brilliant strategies to overcome them. The sun, moon and stars, and the Earth's magnetic field, might seem like obvious cues on which to take a bearing, yet the ways that animals use them are ingenious. Less obvious but no less impressive are the body clocks, visual colour gradients, olfactory memory and cognitive maps that are also exploited in the name of orientation.

In Nature's Compass, husband-and-wife pairing of evolutionary biologist James Gould and science writer Carol Grant Gould tour these talents. They reveal how the butterfly Danaus plexippus, for instance, "employs an internal clock, calendar, compass, and map to commence and measure the two-thousand-mile annual journey to Mexico - all with a brain that weighs only a few thousandths of an ounce."

Not content with just detailing these marvels of nature, the authors aim to set the record straight and champion the spatial awareness of animals. "We are guilty of a condescending anthropomorphism, reading into other orders of beings our own blindnesses and computational limitations," they write.

Using a small cast of model species, including the desert ant, bumble bee, homing pigeon, salmon and migratory birds, they cover the breadth of orientation and navigation strategies on offer. In the course of this journey, there are glimmers of experimental detail, like researchers gluing pig bristles to the legs of ants, moving hives to flummox bees or mounting magnetic-field disrupters to the heads of pigeons - all cunning strategies to manipulate animal perception of the world and find out what it means for navigation.

Unfortunately, the authors do not dwell on the human protagonists involved in these studies and the drama of these historical moments is largely lost, even when they describe the pioneering work in which they themselves had a hand. As a consequence, Nature's Compass loses its way, making for a difficult read on a fascinating topic.

Book information
Nature's Compass by James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould
Princeton University Press
?19.95/$29.95

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