Category: biography

The colorful and erudite J.B.S. Haldane: my take and a new biography

August 15, 2020 • 10:30 am

UPDATE: Greg Mayer noted that Jonathan Weiner reviewed the new Haldane bio in the New York Times, also favorably. The link is below, and here’s one quote from Weiner’s review:

“A Dominant Character” is the best Haldane biography yet. With science so politicized in this country and abroad, the book could be an allegory for every scientist who wants to take a stand. “In the past few years,” Subramanian writes, “as we’ve witnessed deliberate assaults on fact and truth and as we’ve realized the failures of the calm weight of scientific evidence to influence government policy, the need for scientists to find their voice has grown even more urgent.” Haldane’s political principles were “unbending and forthright,” as Subramanian says, and his science illuminated all of life. In both these ways, for all his failings, he was “deeply attractive during a time of shifting, murky moralities.”

___________________

J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) was probably the most colorful character in the history of modern evolutionary biology. Son of a famous physiologist, he was precocious and brilliant, earning a First in both Greats (classics) and mathematics at Oxford. He went on to become one of the three people (along with R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright) to provide the mathematical underpinnings of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, in particular working out how genes would behave under natural selection.

But he made other substantial contributions, suggesting possible theories for the origin of life, becoming the first person to suggest that the gene for sickle-cell anemia was (in one copy) adaptive in areas where malaria was prevalent (he was right), and was also the first to estimate the mutation rate for a human gene.

He was also the first to notice a phenomenon I worked on much of my career: “Haldane’s rule.”  That generalization, which others named after him, was the observation that in crosses between different species, if only one sex of offspring was sterile or inviable (with the other being fertile or viable), it was almost invariably the heterogametic sex: the one that had unlike sex chromosomes. So in flies and mammals, for instance, where males are XY and females XX, if there’s an asymmetry in hybrid sterility or inviability, over 95% of the time it is the males who suffer. In contrast, in birds and butterflies, in which females have unlike sex chromosome and males like ones, it’s the females who suffer among hybrids. Haldane’s explanation for this phenomenon was wrong, but I took up the issue again since it laid fallow since 1922, when Haldane published a short paper on it. It was mainly my students and collaborators, however, who worked out the complete explanation, which has an important bearing on speciation.

Haldane was famous for being a colorful character. Eager to serve in the trenches in World War I, he rode a bicycle along the line, trying to provoke enemy fire. (He apparently knew no fear his whole life.) He was a ferocious drinker, and his student, John Maynard Smith, used to tell me stories about Haldane’s bibulous episodes. One was that, after a night in the pub, the engine of Haldane’s car caught on fire. He immediately urged everyone to douse the fire by urinating on it.

Haldane is also known for his (possibly apocryphal) reply to someone who asked him what one could infer about the creator from the nature of the creation. Haldane’s supposed reply, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” (Beetles are the most numerous of insect orders—Coleoptera—with over 350,000 species.)  My Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin told me that he once invited Haldane to Rochester (where Dick held his second academic job), and Haldane insisted on going shopping for underwear for his wife, Helen Spurway. Wearing his characteristic Indian clothes (Haldane had by then moved to India in protest of British policy in the Suez), Haldane embarrassed everyone by asking for black lace panties and bras in his loud, booming voice.

Haldane was also an immensely talented science writer and popularizer, erudite—remember, he had a First in Greats—with a light touch. With his terse prose, he could be considered the Hemingway of popular science. To get a flavor of his writing, read one of his famous essays, “On Being the Right Size,” which you can find free at the link.

By the way, when I graduated from Harvard, Dick gave me, as a graduation present, an aerogramme he’d received from Haldane in response to an invitation to lecture. You can read it for yourself, and see the diversity of J. B. S.’s interests:

Dick also told me that it was when Haldane was visiting Rochester that he noticed blood while defecating, the first sign of the colon cancer that eventually killed him. But even his impending death didn’t bother Haldane that much, and he wrote a really funny poem about his cancer and colostomy called “Cancer’s a funny thing.” You can read it here, but below are a few lines:

I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.

Yet, thanks to modern surgeon’s skills,
It can be killed before it kills
Upon a scientific basis
In nineteen out of twenty cases.

I noticed I was passing blood
(Only a few drops, not a flood).
So pausing on my homeward way
From Tallahassee to Bombay
I asked a doctor, now my friend,
To peer into my hinder end,
To prove or to disprove the rumour
That I had a malignant tumour. . .

