802 BOOK REVIEWS

devotes his attention to the Lorenz model, which has little to do with
geophysics where the motion is chaotic. This is a serious flaw in exposition.
The proofreading of the volume was perfunctory, at best. On page 30, the
presentations of three different decompositions of some equations are all
the same! The English language in this volume appears not to have been
edited by the publisher; on page 43, we have, “In some cases to fulfill
relation (4.15) strong perturbation, which could be difficult to realize in
practice is necessary.” Finally, the discussion of secure communication
starting on page 47 is weak indeed. The methods he describes, and stronger
ones, have been broken easily by Short (1994,1996) and others. The author
does injustice to these authors by not knowing their work. In the days of the
World Wide Web, one can find this information without any trouble, and
one should find it.
Overall, this is a weak book. One need not have it on one’s shelf. Perhaps
one can thank the author for collecting the papers contained in the second
half of the volume, but then one can get them elsewhere as well.

REFERENCES
Isidori, A. 1995. Nonlinear Control Systems. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Kaplan, D. and L. Glass. 1995. UnderstandingNonlinear Dylurmics. New York: Springer-
Verlag.
Short, K. M. 1996. Unmasking a modulated chaotic communications scheme. International
Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos in Applied Sciences and Engineering 6,367-315.
Short, K. M. 1994. Steps towards unmasking secure communications. InternationalJournal of
Bifurcation and Chaos in Applied Sciences and Engineering 4, 959-977.
Solari, H. G., M. A. Natiello and G. B. Mindlin. 1996. Nonlinear Dynamics: A Two Way Trip
from Physics to Math. Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing.

HENRY D. I. ABARBANEL
Department of Physics and
Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
University of California at San Diego,
La Jolla, CA 92093-0402, U.S.A.
(E mail: [email protected])

PII: soo92-s24cN97Noo19-o

The Lure of Modem Science: Fractal Thinking, by Bruce J. West and Bill
Deering, World Scientific, Singapore, 1995. $58.00 (cloth), viii + 421 pp.

The Lure ofModem Science is another book about fractals and chaos. An
overwhelming number of such books already compete for our time and
money. Even the authors point out that “there have probably been more
 BOOK REVIEWS 803

books published on fractaZsand chaos in the past decade than on any other
topic in the physical/mathematical sciences in any comparable period of
time.” What makes this book different from the others is that, as West and
Deering put it, “it is a montage rather than a well argued scholarly
work.. . .“l Unfortunately, it is exactly this hodgepodge character which
limits the book’s audience. For most people and purposes, another book
will be a better choice.
The book is broken into six chapters: an introduction, “Lure of Modern
Science”; “Linear Spaces and Geometry in Natural Philosophy”; “Noise in
Natural Philosophy”; “Self-Similarity, Fractals and Measurements”; “Maps
and Dynamics”; and “Dynamics in Fractals Dimensions.” Continuing in
self-similar fashion, chapters are divided into sections, sections into subsec-
tions, and subsections into paragraphs, each of which is labeled in the
margin with a three- or four-word phrase. (These phrases are not very
informative, but they are great for remembering where you last stopped
reading.) Every chapter except the first is followed by an appendix contain-
ing the mathematical nitty-gritty. Topics covered include both the analysis
of models (e.g., linear and nonlinear oscillators, Brownian motion, nonlin-
ear l-d maps and maps of the plane, linearization, and bifurcations) and
techniques for the analysis of data (e.g., correlation functions, spectral
analysis of time series, l/f-spectra, inverse power laws, normal vs lognor-
ma1 distributions, attractor reconstruction an dimension estimation). Dr.
West has written about some of this material before. Much of his earlier
book (West, 1985) is covered again here along with new material.
So why are you looking for a book on chaos and fractals? Do you need an
introductory textbook? The Lure of Modem Science does have a number of
interesting applications that would be good for engaging students in the
classroom (l/f spectra in art and music, patterns of bronchial branching in
lung tissue, income distributions, etc.) But it is not a textbook: too much
mathematical experience is assumed, no topic is covered in enough detail,
and there are no exercises. I would suggest Drazin (1992) (which has many
good exercises) or Ott (1993) for good graduate-level mathematical intro-
ductions. A good advanced undergraduate text is Strogatz (1994), which has
the right blend of theory and applications.
Do you want a more thorough and technical mathematical treatment?
Then this book is probably not for you either. More advanced audiences
will already be familiar with most of the techniques. (Among the technical

