Atavist, Carl Zimmer, Page 3

Before the Swarm, by Nicholas Griffin. The Atavist, 2011 (Atavist app for iPhone or iPad/ Kindle/ Nook/ iBook/ Kobo)

Reviewed by Ed Yong

When we first meet Mark Moffett, the man at the centre of Before the Swarm, he is grinning about a botfly maggot that has died in his hand. Not in the palm of his hand, mind you, but implanted within the flesh.

The rest of the tale – the third in The Atavist’s growing stable of long-form non-fiction – proceeds along similar lines.

Nicholas Griffin narrates the life of an ant-loving scientist who self-describes as “Dr Bugs”, plays at both journalism and photography, and frequently disappears on long jungle odysseys. He loves the world’s most painful insect, but he loathes universities. Standing outside of the scientific establishment, he has been criticised for favouring mass media and compelling stories over testing hypotheses and collecting data. There is a compelling counterpoint, which Griffin notes early on, between the ants, whose societies revolve around “hierarchy and specialisation” and Moffett, who “can’t seem to stand either one”.

Griffin’s writing is wonderfully lean and evocative. When Moffett speaks, it is with tight snippets of dialogue (he introduces his parasite with “Have you met my botfly?” and greets the legendary E. O. Wilson with “Hi Ed”). When he is described, it is with tight, unadorned prose.

Then again, one gets the sense that Moffett doesn’t require much embellishment. He’s a writer’s dream protagonist: quotable, possessed of a rebellious streak, and prone to misadventure. He electrocutes himself! He gets kidnapped! He’s been bitten! There is a real risk here that the tale could descends into a list of amusing anecdotes – less a cohesive story, and more The Continuing and Wacky Adventures of Mark Moffett.

But just when Before the Swarm starts to veer down that direction, Griffin hits you with genuine tragedy at the midpoint. I’ll stop short of explicit spoilers but it involves the quote, “That’s a fucking krait.” It’s a turning point, and Griffin deals with it well, giving it room to breathe and ramify. It changes the feel of the earlier lists of derring-do from a Boy’s Own adventure into a tally of genuinely dangerous pursuits.

Then, in the second half, after much time with the man’s history and exploits, his ideas finally get a chance to shine. Sadly, they merely flicker. Here, arguably where it matters most, Moffett becomes a bit-player in his own story.

We learn that, riffing off E.O. Wilson, Moffett thinks that human and ant societies both follow similar rules, and develop similar features, as they get bigger. And we’re told that this is a “fresh idea” even though it feels somewhat familiar.

We’re told that Moffett advocates the idea of ant colonies as superorganisms – that is, they behave like a single being. The superlatively successful Argentine ants are the prime example: its colonies contain billions or even trillions of individuals, genetically similar and spread across entire states. But while Griffin writes about the theory’s origins a century ago, and we meet another scientist who has “written nearly 50 papers on the subject”, Moffett’s own contribution remains quite vague. Griffin says that he is “looking to move beyond simple metaphors” but then relies heavily on metaphors that liken ants to white blood cells and urban humans. The very idea of a superorganism is itself a metaphor.

The scientifically minded reader is then left with many questions. What does it actually say about ants to treat a colony as a single organism? What insights or testable predictions come of it? How has our hero actually advanced the science of superorganisms? None of these is clear. He is probably embroiled in a meaty intellectual debate, but it never truly surfaces. A fellow scientist criticises the idea of an Argentine ant supercolony for untold reasons, and Moffett is later seen attempting to dismantle the critique on untold grounds. In lieu of details, we’re left with the idea of a superorganism as nothing more than a neat framing device, rather than the dogma-shaking “controversial theory” that the standfirst promises.

We might have expected it. The first third of the story, after all, is devoted to telling us how Moffett has a predilection for evocative ideas over solid hypotheses. It’s still a sting in an otherwise great story, but ultimately it’s not a deal-breaker. While Before the Swarm fails as the story of a brave new idea, it amply succeeds as a profile of a fascinating man.

And it ends with a video of a maggot erupting from the skin of its protagonist. That helps too.

*****

Ed Yong is a British science writer who writes the award-winning blog Not Exactly Rocket Science. His work has appeared in Nature, New Scientist, the BBC, the Guardian, the Times, Wired UK, Discover, CNN, Slate, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist and more. He lives in London with his wife. He has never been impregnated by a botfly but he does rather like ants.

Blindsight, by Chris Colin. The Atavist, 2011. (Kindle Single/ Atavist App / Nook / iBook)

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

Blindsight is about what happens when narratives are interrupted, neurologically and socially. New York Times journalist Chris Colin offers a fascinating snapshot of the life-changing car accident of B-movie director Simon Lewis, whose biggest claim to fame (other than CHUD 2) was the comedy Look Who's Talking. After being hit by a van going over 70 mph, Lewis was left with one third of his right brain hemisphere shut down. But he survived, offering his doctors (and us) a stunning vista on what it feels like to live inside a very non-neurotypical brain.

Lewis spent years in recovery, living a kind of half-conscious existence in his parents' home, slowly learning to read, write, and make movies again. Despite his seemingly-miraculous return to Hollywood as a wannabe B-movie director, Lewis still thinks in ways that are almost impossible to imagine. He exists in a world of "flat time," where he remembers everything that's happened to him, but not in the correct order. He can't tell whether that meeting he had took place before or after lunch. It gives him, Colin says, a contemplative, peaceful outlook on life – one that's earned him speaking gigs at Deepak Chopra conferences, and attracted hundreds of thousands of people to his online lectures about consciousness.

More interesting than Lewis' experience of flat time, however, is his peculiar form of blindness. Though he can't consciously see anything in his left visual field, he can still — unconsciously — pick up the shapes and colors in that part of his vision. In one test, a doctor held up a piece of paper and Lewis couldn't see the paper but knew what color it was. He's been diagnosed with "blindsight," a condition in which brain injuries render a person blind – but with some cognitive loopholes that permit sight. In Lewis' case, the effect has been that he believes his mind is functioning on a subconscious level as much as it is on a conscious one.

What does it feel like to live inside such a mind? That's been the focus of Lewis' work since teaching himself to read and write again — he has plans to make a movie based on his unusual way of experiencing the world. Unfortunately his main insight appears to be similar to what you might read in a new age holistic health book. "He's come to regard [his perceptions] as a kind of sieve," Colin writes, "one that oddly inclines him toward more substantive perceptions and omits the frivolous."

One yearns for Colin to provide a kind of scientific counterpoint to Lewis' subjective experiences, explaining what possible neurological mechanisms underly them. In the Atavist app version, we do get lengthy additional text that fills in some of this background, but it might have worked better in the main body of the text itself. That's ultimately the main flaw in this essay. We don't get the outside perspective that would place Lewis' story in a larger context. Still, it's well worth reading, especially for Colin's insight into what happens to a man whose life revolves around storytelling when he loses his ability to view and to plot the narrative of his own life.

A note on text vs. app: I originally read this essay as a Kindle Single, which had none of the multimedia features of the Atavist app. When I read the Atavist version, there were a few extras, such as the scientific footnotes and some photos, which were a welcome addition. But most of the extras, like maps of every place mentioned in the story and a "timeline" of Lewis' life, were unnecessary.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, and is currently writing a book about how we'll survive the next mass extinction.

One man and his superorganism

Narrative and Neuroscience