. . .So now I am like two-faced Janus
The only* god who sees his anus.

*In India there are several more
With extra faces, up to four,
But both in Brahma and in Shiva
I own myself an unbeliever.

I’ll swear, without the risk of perjury,
It was a snappy bit of surgery.
My rectum is a serious loss to me,
But I’ve a very neat colostomy. . .

Note that Haldane consulted a doctor on his return from Tallahassee, which, as he noted in the aerogramme above, he was visiting after he came to Rochester.

Finally, Haldane was an intensely political animal. He was a Communist, joined the British Communist Party (often giving speeches against the government), and even supported the charlatan Trofim Lysenko and his Lamarckian theories of crop breeding, simply because Lysenko was touted by Stalin. This was a serious misstep for a scientist—especially an evolutionary biologist—but Haldane, disenchanted, eventually left the party. He moved to India in 1956 to join the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, and died in Bhubeneswar, where the aerogramme above was written. After his move, Haldane always dressed in Indian clothes, even when traveling to the West (he said “sixty years in socks is enough!”). Here’s a picture of him (left) with the famous statistician P. C. Mahalanobis:

Wikipedia gives several encomiums tendered by those who knew him or knew of his work:

Arthur C. Clarke credited him as “perhaps the most brilliant science populariser of his generation”.  Nobel laureate Peter Medawar called Haldane “the cleverest man I ever knew”. According to Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Haldane was always recognized as a singular case”; and to Michael J. D. White, “the most erudite biologist of his generation, and perhaps of the century.”

I’ve written too much already, as all I intended to do was highlight a new biography of Haldane that was favorably reviewed (by conservative Matt Ridley!), in the London Times. Reader Pyers sent me a transcript, adding, “You might be interested in a new book which is a biography of JBS Haldane. The headline in the review in the London Times sums him up perfectly: ‘The stupidity of a brilliant mind’.”

I’ll send a copy of the review if you’d like to see it.

There was an earlier biography of J. B. S. (that’s what his colleagues and students called him) by Ronald Clark, which is okay but very light on Haldane’s science. Click on the screenshot to go to its Amazon page:

And here’s the new biography (click to go to Amazon page), which came out July 28. The title is a double entendre, as in genetics “a dominant character” is a trait produced by a gene that gives full expression of the trait when the carrier has only one copy of the gene (polydactyly and attached earlobes are two such traits in humans).

Here is the evaluative part of Ridley’s review:

Subramanian does a masterly job of summarising a rich and rough life. He uses sharp analogies and arresting images. Haldane’s handwriting was like “ants somersaulting through snow”. His columns for the Daily Worker were like “razor blades in print”. He writes that in his thirties “the various streams of his experience pooled within the basin of his character”. Haldane would have approved. Look for a familiar analogy, he wrote in “How to write a popular scientific article”. But, both illustrating and contradicting the point, he also wrote “an ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument”.

. . . Subramanian summarises Haldane’s contribution as “an incandescent persona: the man who lifted the arras that hid the work of nature; the man who stepped down, into the everyday world, from his tower of ivory; the man who shrugged away convention and defied authority”. Haldane deserves a biographer who is eloquent, intelligent, fair, but unsparing and as good at explaining science as politics. Not an easy combination, but he has got one.

I’ll be reading the book, for it’s hard to get enough Haldane. I wish I’d met the man, but he died before I graduated from high school and began studying biology.

Woody Allen memoir finally published

March 23, 2020 • 12:45 pm

After Woody Allen and his memoir, Apropos of Nothing, were cast adrift by Hachette Publishing after an employee walkout and the loss of their author Ronan Farrow, the memoir has been acquired and will be published by Arcade Publishing, according to this announcement by Publisher’s Weekly (click on screenshot). In fact, the book was released today:

A bit of the PW report (I’ve left out the bit about accused sexual misconduct that I’ve discussed before):

After the acquisition of filmmaker Woody Allen’s memoir by Grand Central Publishing led to protests at the imprint as well as at parent company Hachette Book Group, the book has a new home. Arcade Publishing, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, announced that it has acquired world rights to the title, Apropos of Nothing, and has released it in the U.S. today.

