routers follows a power law”, the notion ofNP complete problems and the travelling-salesman problem. Regrettably, the basicFigure 6.1, which is meant to illustrate apower-law degree distribution, is of poorquality and it would been more informativeto plot power-law behaviour on a double-logarithmic scale. Overall, however, Bara-bási has pitched the presentation at a highlyaccessible level.

Nexus is a very similar book. Written byMark Buchanan, a science writer and physicsdoctorate, it gives a cogent and engagingdescription of recent developments in complex networks. There is much overlapwith Linked, in both content and style. ButBarabási’s book is more focused and followsmany of his own very important contribu-tions, whereas Buchanan’s provides a slightlybroader perspective but sometimes straysfrom the topic of networks.

Both books are extremely valuable con-tributions to the popular-science literatureand I enjoyed them immensely. I wouldenthusiastically recommend them to myown family members. It is remarkable andgratifying to see excellent popularizations ofa burgeoning field of scientific research whilemany developments are still in progress. ■

Sidney Redner is in the Center for BioDynamics,the Center for Polymer Studies, and in theDepartment of Physics, Boston University, Boston,Massachusetts 022152, USA.

A right royal feudThe Correspondence of JohnFlamsteed, First AstronomerRoyal: Volume 3, 1703–1719Compiled and edited by Eric G. Forbes,Lesley Murdin & Frances WillmothInstitute of Physics: 2001. 1,104 pp. £199, $298.50

Owen Gingerich

Had this long-awaited third and final vol-ume of John Flamsteed’s correspondenceappeared 170 years ago, it would have created consternation, incredulity and a serious scandal in Victorian Britain. Sir IsaacNewton, a national hero, the paragon of scientific insight and moral rectitude, apoth-eosized in Westminster Abbey, would havebeen exposed as a conniving, arrogant bullywho had embarked on a campaign ofdefamation against the upright, albeit strait-laced, mathematicus regius. This book is thedocumentation of Newton’s confrontationwith the hapless Reverend John Flamsteed,the first astronomer royal.

Today the shock value is considerablydiminished, for the news was in fact broken in1835 to a disbelieving British public by Fran-cis Baily in his An Account of the Rev. JohnFlamsteed, the First Astronomer-Royal. But

now, at long last, the entire correspondence is available, with detailed notes to clarifynumerous references blurred by the passageof nearly three centuries. The previous twovolumes showed the once-friendly collabora-tion between Newton and Flamsteed gradu-ally fade to an arm’s-length relationship. Inthis, the thickest of the three volumes, theinteraction comes to a boiling feud, climax-ing in a letter dated 22 December 1711 whenFlamsteed informed his former assistant andconfidant, Abraham Sharp, that a furiousNewton had called him (horrors!) a puppy.

In hindsight we can see that Flamsteedwas an extraordinarily competent, obsti-nately self-motivated and highly drivenobservational astronomer worthy of havinghis correspondence edited in detail. But hewas not a genius like Newton, who, in hisarrogance, recognized his superiority andcould scarcely disguise his feelings that incomparison the astronomer royal was a merepup. Flamsteed was not about to concede hislesser ability, and a substrate of jealousy andattempted one-upmanship is scarcely con-cealed in his letters to Sharp, who providedthe perfect foil. (The correspondencebetween this pair comprises nearly half of thesurviving letters in this volume, as opposedto those whose existence is merely deduced.)

In the early years covered in this volume,the relationship between these two egos wasstill sufficiently cordial for Newton to sendFlamsteed a copy of his Opticks in 1704. “Iwas delighted with it till I came to pag 72.73where I found he commited a great fault,”Flamsteed confided to James Pound, anotherastronomer. “Mr N came down to see me, Ishewed him the error of his assertion and aneasy experiment whereby it might be proved

on our earth that the rays of light spreadinghad no such monstrous effects as he imag-ined. He gave me the heareing quietly andmade me no answer.”

