New Scientist recommends Togetherness by Rowan Hooper, a radical new view of life

Togetherness
Rowan Hooper
(Fern Press, UK, out 4th June; Knopf, US, out 18th August)

The best books are those that give you a new perspective, but Togetherness by my colleague Rowan Hooper has given me something more than that – not just a new view, but a new way of seeing. In essence a book about symbiosis, Togetherness zooms from the inner workings of our cells all the way out to how our planet functions as a whole and back in again, revealing how biological cooperation underpins all life – and why Western science has largely failed to notice this for centuries.

Symbiosis is the kind of concept you learn at school, often with a too-neat-to-be-true definition and a few quirky illustrative examples – coral, say, or lichen. Both feature in Togetherness (plus plenty of extraordinary cases you won’t be familiar with), but Rowan makes it abundantly clear that symbiosis isn’t a freak occurrence confined to a few classic cases: it’s a rule of nature, occurring time and time again and everywhere you care to look.

Having demonstrated this, he then makes his passionate argument for how this revelation requires us to re-examine everything we know about the natural world. He traces our understanding of evolution through history, and how Charles Darwin’s dazzling fundamental insights on competition and survival have an overlooked counterpart in the tendency of unrelated living things to come together. Rowan – as big a fan of Darwin as I’ve ever met – treads the line carefully and shows how you can have both.

In the thrilling final third of the book, Rowan explores all the environmental ills of today, many of which are the result of us neglecting to consider how different species live and work together. He speaks to the scientists trying to figure out how, in turn, we could use symbiosis to right these wrongs.

I’ve worked closely with Rowan, New Scientist’s podcast editor, for over a decade, so I can’t pretend that this is an objective review of his third book. But listeners of our podcast The World, The Universe And Us will know that Rowan is someone who loves to dive into big ideas, and Togetherness manages to be both hugely ambitious in scope and also very enjoyable.

His plea for us all to adopt an ecological world view, one underpinned by the insights of symbiosis, is deeply rooted in his earlier career as a scientist, but Rowan’s many journalistic titbits – from what Karl Marx thought of Darwin to Carl Sagan’s opening chat-up line to Lynn Margulis – make it really fun.