IN The Hot Zone, Richard Preston's powerful 1994 best seller about the Ebola virus (and its distant cousin, HIV), he ranks the construction of the Kinshasa Highway across Africa as "one of the most important events of the 20th century".
As the ribbon of tar was carved through isolated areas of the continent, it awakened deadly organisms such as Ebola and, combined with international flight routes, created an easy passage to millions of host bodies - humans.
"AIDS is the revenge of the rain forest," he concluded. The planet was mounting an immune response to the human species.
This is a terrifying moment, a dizzying shift in perspective: from the biosphere's point of view, humans are little more than parasites.
Edward Tenner's new book has many similar shifts in perspective, as he chronicles what he calls "the revenge effect": how and why things bite back - how, despite all our cleverness, the world seems intent on twisting today's "miracle" solutions into tomorrow's chronic problems.
He wants to know why new roads lead to bigger traffic jams, how pest control ends up spreading pests, how megadoses build superbugs, how American football helmets and other "protective" gear make sports more dangerous, and why the person most likely to break into your car or your home nowadays is you.
It seems as if every major advance in science and technology leads to paradoxical, unforeseen consequences; and all notions of "progress" are abandoned, in the desperate rush to catch up with these unintended effects. As the Red Queen says in Through the Looking Glass, we are no longer in the "slow sort of country", where running gets one somewhere.
Tenner's analysis ranges from the global (CFCs and gradual climate change) to the more mundane (how push button telephones are easier to misdial and have led to increasingly long phone numbers). Over 50 pages are devoted to computer related injuries, and the paradox that computers generally don't increase productivity. But the book isn't just for "techies" - its overall focus isn't confined to technology in this increasingly narrow sense of the word.
Tenner unravels strange chains of cause and effect in agriculture, medicine, sports and urban planning, looking at everything from forest fire management to how the Patriot missiles in the Gulf War might have caused more damage than the Scuds. (Many of the Iraqi missiles would have hit harmless targets, or might have landed without exploding, but some of the Patriot missiles which took out the Scuds produced debris extending over five kilometres.)
Much of the book's territory and thinking will sound familiar to Richard Dawkins fans. For example, the more effective and widely used a pesticide becomes, "the greater the potential reward for genes that confer immunity to it". Occasionally, though - probably for the sake of a good read - the analysis veers towards anthropomorphic parallelism: assigning human attributes to systems, objects or other organisms.
Talking about the powerful evolutionary pressure created by the introduction of antibiotics, he says: "bacteria assemble their own arsenals of resistant genes as hackers swap access codes and passwords." OK, it's a vivid analogy, but one which might confuse readers still struggling to understand the real motive forces within evolution.
One of the most surprising sections - for this reviewer, at least covers the 19th century "acclimatisation" movement in France and the US, which comes across as a sort of biological imperialism. Various do gooder breeders and philanthropic entrepreneurs introduced European house sparrows and gypsy moths to America, as well as carp and Africanised honeybees, often with disastrous, irreversible consequences. "Undoing animal introductions can be as impossible as unscrambling an egg," Tenner concludes.
His outlook can seem pessimistic ("Where we once hoped to eradicate, we are now struggling to manage"), yet Tenner is no Luddite: he wants to refine technologies rather than renounce them, and apply more subtle theories to these evolving tightly interlocking and complex systems. "Frankenstein's fateful error was to consider everything but the sum of the parts he had assembled," he writes.
He stresses the need for continual and greater vigilance, for designers to learn from their failures, for biologists to reach "a kind of evolutionary compromise" with lethal bacteria and viruses instead of trying to destroy them, and for medicine to substitute cunning for the frontal attack.
This scholarly work is a great antidote to the tendency to celebrate the technological sublime as, page after page, it debunks the mythological promises of modernisation. By rights it should become a classic text about problem solving.