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committed suicide in part from guilt at SPL having helped the birth of the darwinism Troubled waters ‘heresy’. If that’s the case, we would need FitzRoy: The Remarkable Story of to have evidence of what FitzRoy thought Darwin’s Captain and the his contribution had been. He was also Invention of the Weather Forecast depressed about the US Civil War and the by John and Mary Gribbin situation of Matthew Maury, an exile in Review: 2003. 336 pp. £18.99 Paris who also had a claim to have invented Evolution’s Captain: The Tragic . Almost bankrupt him- Fate of Robert FitzRoy, the Man self, FitzRoy still sent his rival money to live who Sailed Around on. And the great ‘machine’ that supported the World and promoted Darwin — in this case princi- by Peter Nichols pally in the form of Francis Galton — never Profile Books: 2003. 352 pp. £16.99 hesitated to stick the knife in. HarperCollins: 2003. 352 pp. $24.95 But there must have been much more to Keith Thomson FitzRoy than that. As the Gribbins lament, however, when it comes to FitzRoy we know Robert FitzRoy was one of the most gifted everything in terms of names, dates and naval officers of his or any generation, a places but very little about the man. FitzRoy brilliant seaman, surveyor and commander was one of the most compelling figures of the of men, and a technical innovator who in darwinian era,but his fate has been to remain different circumstances might have been a Looking ahead: Robert FitzRoy, the Beagle’s hidden. We want to know more and we great scientist. Most of the characters who captain, went on to invent weather forecasting. fervently hope that it might include a little entered our lives through the voyage of the more triumph to go with the tragedy. ■ Beagle, which FitzRoy captained, went on to intellectual development. For example, it is Keith Thomson is in the University become part of a great Victorian success hard to guess how different Darwin’s later Museum of Natural History, 1 Parks Road, story. FitzRoy did not. career would have been if James Sulivan Oxford OX1 3PW, UK. Aristocratic, handsome and wealthy, at (mate on the Beagle, who was later knighted times he could be carefree and capable of and made an admiral) had been captain. achieving anything he set his mind to. The Nor do we know how the voyage with few surviving letters between him and Darwin influenced FitzRoy’s later career. Charles Darwin from the voyage of the We know only that they shared meals, not The universal Beagle reveal an almost giddy schoolboy a philosophy. companionship that is hard to connect to The Gribbins guess that FitzRoy became engineer his episodes of outrageous behaviour and a religious fundamentalist as a result of Discussion of the Method: anger (over , for example). He was spending long, lonely hours studying the Conducting the Engineer’s also a workaholic, dogged both by his own Bible during the later parts of the voyage.But Approach to Problem Solving depressive mental illness and by the knowl- all we know for sure about this is that Darwin by Billy Vaughn Koen edge that others in his family had suffered was not an evolutionist until after the voyage, Oxford University Press: 2003. 272 pp. the same way. and that FitzRoy was not a fundamentalist $60, £45 His life was full of tragedies, usually until his marriage to the religious Mary Julio M. Ottino generated by his own mercurial temper, Henrietta O’Brien in 1836. sudden black moods and constant brooding To the only previous biography of This book is about the universal method. unhappiness, compounded by official resis- FitzRoy (FitzRoy of the Beagle by H. E. L. “Philosophers have long sought the univer- tance to his cutting corners and, in his para- Mellersh; Hart-Davis, 1968), John and Mary sal method… They failed to look for it in noia, the effortless successes of others. After Gribbin have added information from the the most unlikely of places, in the engineer- the exciting years on the Beagle, he never few new letters to come to light. Peter ing method,” says Billy Vaughn Koen, in his attained true greatness,whether as an officer Nichols’book,which has too many irritating book Discussion of the Method. An engineer (he never had another proper command), errors, diversions into side issues and purple solves problems using heuristics — any- as a member of parliament (for two years), passages, and an absence of either citations thing (such as state-of-the-art science, as a brave but unappreciated governor of or index, is less useful. Both books devote present and past technology, or just plain New Zealand (he was recalled for siding with too much space to rehashing the Beagle experience) that provides a plausible aid the Maoris), or as a meteorologist. When all voyages — something that has been covered or direction in the solution of a problem of the pressures overcame him, he copied so much better elsewhere. It is in FitzRoy’s but is, in the final analysis, unjustified, his uncle Lord Castlereagh, and cut his own life after the Beagle that his contributions to incapable of being justified, and fallible. throat with a razor. science and modern life are to be found. When faced with a situation that is complex Somewhere, it is to be hoped, there exist FitzRoy the unusually enlightened Victorian and poorly understood, and with limited the letters and diaries that will shows us a public servant, or the man who gave us resources at your disposal, if you seek a fuller version of the life of this strangely synoptic weather charts and almost single- solution that is the best available, then you brilliant man, beyond the stereotypes — a handedly invented weather forecasting, is at too are an engineer. “To be human is to be different FitzRoy from the one who seems least as interesting as the one who,as Nichols an engineer,”as Koen puts it. always to be in Darwin’s shadow. At a criti- dismissively puts it, “sailed Darwin around In Koen’s view, engineering is often con- cal time, FitzRoy must have known Darwin the world”. fused with its products, be they antiquated better than anyone else, but after a hundred The Gribbins develop the idea that irrigation channels, aqueducts, gears and or more years of the ‘Darwin industry’, FitzRoy, who was probably always a manic- bearings, or the more recent computers, we still do not know what, if anything, depressive and who unthinkingly gave more chemical plants and aeroplanes. In this book was FitzRoy’s contribution to Darwin’s of himself and his fortune than was wise, he argues for a wider unifying view based

