Yesterday evening I attended an event at the Watershed in Bristol. It was part of the Festival of Ideas, and was held to celebrate the re-launch of Pelican, the non-fiction imprint of Penguin Books. Sir Allen Lane, the publishing entrepreneur who founded Penguin, was born in Bristol, so the city has a special connection with his companies.

The business plan for Pelican was to provide top quality books on a variety of complex issues that were both cheap and written in a manner accessible to the general public. I own several of them, mostly inherited from my father, though they are all in California. The imprint was closed down in 1990, but has been resurrected this year.

The new Pelican was launched with five titles. Four of the authors were on hand for the event in Bristol. Sadly the only woman, Melissa Lane, lives in the USA and could not make it. The books are as follows:

Economics: The User’s Guide, by Ha-Joon Chang (Cambridge). This sounds very promising. Chang is an amusing speaker, and he has a very important qualification for an economist: his view of the subject is not tied to a religious attachment to any particular political dogma.

Human Evolution, by Robin Dunbar (Oxford). Dunbar is already famous for having a number named after him. This book is all about how and why humans came to evolve on the plains of Africa, developing language, culture and, eventually, civilization. The book sounds interesting, but listening to Dunbar I found myself wishing that Karen Joy Fowler was there to debate human exceptionalism with him.

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991, Orlando Figes (Birkbeck). Figes has a good point that Russia’s revolution is ongoing, and what is happening now under Putin is at least in part a consequence of what happened under Yeltsin, Gorbachev and Khrushchev. However, history is notoriously subjective and I don’t know enough about Russia to judge his interpretation. To my mind the most interesting thing he talked about was how revolutions can’t be sustained over more than about three generations because by that time the young people no longer have any intellectual or emotional connection to the issues that sparked the movement. I think there are lessons there for feminism.

Greek and Roman Political Ideas, Melissa Lane (Princeton). This sounds fascinating, because so many of our political ideas are deeply rooted in the Classical world. I do wish Lane had been there to talk about it.

The Domesticated Brain, Bruce Hood (Bristol). Possibly the most interesting of the lot, especially for a science fiction writer. We know (from Dunbar’s book) that homo sapiens evolved in a period of significant environmental stress (climate change brought on by the closing of the straits between North and South America, according to last weekend’s Cosmos). We also know that we are currently undergoing rapid technological and social change, with a major climate disaster waiting in the wings.

Hood notes that humans have become domesticated. Since the last Ice Age our brains have shrunk by around 10% in size. The same phenomenon can be observed in animals that are domesticated. The lack of need to survive in the wild seems to take the edge off a species. Of course Hood isn’t arguing for some sort of Libertarian paradise in which evolution can be kickstarted. However, he is worried about how we’ll cope in the new world of social media.

Much of what gets said about the Internet by pundits reminds me of 19th Century scaremongers saying that humans could never travel fast in trains because our internal organs would get shaken around and damaged. Dunbar said at one point in the evening that it was impossible for humans to negotiate a compromise if they only interacted online. I think that’s a rather hasty judgement. After all, it took us thousands of years to develop civilization, and we’ve had social media for less time than it takes for a human to reach adulthood.

What worries Hood, and me, is what will happen while we learn to adapt to the new world. When Judeline and I were discussing friendship on Women’s Outlook earlier in the day we had touched on the fact that many people now live alone and have no local community. This is particularly hard on the elderly who have a poor grasp of technology. Hood says that being alone is significantly worse for your heath than being overweight. It is all a bit troubling.

The issue of the Internet also touches on the core philosophy of Pelican. Modern day doomsayers are quick to claim that the Youth of Today, having been corrupted by television and the Internet, simply don’t have sufficient attention span to read a whole book on a scientific theory. It is as much as they can to do absorb an infographic, allegedly. The new Pelican imprint is betting on this being wrong. I very much hope it succeeds.

I should also add that Hood’s book also touches on the development of identity. In his talk he specifically mentioned how children acquire a sense of gender. I talked to him after the event and he says he hasn’t studied trans kids himself, but he knows someone in Vancouver who is doing so. He also mentioned that other aspects of identity appear to be acquired fairly early on in life (around age 3) and are very difficult to change thereafter. These may include sexuality and even ethnic identity. This doesn’t solve the nature/nurture debate, but it does narrow the focus, and will hopefully stop people peddling “cures” for certain identities.

So yeah, I need to read Hood’s book. I shall report back.

In the meantime, best of luck to Pelican in its new incarnation. Can we have a book on cosmology next, please?