Book Review - Pulse by Robert Frenay, The Sunday Times

[applegrove]

The Sunday Times - Books
The Sunday Times December 10, 2006
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Science
Nature’s greatest lessons
REVIEWED BY MATT RIDLEY



GENESIS MACHINES: The New Science of Biocomputing
by Martyn Amos
Atlantic £18.99 pp353

PULSE: How Nature Is Inspiring the Technology of the 21st Century
by Robert Frenay
Little Brown £15.99 pp545


"SKIP.............


Pulse by Robert Frenay is a book whose subtitle implies that it is about technology that mimics nature. It is, initially, but then it becomes much more about how its author would run the world if in charge. He thinks that we are coming to the end of a “machine age” in which we based our agriculture, our town planning and our economic systems on machine analogies, whereas we must now begin to base them on analogies from ecosystems instead. A biocentric age is due to dawn, he thinks, and just in time to save us from environmental disaster. We must learn to copy rainforests, which recycle their matter and reorganise their information (DNA) as energy flows through them.

This is at least a different take on green politics, more optimistic and less allergic to technology than the stuff that emanates from many British tree-huggers (Frenay is American). And although like most greens he includes the obligatory digs at economists, unusually he tries to understand economics before patronising it. Indeed, he has a rather intriguing passage on how to use currencies that automatically depreciate to kill off what he sees as the evil of interest.

But scratch beneath the surface of what he is saying — very fluently — and there is not much more than the usual green manifesto: make all farming organic (which would starve the world in short order), stop international capital flows (which would prevent the dissipation of risk and the punishment of economic incompetence), make urban planning more imaginative (but in this country, planning is not even “planning” at all; it is bureaucratic licence-giving), and above all curb the power of corporations, which are unnatural and against the decentralised philosophy of Adam Smith.

Frenay collects blood-curdling stories about how big companies lobby, advertise and corrupt their way into government favour, and he is right that they get away with too much in politics. But to argue that they are thereby capturing the world is bizarre when you reflect how vulnerable large companies are to a supremely biological phenomenon: extinction. It’s not just that Carnegie Steel has gone the way of Diplodocus (reconstructed with Andrew Carnegie’s money); even General Motors and IBM have now had their day; while Microsoft and Google are sure to follow. If only government bureaucracies could suffer the same fate.

....SNIP"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-2488511,00.html