uscles
are big in America. They are our peacock's tail: One flash of a
bulging bicep signals well-being, sexual prowess, success. We are
terribly aware of that fact. We take "natural" supplements
that make us unnaturally bulky; we fuel an entire genre of trash
magazines devoted to body-building; we wring our hands over rising
steroid use in teenage boys and pro athletes--they're wrecking their
health to look healthy!--while implicitly endorsing the end product
through Madison Avenue. Tobey Maguire notwithstanding, we like our
heroes ripped. Not just the men, either. Waifs used to be fashionable,
but today's Lara Crofts and Charlie's Angels could crush them in
one hand. These days, "scrawny" is a serious epithet.
And don't even mention "weak."
For all our obsession, for all the pseudoscientific jargon we like
to throw around at the health club, Americans as a rule know very
little about what muscles are, or how they work, or why. We only
know how to make them bigger. In Prime Mover: A Natural History
of Muscle, James B. Duke Professor of biology Steven Vogel tells
a story that neatly makes the point. While teaching a course for
adult nonscientists on biomechanics, Vogel decided to use a leg
of lamb for demonstration. He was halfway through the dissection
when one of his students, a highly appointed local computer exec,
got that look on his face--the one educators live for, the one that
says Ohhh! "I paused for some comment on the subtle biomechanical
role of the kneecap," Vogel writes. "Instead what I heard
was 'Muscle--you mean that that's what meat is?' " Ohhh.
That fellow is probably not in the target audience for Vogel's book.
But he ought to be. The statement "muscles are big" is
far truer than he realizes. Muscle is, as the title says, the prime
mover of human history. It is our engine and our fuel; it is literally
the beating heart of society. It is much, much more than a big bicep.
That's the funny thing: If science and not pseudoscience were king,
the muscle craze would be even more intense than it is.
Prime Mover is a glorious testament to that fact. It's probably
too much to expect most gym rats to take the hour they usually spend
lifting/running/Pilates-ing every day and read this book instead
for two weeks. But one can hope. Vogel's last book, Cats' Paws and
Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People, won him this
laurel from The New York Times: "One gets over envying youth
in general, but one cannot help hoping that students at Duke University
appreciate the fact that their faculty includes two of the finest
explainers working in the United States: Steven Vogel, whose books
previous to Cats' Paws and Catapults include Life's Devices, and
Henry Petroski, best known for Pencil and Engineers of Dreams."
This is a book that could easily find its way onto the shelf next
to those instant classics.
The one small problem is that this is also a book that, at first,
teeters on the edge of inscrutability. This is not surprising in
a science book, but who knows how nonscientist readers will react?
Beach reading it's not. Still, like all great explainers of science,
Vogel has a gift for metaphor, and in the chapter "How Muscle
Works," he wields one that almost negates all need for understanding
the more subtle submicroscopic processes at work. Noting that muscle
components actin and myosin don't actually contract, he writes,
"instead contraction comes from interdigitation of myosin and
actin, as you might do by sliding the fingers of one hand between
the fingers of the other." Ohhh!
The next chapter, "And How We Found Out," is where the
book really gets under way. Rich in detail and clean in explanation,
it shows off Vogel's obvious and contagious delight in tripping
through the history of science, from Aristotle, who "got so
little right that one suspects mere accident when he was on target,"
to continental drift. Here Vogel has something in common with the
late Stephen Jay Gould (and an even better grasp of his field to
boot)--a wide sweep of knowledge and the ability to connect seemingly
unrelated dots across it. The rest of the book continues in the
same fashion, effortlessly blending the sort of diagrams you'd only
see in class with the sort of historical tidbits you'd only see
on Trivial Pursuit cards. It works. It's fascinating.
As Vogel hits the home stretch, it becomes clear that this book
is not about muscle-building or anatomy or even pure biology. It
is about limitations. It is an elegant argument for the fact that
"biology underpins the human world," and it is accomplished
without provoking any "antisociobiological brickbats."
Like Cats' Paws and Catapults, perhaps more so, it has a Big Message
to convey.
The Message is this: Science is the real world. Muscle-builders
want to be bigger, faster, stronger, but they are constrained by
biology. So, too, is society, and it will never be bigger, faster,
stronger unless it takes biology into account. Not the sort of idea
generally featured in muscle mags, but one far more worth reading--even
for those of us without gym memberships.
--Mary Carmichael
Carmichael '01 is a science reporter for Newsweek magazine. |
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