18 NATURE | VOL 425 | 4 SEPTEMBER 2003 | www.nature.com/nature books and arts on methodology — an “engineering way though the author takes pains to indicate Is the method proposed in this book a of thinking”. This provocative book is full that science is part of the heuristics, some good way to think about the crucial issues of ideas with heuristics as the centrepiece. who read the book superficially will equate facing us today? One can think of many cases Heuristics appear in many disciplines, from engineering with a much narrower defini- where one wishes that this mode of thinking computer science and artificial intelligence tion of heuristics. had been followed. The first part of the book to operations research, but rarely are they Even if one only partly agrees with the should be required reading in science and elevated to the exalted position they occupy main conclusions of the book, many of the engineering departments. It has the poten- in this book. arguments are thought-provoking. Break- tial to create a huge controversy — what it In the second part of the book,the author throughs can be seen as ‘break-withs’ the doesn’t deserve is indifference. ■ puts the case for expanding the engineering prevailing state-of-the-art.And the idea that Julio M. Ottino is in the R. R. McCormick method into a ‘universal method’.The book a heuristic-based approach is much older School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, touches on so many topics that it is hard than the scientific method is intriguing to Northwestern University, Evanston, to imagine philosophers, mathematicians, say the least. Illinois 60208, USA. linguists, physicists and scientists of all stripes not having an opinion about it. At the centre are heuristics as an incre- mental and sure-footed driver of change. According to Koen,“the engineering method is the strategy for causing the best change in a poorly understood situation within the available resources”. But clearly not all changes are equal, and some are certainly not sure-footed; some jumps seemingly come out of nowhere. Is this a claim of uni- versality going too far? Is heuristics — from the Greek heuriskein,meaning to discover — a path to creation and invention as well? I’m not convinced, but Koen is unequivocal: all is heuristic. Technology is about invention, making and building,which can be rather haphazard processes. The appearance of the video for- mat VHS was not inevitable — we could have jumped straight to DVDs, or passed from Betamax to DVDs.The process is like playing with an ever-growing Lego set — some pieces are already there, and combinations of these lead to the creation of new pieces, which lead to yet more. There is no going back. But one can see how a growing heuris- tic may actually guide the process. But can the processes of creation and discovery be viewed as a part of a heuristic? Immanuel Kant, stating his position on creation and its uniqueness, declared that Sculpture science is ephemeral, and that art is perma- nent.The painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Breaking with tradition would not exist without Picasso. Not every- body agrees. The art of writing, Jorge Luis Michelangelo’s sixteenth-century Pietà in the technologies to create a ‘virtual Pietà’. This has Borges argued, is actually discovery, reveal- Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, enabled Wasserman to learn more about how ing what was already there. Likewise, science Italy, incorporates a mystery as deep as its the sculpture was physically carved and can be viewed as discovery, and hence as expressive beauty. Having worked for a decade repaired. It has also allowed him to put forward an inevitable process: Newton’s laws would on the carving he intended for his own tomb, his theory that Michelangelo was not intending have been revealed eventually, although Michelangelo apparently attacked his 2.5-metre to destroy his work in anger at all. By ‘virtually possibly in a different form to that obtained sculpture in a fit of rage, hacking limbs from the dismembering’ the re-attached limbs, and by Newton. Parallel universes with the same four carved figures. These were later re-attached studying the carving from all angles, Wasserman physics and chemistry will have the same sci- by his assistant, apart from Christ’s left leg, concludes that the limbs had been detached ence,but may have different technologies. which remains missing. selectively, and with care, perhaps to create a But there is no inevitability in art. The Why did he do it? Did he fear it fell short of composition where Christ is being lowered from history of modern art appears to be driven perfection? Was he angered by a flaw emerging the Virgin’s lap, rather than into it. by replacing and disavowing heuristics. If in the marble? Had he been afraid that his Wasserman’s book Michelangelo’s Florence any heuristic exists, it is one of replacing positioning of the left leg across the Virgin’s lap Pietà, published by Princeton University Press heuristics. One cannot help but wonder was immodest? ($75), describes the extraordinary technical whether Koen’s claim is simply too big. In a collaborative project with art historian analysis of one of the most important artworks There are ways out: we are told that a heuris- Jack Wasserman, scientists have used IBM’s of post-Renaissance Italy. It also includes a CD tic may contradict other heuristics, and most sophisticated three-dimensional imaging of the virtual Pietà. Alison Abbott that use may depend on context. And even

NATURE | VOL 425 | 4 SEPTEMBER 2003 | www.nature.com/nature 19