But from there on the relations wentdownhill. Newton “has been lately muchtalkt of but not much to his advantage”,Flamsteed wrote to Sharp in 1709. “Our[Royal] Society is ruined by his close politickand cunning forecast [design] I fear pastretrieveing for our Drs Transactions havebeen twice burlesqt publickly and now wehave had none published I think this fourmoneths.”

By the time the second edition of New-ton’s Principia was published in 1713, communications between the two men hadcompletely deteriorated. Flamsteed zeroedin on the lunar theory — precisely the areawhere Newton had been so keen to get theastronomer royal’s observations, and theroot of the great controversy between them.Flamsteed wrote to Sharp that Newton’s sixthequation “is not allowed by the Heavens”,implicitly admitting that he had 112 observa-tions that Newton had not seen. The three-body lunar problem was very complex, and itwould be many years before the gravitationaltheory was tested using enough terms to givepredictions independently of empiricallydetermined coefficients. If Newton had hadaccess to Flamsteed’s observations, no doubthe would have fudged the theory enough tobring the coefficients into line with theempirical data.

Meanwhile, Flamsteed gave grudgingadmiration to the gravitational theory,although he probably didn’t understand itvery well. It was becoming increasingly obvi-ous that the periods of Jupiter and Saturnhad long-term variations, and that thesemight be explained by their mutual attrac-tions. About the great comet of 1680, Flamsteed wrote: “This is the consequenceof Keplers doctrine of Magneticall fibres,improved by Sir Chr. Wren and prosecutedby Sir I. Newton and I thinke I can lay someclaime to a part of it…” Newton had earlierargued that two comets were involved,whereas Flamsteed believed it was a singlecomet that had undergone a hairpin turnnear the Sun. When Newton capitulated, itproduced strong input for his concept ofuniversal gravitation. Flamsteed, however,had placed the turn in front of the Sun,rather than around it, and it was just his fantasy that he deserved part of the credit forthe gravitational theory.

Although the relations with Newton takecentre stage in this volume, there are manyfascinating subthemes as well. In 1714 Flam-steed was appointed a judge for proposalsseeking the £20,000 prize for a method tofind longitude at sea, and hopeful inventorsput their cases to him. Detailed descriptionsof brilliant auroral displays fill a number ofletters. Their cause was still unknown, but

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Although Flamsteed (above) showed exceptionalability, in Newton’s eyes he was a mere “puppy”.

SPL

© 2002 Nature Publishing Group

Flamsteed was intrigued, and near the end ofhis life he remarked to Sharp: “You see thatneither Age nor Infirmitys, nor any discor-agements hinder me from seeking afterknowledg and Truth.”

Particularly revealing were the now-forgotten amateur astronomers who wrotedetailed letters comparing their observa-tions with a variety of competing astronomi-cal tables. Clearly the “great inequality” ofJupiter and Saturn was raising its head, not to be solved till the end of the eighteenth century. In the final paragraph Flamsteedwrote to Sharp, a month before his death, heremarked: “but Saturn and Jupiter will findworke for those that come after us.” ■

Owen Gingerich is at the Harvard-SmithsonianCenter for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.

Evolution bydesign?No Free Lunch: Why SpecifiedComplexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligenceby William A. DembskiRowman & Littlefield: 2002. 432 pp. $35, £27

Brian Charlesworth

Newton believed that his discoveriesrevealed the Universe to be subject to the“counsel and dominion of an intelligent andpowerful Being”. A century later, Laplacefamously remarked that “I had no need of that hypothesis”, after completing his revision of celestial mechanics. The wholeenterprise of modern science is built on theassumption that nature can be understoodwithout appealing to the intervention ofgods or goblins. Most people would agreethat it has been remarkably successful.

William Dembski and his fellow advo-cates of “Intelligent Design” want to turn theclock back. They claim that darwinian evo-lution is inadequate to explain the intri-cate adaptations that can be seen ineven the simplest single-celled organ-ism. Their position differs from that ofthe biblical creationists in that they acceptthe scientific estimates of the age of the Earthand the Universe, and even allow a limitedrole for evolutionary processes such as nat-ural selection. Their arguments are dressedup with a good deal of philosophical andmathematical formalism, but conclude withan appeal to the continual intervention of an unobservable designing intelligence in the course of nature. This smacks of theMiddle Ages.

