Book Review: The Upright Thinkers

The Upright Thinkers:The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmosby Leonard MlodinowPantheon Books, 2015Leonard Mlodinov, author of the popular 2008 book The Drunkard's Walk, starts off his new book The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos with two anecdotes, both of them in a neck-and-neck contest of passive-aggressive obnoxiousness. In the first anecdote, he tells his reader about his father giving up a precious crust of bread while a prisoner in Buchenwald concentration camp in order to learn from another prisoner the solution to a mathematical problem. In the second, he relates his brief stint on the writing staff of Star Trek: The Next Generation during which he proposes a story based on the actual science of solar winds and a senior producer “stared at me for a moment, his face strangely unreadable, and then he said with great force, 'Shut up, you f-king egghead!'” Mlodinov follows up the second anecdote by telling us that once he got over his embarrassment, he “realized that what he was so succinctly telling me was that they had hired me for my storytelling abilities, not to conduct an extension school class on the physics of stars.”The clear subtext of the first anecdote is: it would be really bad form for you to criticize me. And the clear subtext of the second anecdote is: you wrote for The Next Generation??? How cool is THAT!!!The unifying note in each is self-serving, and that's an off-putting way to start a book. Readers who do the work of overcoming the mild frisson of distaste that always accompanies what's known to day as “humble-bragging” will get precious little reward for their efforts. The rest of The Upright Thinkers is every bit as off-putting as its opening gambit. The whole book bears a striking similarity to The Drunkard's Walk in its vanity and slang, and both books veer far, far too close to the shill-game pseudo-science of trash books like Superfreakonomics.The Upright Thinkers is a flag-waving paean of praise to homo sapiens:

A few million years ago, we humans began to stand upright, altering our muscles and skeletons so that we could walk in an erect posture, which freed our hands to probe and manipulate the objects around us and extended the range of our gaze so that we could explore the far distance. But as we raised our stance, so too did our minds rise above those of other animals, allowing us to explore the world not just through eyesight but with our thoughts. We stand upright, but above all, we are thinkers.

“In the single-elimination tournament called evolution,” Mlodinow writes, “all the other human species proved inadequate. Only we, due to the power of our minds, have met all survival challenges (thus far) …” It's all as shallow as it is bombastic, not only to equate specialization in human-style thinking with 'rising above' the animals who excel at other kinds of thinking (with all the teleological nonsense such assumptions always carry) but also, of course, that the quasi-mystical 'power' of the human mind is the thing that allowed mankind to win the 'tournament' at which all other species of human lost (when in fact superiority at navel-gazing offers no competitive advantage in the wild, and perhaps, just perhaps, homo sapiens utilized other things than 'the power of the mind' to win the tournament) … and, ultimately, the smugness of presuming that if there were such a tournament, it was necessarily 'single-elimination.' The book is a skin-crawling protracted example of the winners writing the history books.Mlodinow never slows down – he just keeps laying on this kind of rise-to-power gloating in chapter after chapter:

The nobility of the human race lies in our drive to know, and our uniqueness as a species is reflected in the success we've achieved, after millennia of effort, in deciphering the puzzle that is nature. An ancient, given a microwave oven to heat his auroch meat, might have theorized that inside it was an army of hardworking, pea-sized gods who built miniature bonfires under the food, then miraculously disappeared when the door was opened.

The enormous erroneous assumptions here and throughout echo the conceptual irresponsibility of The Drunkard's Walk, unfortunately. The human race has no more inherent “nobility” than any other species, of course, and countless numbers of those other species have quite strong 'drives to know' (“lizards don't ask questions,” he asserts several times, by which he can only possibly mean “lizards don't ask questions in English”); and the achievements in deciphering the puzzle of nature are nether cellular nor inherited – it's not just an “ancient” but a “modern” raised in isolation from technological education would make erroneous assumptions about how a microwave oven works; and this 'my kid could do that' entitlement is at work throughout the book, leading Mlodinow to make overreaching statements at every turn. “Today most people are comfortable with the fact that Grandma had a tail and ate insects,” he writes, for instance – a claim he must know is false, but one offered with the same kind of water-cooler overreach that characterizes the rest of the book.It's tough to guess what kind of audience Mlodinow or his editors might imagined for a book like this. Scientifically literate readers will find far too much inaccuracy and oversimplification to let them read with any enjoyment; newcomers to science writing will nevertheless commence to feel handled and manipulated by that “Grandma had a tail” smarmy tone. Maybe it's for the fans Mlodinow gained with The Drunkard's Walk. If so, there's a real danger here of diminishing returns.