‘The authors claim that, “It is a montage rather than a well argued scholarly work because this
modem science is still in its formative stages, and we do not want to be guilty of killing it off by
unnecessarily restricting its process of growth.”
804 BOOK REVIEWS

treatments of nonlinear dynamics, I personally like Guckenheimer and

Holmes, 1983.) It seems that the authors have aimed for a middle-ground
audience, hoping to hit both mathematically trained scientists and neo-
phytes. This approach inevitably produces some tradeoffs between precision
and readability. For example, on page 32, we read, “An attractor derives its
name from the fact that no matter how a system is started, it is attracted to
this structure.. . .” Yet, on page 33, we find the apparently contradictory
statement: “Another feature of certain nonlinear systems is the simultane-
ous existence of multiple attractors.” In some cases, this imprecision can
seriously mislead untrained readers. On page 12, we are told that the
“multiplicative process” Xi+ r = 2Xj is not linear, in contrast to the linear
“additive process” Xi+ r = Xi + 1. Both processes are, in fact, linear; the
former simply has nonlinear solutions.
Perhaps you want a book on chaos and fractals for biologists. Z%eLure of
Modem Science is not a bad choice. Probably half of the examples in the
book are biologically motivated. But these examples are drawn overwhelm-
ingly from anatomy and physiology, particularly mammalian lung architec-
ture and physiological time series such as electroencephalographs and
electrocardiographs. Other fields, particularly ecology, get short shrift. Most
of the other examples are taken from physics, sometimes without much in
the way of introduction. Try Kaplan and Glass (1995) for a good introduc-
tory text specifically aimed at a biological audience (although ecology gets
less attention there too).2
Neither a textbook nor a popular treatment, neither introductory nor
advanced, not particularly for biologists or physicists or mathematicians,
this book will obviously have a small audience. However, if your interests
fall between the traditional disciplinary cracks, and you do not find yourself
in either extreme of the experience distribution-i.e., if you are like
me-then in The Lure of Modem Science you would probably find a
readable introduction to a few techniques with which you are not familiar
or an engaging analysis of a novel application or two. What prevents me
from recommending this book to you unconditionally is something else that
you will find.
Throughout the book, but especially in the preface and first chapter,
West and Deering discuss the implications of nonlinearity for the philoso-
phy of science. While they raise some interesting issues (for example, the
implications of chaotic dynamics both for irreversibility and determinism,
and the role of reductionism in science), these are dealt with more

*See the review by Pascual in the May 19% volume of the Bulletin.
 BOOK REVIEWS 805

thoroughly elsewhere. 3 Here, they are at best distracting and at worst

irksome. For example, the authors emphasize that the concepts of chaos
and fractals have “led to a new kind of science and a new way of thinking
both in and out of science.” I am not sure what this really means-and I
am not sure that I care. As the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg put it,
“ . . . recently scientists . . . have claimed a deep philosophical significance for
work on nonlinear dynamics, a subject that is interesting enough without
the hype” (Weinberg, 1996). Amen to that.

The author thanks Hal Caswell for illuminating discussions which improved
this review.

REFERENCES
Ayala, F. J. and Th. Dobzhansky (Eds). 1974. Studies in the Philosophy of Biology. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Bricmont, J. 1995a. Science of chaos or chaos in science? Physicalia Magazine 17, 159-208.
Bricmont, J. 1995b. The last word from the rearguard. Physicalia Magazine 17, 219-221.
Bricmont, J. 1996. Science of chaos or chaos in science? In The Flight from Science and
Reason, P. R. Gross, N. Levitt and M. W. Lewis (Ed& pp. 131-175.
Drazin, P. G. 1992. Nonlinear Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guckenheimer, J. and P. Holmes. 1983. Nonlinear Oscillations, Dynamical Systems, and Bi-
furcations of Vector Fields. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Kaplan, D. and L. Glass. 1995. Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics. New York: Springer-
Verlag.
Mayr, E. 1985. How biology differs from the physical sciences. In Evolution at a Crossroads,
D. J. Depew and B. H. Weber (Eds), pp. 43-64. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mayr, E. 1988. The limits of reductionism. Nature 331, 475.
Ott, E. 1993. Choas in Dynamical Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strogatz, S. 1994. Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Weinberg, S. 1987. Newtonianism, reductionism and the art of congressional testimony.
Nature 330,433-437.
Weinberg, S. 1988. The limits of reductionism (reply). Nature 331, 475-476.
Weinberg, S. 1994. Dreams of a Final Theory. New York: Vintage Books.
Weinberg, S. Aug. 8, 1996. Sokal’s hoax. New York Review of Books, pp. 11-15.
West, B. J. 1985. An Essay on the Importance of Being Nonlinear, Lecture Notes in
Biomathematics, Vol. 62. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

MICHAEL G. NEUBERT
Biology Department,
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
Woods Hole, MA 02543, U.S.A.
PII: SOO92-8240(97jOOO20-7

3For a debate on chaos, determinism and irreversibility, see Bricmont (1995a, b, 1996) and Prigogine
and Antoniou (1995). For a discussion of reductionism in the sciences, and biology in particular, see
Ayala and Dobzhansky (19741, Mayr (1985, 1988) and Weinberg (1987,1988, 1994).