Comments on a Book Review

It continues to surprise me that some of my best material comes from book reviews. "When giants walked the Earth: A. pedigree of Darwin's well bred English bulldogs" is a book review by Steve Jones of A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection in the British Imagination_ by Marek Kohn (Nature v. 431, 2 Sep 2004, p. 21) . "What's this cult of personality in evolutionary biology all abou? There's the great leader, Chairman Charles, of course... But why do we need so many? Experts on chloroplasts or chlorine manage, as far as I know, with living facts, and are not forced to attach them to dead heroes. But there's something in evolution that calls for immortals to whom we plebs must defer." Quite an admission, isn't it?

It's interesting to me that of the six British scientists chosen for the book, several are the most prominent in the global history of evolutionary thought. There's J. B. S. Haldane, John Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins, and Alfred Russell Wallace. The reviewer notes that all but Wallace attended prestigious schools such as Cambridge and Oxford. Also, the reviewer notes a feeling that the author's "patience is tried by the miasma of self-congratulation that surrounded some of the actors in his drama. Fisher claimed that his fundamental theory of natural selection occupied the supreme position among the biological sciences, although others dismissed it as a verbal trick"

And how about this for an unscientific attitude: "Wallace's expeditions were followed by a lifetime of devotion to the Great Leader... He turned, alas, to spiritualism and, as so often when scientists use their knowledge of nature to interpret the world of man, abandoned common sense." And Wallace wasn't the only one to use "sweeping generalizations without the need for facts -- when discussing human affairs." Fisher, for example, had "rather a nasty social agenda" which I've learned elsewhere was a form of eugenics. Then there's Haldane, who "stuck with the Communist Party long after his colleagues had abandoned it..." and demonstrated a "readiness to support Comrade Lysenko even in the face of powerful evidence against his theories." So much for the objectivity of scientists. Note the reviewer's language here: Haldane's representative on Earth was, for nearly 40 years, John Maynard Smith..." representative on Earth? Good grief. Smith "... had himself honed a hammer and circle from his Eton window." And how about the reviewer's attitude revealed in his comments on Richard Dawkins' being "voted Britain's top intellectual": "(a welcome kick in the teeth for the new generation of Creationists in our privately funded schools)." Nasty.

The reviewer claims that "Darwin's ability to generalize came from his huge knowledge of plants and animals. Few of his intellectual descendents can tell a hawk from a handsaw, let alone from an eagle." He says that Bill Hamilton did have such encyclopedic knowledge, but also notes: "Hamilton, sad to say, was also a martyr to political vapourings and lobbied for a cracked eugenics Utopia with Margaret Thatcher as Life President and caesarean births banned."

The reviewer concludes with: "Every evolutionist should read it -- as a warning against personality cults, if nothing else. Kohn makes it clear that giants walked the Earth in those days. Those days are gone, but after perusing his chapter on the Oxford school of evolutionary biology in the 1950s and 1960s -- some geniuses, no doubt, but also a fair sprinkling of prima donnas and right-wing zealots -- one can only mutter, through gently clenched teeth, 'Thank God!'



Until Next Time,

David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.

http://home.att.net/~david.bump