Review - Mismatch

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Review - Mismatch - Peter D. Gluckman & Mark Hanson

One of the most worrying signs on opening a popular science book is a plethora of introductory material (particularly if someone feels it necessary to wheel in a celebrity). It suggests either lack of content, uninspiring content or both. Mismatch starts with a foreword (yes, from TV rent-a-professor Robert Winston), a preface, an introduction and a section introduction (and compounds this with 53 pages of notes), which is a worrying start. The authors are both academics - one of my fellow reviewers regularly comes down heavily on academics who try to write popular science - I don't generally agree, but this is a prime example of a book crying out for some professional input (that's professional writing skills).

It's not that the authors can't write in an accessible way. It all starts very promisingly with the introductory tale of an expedition to visit the Sherpa people in the 1970s, and the reflections of their troubles due to living in an environment that lacks iodine in the diet - a mismatch between the environment and the biological requirements of the human being. That, of course, is the main thesis of the book - how human beings are increasingly biologically mismatched with their environment, especially the modern artificial environment that technology has created. The message is not "it would be wonderful if we lived stone age lives" - the authors recognize the huge benefits that human beings have reaped from science and technology, but also suggest we need to take action, either to change the negative aspects of the environment, or to change humans (medically or genetically) to cope better.

So far, so excellent, but the way it has been presented, it's no popular science book. After that promising introduction, the authors fall into dull textbook speak. Take a randomly selected couple of sentences - by no means the worst: "So the processes of selection include not just determinants of mature experience but also the capacity to adapt and, in a similar vein, the capacity to demonstrate flexibility or plasticity in response to environmental variation during development. These processes attempt to attain a good match between the phenotype of the individuals in a population and their environment, provided that environment is stable or varies in a predictable manner (e.g. with seasonal changes)." Anyone still awake?

Apart from the off-putting style, there is much too much biology and nowhere near enough sociology, historical context and feel for the real world. We want to know about the causes of mismatch in terms of how cultures have grown, the impact it has on real people, how we can do something about it - instead the vast majority of the book deals with the detailed biology of small aspects of the problem. I kept thinking, "okay, if I can just struggle through this bit, I'll get to the interesting bit" - unfortunately, I was still thinking this when I abruptly got dumped into the notes. An excellent concept, poorly delivered as a popular science book.

Only in hardback.

Reviewed by Jo Reed

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