How science takes the Bible to bits

Steve Jones's scientific retelling of the Bible in The Serpent's Promise is lively and amusing, but it is hard to tell what audience the book is intended for

Where does the idea of a single soul at conception leave twins?

THE Bible has been called "the greatest story ever told". Steve Jones begs to differ. In The Serpent's Promise, Jones, a British geneticist and outspoken anti-religionist, sets out to retell the Bible from the point of view of science.

Well, not exactly. Instead of a point-by-point fact-checking of the Christian holy book, Jones has opted to pick some of its main themes. From big topics such as the origins of the world and of humans, Noah's flood and other epic disasters, and the ultimate fate of Earth, he sketches out our scientific knowledge for each.

Sometimes this works well. The chapter on origins, for example, takes a quick tour through the big bang, the formation of Earth, the history of the continents, the origin of life, its evolutionary history, plus human evolution – and all in less than 40 pages.

Needless to say, Jones is aiming to hit the high points, not provide a comprehensive lesson. But it all hangs together, and it gives a fair overview of science's alternative to the first chapters of Genesis.

At other times, though, this approach seems to be little more than an excuse for rambling. For instance, the Bible pays a huge amount of attention to matters of reproduction: think of all the "begats", not to mention the virgin birth of Jesus. Jones takes this as a pretext to launch into a discussion of reproductive biology that wanders from sea urchin embryology and why there are two sexes, to sperm donation and genetic imprinting. By the time we get to the end of the chapter, we have strayed a long way from any remotely biblical topic.

Much of the book is like this – a collection of random walks from biblical starting points – and it leaves the reader feeling rather adrift. That is a shame, because, paragraph by paragraph, Jones is always lively and often wickedly funny. He notes, for example, that vicars and insurance sellers are in the same game – of convincing people to forgo immediate pleasures for long-term security.

To those who believe that humans are endowed with a soul from the moment of conception, he points out that his mother was an identical twin formed when a fertilised egg accidentally split into two separate embryos. What happened to the single soul when it found itself with two bodies? "Were my mother and her sister, my Aunt Pegi, blessed with just half a copy each," he asks, "or does God have a stock of spares ready to insert when needed?" Whatever the book's other faults, Jones is never boring.

But he can be hasty and careless. At one point he says that the pre-Columbian New World was sparsely populated by small, scattered bands; five pages on he says that large parts of South America were heavily settled and "buzzed with activity". Elsewhere, he writes that HIV is an exclusively human virus, but four pages later that it also infects chimps. Then there are the many unclear pronouns that sometimes leave us unsure as to the precise meaning of sentences. For example, when Jones writes about the first multi-drug-resistant plasmid – a transmissible ring of DNA – emerging in a strain of plague in Madagascar, he muddies the water with unclear uses of "it". If this book passed through an editor's hands, he or she left few prints. In a perfect world, authors would be perfect, but in the real world, we need editors to pick up the errors.

A bigger problem, though, is that Jones seems unclear who his audience is. He oversimplifies some concepts and goes into dizzying detail on others. The book skims too lightly over the surface to interest most science enthusiasts, and religious readers are likely to be put off by the barbed comments.

Read more at New Scientist