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REVIEWS ■ ■ ■ ■ www.SciAm.com/reviews

■➜ MANIPULATIVE MONKEYS: THE

CAPUCHINS OF LOMAS BARBUDAL

by Susan Perry, with Joseph H. Manson. Harvard University Press, 2008 ($45)

Looking for a good species in which to investigate the evolution of intelligence, Susan Perry and her husband, Joseph H. Manson, primatol-ogists at the University of

California, Los Angeles, came upon the capuchins. These New World monkeys have brains larger for their body size than any primate except humans, and since 1990 the couple has followed the lives of four genera-tions of capuchins in a Costa Rican rain for-est. The monkeys’ tonsured head and striking cowl grant them a vague resemblance to the monks for whom they were named. Their world may be almost as structured and ritual-istic. Not only do they interact in byzantine ways, but they evince an excellent under-standing of who is friends with whom and under what circumstances. Much of their considerable intellectual creativity is ex-pressed through devising unique rituals for testing and maintaining friendships, includ-ing sticking their fi ngers up one another’s noses and forming totem poles of up to four monkeys piled high to frighten enemies. The book is immense fun to read, as Perry melds tales of the rigors of rain forest research

Monks and Monkeys BY MICHELLE PRESS

EXCERPT

■➜ IS GOD A MATHEMATICIAN?

by Mario Livio. Simon & Schuster, 2009 ($26)

For centuries, mathematicians have been uncannily accurate in predicting the physical world. Astro-physicist Mario Livio tries to explain why. In a book with a question for the title, it is hard to resist quoting an entire paragraph of questions, but in response to what you are wondering, yes, Livio provides answers as well.

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■ You Are Not Your Brain ■ Miraculous Anticipation?

AURA

/STS

CI/N

ASA

with surprising revelations about these complex creatures.

■➜ OUT OF OUR HEADS: WHY

YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN,

AND OTHER LESSONS

FROM THE BIOLOGY

OF CONSCIOUSNESS

by Alva Noë. Hill and Wang, 2009 ($25)

Alva Noë, a University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley, philosopher and cognitive scientist, argues that after decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscien-tists, psychologists and philoso-

phers “only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious . . . has emerged unchallenged: we don’t have a clue.” The reason we have been unable to explain the neural basis of consciousness, he says, is that it does not take place in the brain. Consciousness is not something that happens inside us but something we achieve—it is more like dancing than it is like the digestive process. To understand con-sciousness—the fact that we think and feel and that a world shows up for us—we need to look at a larger system of which the brain is only one element. Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body and world. “You are not your brain. The brain, rather, is part of what you are.”

1 The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet

by Neil deGrasse Tyson. W. W. Norton, 2009 ($23.95)Tyson chronicles this country’s irrational love affair with an extraterrestrial underdog.

2 Joseph Cornell and Astronomy: A Case for the Stars

by Kirsten Hoving. Princeton University Press, 2008 ($49.50)The master of the assemblage box, artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) had an intense fascination with astronomy and the cutting-edge discoveries made during his lifetime.

3 People and the Sky: Our Ancestors and the Cosmos

by Anthony Aveni. Thames and Hudson, 2008 ($29.95) Ancient societies depended on signals in the sky for sustenance, navigation, social cohesion and political authority.

4 Hubble: Imaging Space and Timeby David Devorkin and Robert W. Smith. Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, in association with National Geographic, 2008 ($50)Stunning photographs; spare, intelligent text.

NOTABLE BOOKS: ASTRONOMY

HUBBLE view of Saturn, 1996

“The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics creates many intriguing puzzles: Does mathe-matics have an existence that is entirely independent of the human mind? In other words, are we merely discovering mathematical verities, just as astronomers discover previously unknown galax-ies? Or, is mathematics nothing but a human invention? If mathematics indeed exists in some abstract fairyland, what is the relation between this mystical world and physical reality? How does the human brain, with its known limitations, gain access to such an immutable world, outside of space and time? On the other hand, if mathematics is merely a human invention and it has no existence outside our minds, how can we explain the fact that the invention of so many mathemat-ical truths miraculously anticipated questions about the cosmos and human life not even posed until many centuries later? ”