Chance in the House of Fate: a natural history of heredity by Jennifer Ackerman

For the ancient Egyptians, a serpent swallowing its own tail symbolised the mysterious cycle of life, death and re-birth. In our own scientific era, the chemist and writer Primo Levi turned the carbon cycle into an unforgettable parable of the transformations of matter. The final chapter of his The Periodic Table describes how carbon gives us both coal (the smell of which always reminded him of Auschwitz) and diamonds. But it is also the key element in every living organism.

Science is supremely successful at analysing and breaking down nature's creations, "unweaving the rainbow", as Keats put it. But it also excels at spotting relationships, and it is this that fascinates the American science writer Jennifer Ackerman. Drawing on her own acute observations as well as current research in genetics, Ackerman explores our connectedness with the natural world. Her quest to explain what links "ermines and emus, koalas and kings" draws on cutting-edge science, yet has its roots in the oldest philosophies of nature.

Aristotle observed a "principle of continuity" running through all living things, and, as Ackerman shows, genetics has amassed a wealth of data on the affinities between life forms. According to molecular biology, we have more in common with fungi than trees, which is why it is difficult to treat fungal infections, for what kills their cells harms our own.

In a fascinating chapter on circadian rhythms (those based on the cycle of day and night), Ackerman shows how our biological rhythms "swing in synchrony" with the Earth's rotation. Vital signs, such as our pulse rate, wax and wane with the time of day or night. The cycle of ovulation in primates mimics the moon's period. Even the "slow turn of the seasons" is "enmeshed in our flesh": our blood pressure and temperature are highest in the spring, like the tides of the ocean. Such patterns in nature's garden enthral Ackerman, and her enthusiasm is contagious: "We expect spring as we expect dawn, in the lens of the eye, in skin, muscle, and organ."

Her fascination with the relatedness of nature harks back to the Renaissance idea that people were a microcosm of the cosmos. "The galaxa goes through the belly," said the 16th-century alchemist Paracelsus, quoted most recently by Jeanette Winterson in her scientific novel Gut Symmetries. But in our technological age, the laws of science weave the web of our fate.

Chance in the House of Fate will not disappoint those in search of astounding scientific facts. Ackerman calculates that an ejaculated sperm moves at a speed equivalent to a person travelling at a breathtaking 34,000 mph. But the strength of her writing lies not in such textbook details but in her ability to give the abstract science of genetics a human face. Like Levi, Ackerman makes science personal, exploring heredity through her own family history.

Beginning with her pregnancy, she describes lying awake at night, afraid that her child will share the fate of Ackerman's sister and be born microcephalic: "I imagined profound deformity drifting there in the dark, a clot of furled flesh." Even though she knows that her sister's condition was not caused by ancestry but by chance, by "a first-trimester virus, a wayward scrap of DNA that found its way into my mother's blood", her anxiety remains. For chance, too, plays a vital part in our evolutionary fate.

Cold science often seems far removed from our lives. But in her "pilgrimage to the heart of heredity", Ackerman succeeds in fitting science into the human scheme of things, from the birth of her daughter ("as sweet and sound as a nut") to her mother's death from cancer.

She shows how even our most intimate experiences are part of the "thick, fabulous tapestry" of nature. Ackerman argues passionately and convincingly that beneath nature's rich diversity lies an evolutionary thread that binds us strongly "to all the family that ever was".

The reviewer is currently writing a study of science in European and American literature

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