Broderick is a science fiction and popular science writer, editor of sci-fi journals, and is described in lots of places as a genius. I've no real way of telling whether this is true or not, but I've enjoyed everything I've read by him, which I admit is not a huge amount. If you want to know more, you can see an unofficial website (link should be over there > ), or ask Wikipedia the all-knowing.
Ferocious Minds is a really interesting book. It starts off with a description of what Broderick thinks we are experiencing - a revived enlightenment, better poised to deliver on the hopes of the original version. Broderick is unashamedly a fan, a believer in progress and the benefits that reason can bring, and the first section of the book is a rallying cry for those already signed up:
"I will argue that today's reviving enlightenment, despite such fashionable rumours to the contrary [refers to a quoted dismissal of progress by the Chapman brothers], is no recuperative sham, let alone a path to doom and ruin. To the contrary: it is our single, best highway to deliverance from a future of accidental or malign oppression."
For that rhetoric, the book is surprisingly thin on justification for this belief. I don't think that's because such a justification can't be made, it's rather that Broderick's enthusiasm for the writers, scientists and thinkers he discusses overtakes him very early in the book, and it turns instead into a race through the best of popular science (and more technical, less popular science). We run through evolutionary biology, evolutionary linguistics, evolutionary everything, AI, nanotech, ufo abductions, sci-fi, feminism, the paranormal, stem-cell research and much much more in around 200 pages packed with citations, quotes and links to academic essays available online.
The book is a primer, a new Enlightenment 101 containing lots of signposts for the would-be polymath (or, as Steve Jones has it, the civilized person) to follow, wherever their curiosity takes them. It's a catalogue of wonderful, exciting and energising topics and minds, gingerbread trails disappearing off in myriad directions through the whole forest, and it's really well written and worth reading.
It also raises an interesting question about the definition of a polymath, and the status of expertise. True polymaths are rare, and it's much more likely that people are experts in one field or another. It is a popular concern that we have so much knowledge now that it is impossible for people to know everything, and that we will have to defer to expert A and expert B for answers on their specialist subjects. The tyranny of the expert beckons, a true technocracy. This topic deserves, and will get, more attention here, so for now I simply raise the point that there ought to be a way through, for people to have wide-ranging knowledge and enjoy a diverse intellectual life, and be able to make assessments of views of experts without themselves being expert. If the best science writers can make complex theories and the history of the development of those theories intelligible to the lay reader, then I think there is reason enough to believe that the polymath can continue to flourish and have fun in the process. Don't stay up too late watching it though.
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