Structure in Science and Art (review)

This book is based on the 1998 Darwin College Lectures, the 13th in the series, delivered at Darwin College, Cambridge, by eight experts in their disciplines. The disciplines constitute a variety of the arts and sciences. Accordingly, the essays are essentially on topics pertaining to art or science, with only the occasional reference to interdisciplinary matters. The following review is a brief synopsis of each essay.

Simon Conway Morris is a world-renowned paleontologist. Readers of Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life (1989) will remember him as one of Gould's heroes for his work on the Cambrian explosion as revealed in the Burgess Shale. Morris begins by pointing to the recent wave of materialist interpretations of Darwin's evolutionary theory (e.g. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett), which leads him into the issue of structure, from DNA through amino acids to proteins, with evidence of a remarkable order in the structure of these layers. Morris does not use the term "design"—but in light of his introductory anti-materialist discussion, it did come to mind. This interpretation is reinforced by his discussion of the eye, a very complex organ that some have argued cannot be explained by natural selection alone; Darwin himself confessed that the eye made him shudder. Morris presents the evolutionary argument for the eye, yet points to the quasi-leaps in the logic needed to sustain the theory.

Alan H. Cottrell and David G. Petti-for are metallurgists who show how structure plays a role in the properties of metals—from the smallest (elec-trons) to atoms (atomic bonding) to microstructures (molecular bonding) to the macroscopic (with no visible internal structure). In particular they show that often (but not always) the latter properties are dependent upon the former ("lower") ones.

Shobana Jeyasingh is a choreographer, founder and director of the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company (London), writing on the differences among the classical and modern techniques of both Indian and Western dance. She shows that in dance, spatial structure is always imbedded in time.

John Dixon Hunt is a well-known author and editor specializing in landscape architecture, or "designed landscape" as he calls it. His essay takes as its starting point the sixteenth-century idea of the three natures: first, natural geological features; second, human agrarian transformations; and third, human gardens, an aesthetic extension of the second. He argues that, since the eighteenth century, the ruling guide about the third nature stems from Horace Walpole's essay in which he made the case for natural and informal gardens that blended with nature, rather than more formal and overtly structured ones. But Hunt thinks Walpole imposed too rigid a system of constraints upon landscape architecture. Hunt makes his case against a return to an unspoiled nature with three examples—Yosemite, Delphi, and Rochefort sur Mer—showing how the land was restructured by human invention and imagination.

John Meurig Thomas, chemist, writes on the molecular structure of minerals and gemstones as uncovered by X-ray crystallography (or diffraction). He shows how this technique is used in fashioning new materials and substances, from fabrics to fuels. He presents an interesting example of the molecular structure of the catalyst ZSM-5, developed by Mobil Oil, whose pattern is geometrically the same as that displayed on the wall of an eleventh-century mosque in Baku, Azerbaijan. Interesting, but not surprising: Islamic art is well known for its myriad of geometrical patterns; and both nature and humans are constrained by similar rules.

John Knott's expertise is in metallurgy and engineering, and thus he discusses the stresses and strains of engineering structures. Looking at many spectacular failures of buildings, bridges, planes, and ships, he tries to answer the question, Why did they fail? Some of the discussion is quite technical, such as on the recent method of fracture mechanics to analyze the effects of cracks.

Mary Kaldor is a director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics, and as...