Dembski uses two arguments, neither ofwhich is new. The first is based on the prob-lem of “specified complexity”: the improba-bility of assembling a functioning complex

system by randomly combining numerousindividual components. This is a variant ofHoyle and Wickramasinghe’s old claim thatthe probability of assembling a functioningprotein out of a random set of amino acids issimilar to that of Concorde being construct-ed by a tornado hitting a junkyard. As Darwin made abundantly clear, this is notthe way that evolution by natural selection is thought to work. Rather, a step-by-stepadjustment of individual characters occurs,each of which is advantageous in terms ofdarwinian fitness.

After a good deal of twisting and turning,Dembski concedes that this model of adap-tive evolution can indeed work, and producethe appearance of design. But he then arguesthat there is still no “free lunch”, since we haveto be able to explain the trajectory over timeof the relationships between character statesand fitness. According to him, this requiresthe intervention of an intelligent designer,rather than the interaction of an evolvingpopulation with a changing physical andbiotic environment. This ignores the largebody of biological evidence on the emergenceof evolutionary novelties in response to new environments, seen on a small scale inisland radiations such as Darwin’s finches,and on a large scale in such events as the evolution of mammalian groups after the

extinction of the dinosaurs.

The second argument is that of “irre-ducible complexity” — that a piece of biological machinery made up of many integrated components, such as a bacterialflagellum, may fail to work if even one ofthem is removed. This is taken to imply that itcould not have evolved via a series of func-tional intermediates. Again, this argumentwas considered by Darwin in his famous discussion of the eye. Darwin pointed outthat, although we have no evidence about theactual historical course of events that led tothe evolution of the vertebrate eye, we dohave many different types of eyes represen-ted among living animals, ranging from simple light-sensitive cells to the elaboratecamera-like eyes of cephalopods and verte-brates. A series of gradual steps leading fromthe simplest up to the most elaborate eye canbe reconstructed, each of which involves alight receptor that is of use to its possessor.

Like other historical sciences, evolution-ary biology attempts to interpret the past inthe light of processes that can be observed tobe acting today. The direct record of whatactually happened, as revealed in the fossilrecord, is necessarily incomplete, especiallywith respect to very remote events such as theorigin of life itself. Nevertheless, we can ask ifwhat we see in the living world, both in thepast and today, is consistent with what isexpected from our models of evolution. Thescientific literature on evolution is full ofexamples of people trying to do just that. For example, if a lack of intermediates is aproduct of the incompleteness of the fossilrecord, we would expect to see more andmore discoveries of intermediate forms astime goes by. Human evolution provides anexcellent example of this, with the fossil discoveries of the twentieth century pro-viding a resounding confirmation of Darwin’s hypothesis of an African origin ofmodern humans.

In contrast, Dembski prefers to fill up the gaps in our knowledge by invoking anagent whose acts have no observable con-sequences. He smugly refuses to provideany details of what the designer has in mind.

His theory can explain anything, and there-fore explains nothing. If one tries to imaginewhat the designer is like by looking at the

facts of biology, one is likely to come to rather uncomfortable conclusions.As J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1932: “Blakeexpressed some doubt as to whether Godhad made the tiger. But the tiger is inmany ways an admirable animal. We havenow to ask if God made the tapeworm.And it is questionable whether an affir-mative answer fits in either with what we

know about the process of evolution or whatmany of us believe about the moral perfec-tion of God.” ■

Brian Charlesworth is at the Institute for Cell,Animal and Population Biology, University ofEdinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JT, UK.

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Azurite, found in Chessy, France. Taken fromPhotographic Guide to Minerals of the Worldby Ole Johnsen (Oxford University Press,£17.99, $29.95), originally published in Danish.

Rocky blues

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