Speaking to the title, Arcade, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, said it is “a candid and comprehensive personal account by Woody Allen of his life, ranging from his childhood in Brooklyn through his acclaimed career in film, theater, television, print and standup comedy, as well as exploring his relationships with family and friends.”

From Vox:

As part of that cancellation, Hachette reverted all rights over the book to Allen. That meant he was free to sell the book to any other publisher, and now he has. Apropos of Nothing has gone to Arcade Publishing, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing.

Unlike Hachette, Skyhorse is not one of the so-called “Big Five” houses that dominate US trade publishing. It’s a smaller independent house that has published plenty of legitimate authors, including Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, but also has a history of publishing conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination and vaccines. Skyhorse has also worked with Allen before: In 2011, he wrote the introduction to director Ingmar Bergman’s memoir, published through Skyhorse.

In a statement to the AP, Arcade editor Jeannette Seaver said: “In this strange time, when truth is too often dismissed as ‘fake news,’ we as publishers prefer to give voice to a respected artist, rather than bow to those determined to silence him.”

The AP appears to be the only outlet that has been able to see a copy of Allen’s memoir thus far. In the book, the AP reports, Allen continues to deny ever harming Dylan Farrow. He writes that he “never laid a finger on Dylan, never did anything to her that could be even misconstrued as abusing her; it was a total fabrication from start to finish.”

And there’s a bit more about the contents from (ugh) HuffPo, which is the only place I’ve found this (I didn’t look hard):

“Apropos of Nothing” begins in the wry tone of such literary heroes as J.D. Salinger and George S. Kaufman, describing his New York City upbringing and love affairs with Diane Keaton and others with a sense of nostalgia and angst that also mirrors Allen movies ranging from “Radio Days” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo” to “Annie Hall” and “Hannah and Her Sisters.” But it darkens and becomes defensive, not surprisingly, as he recalls his relationship with Mia Farrow and the allegations he abused daughter Dylan Farrow that for many have come to define his public image in recent years.

He was with Mia Farrow for more than a decade, and recalls happy times with the “very, very beautiful” actress that would cool over the years, especially after the 1987 birth of their one biological child, Ronan (named Satchel at birth). As he has alleged before, he and Farrow were essentially apart by the time he began dating her daughter Soon-Yi Previn, more than 30 years younger than him, in the early 1990s. “At the very early stages of our new relationship, when lust reigns supreme … we couldn’t keep our hands off each other,” he writes of Previn, whom he married in 1997 and to whom he dedicates the book.

Recalling the day Farrow learned of the affair, after discovering erotic photographs of her twenty-something daughter at Allen’s apartment, Allen writes: “Of course I understand her shock, her dismay, her rage, everything. It was the correct reaction.” But he also expresses no regret over he and Previn becoming lovers.

“Sometimes, when the going got rough and I was maligned everywhere, I was asked if I had known the outcome, do I ever wish I never took up with Soon-Yi?” he writes. “I always answered I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

I’ve found the Arcade version on Amazon, but only in the large-print edition (it costs $40). There’s an extract on the Amazon site as well.

As I’ve said several times before, Allen deserves to have his say, and Hachette acted badly by first acquiring the book, defending Allen against his critics, and then instantly caving in to social-media and mob pressure. It was, in effect, an act of censorship. At least it will be available now (I’m betting that some woke bookstores won’t carry it), and the market can vote, though I wouldn’t trust the Amazon reviews, which will be highly conditioned by whether people think Allen is innocent or guilty of sexual misconduct.

 

The BBC’s Hitchens remembrance

April 17, 2019 • 10:00 am

A few days ago I directed you to an hourlong BBC show about the life and work of Christopher Hitchens, who, had he lived, would have been 70 on April 13. If you haven’t yet heard it, I recommend it highly. You can listen to the program by clicking on the third screenshot below (or going here); it won’t be up forever.

And you have to click a trigger warning verifying that you’re over 16 years old and also have turned off a “parental guidance lock”. Hitchens would be amused at that:

Even if you think you know everything about the man, I think you’ll learn quite a bit. There are interviews with his brother Peter, his BFF Martin Amis, Ian McEwan (who poignantly describes his farewell to Hitchens in the hospital), his Nation colleague Katha Pollitt, his ex-wife Elena, and others. His youthful Marxism is on view, as is his sexism and his prodigious consumption of libations. You’ll be intrigued at the very last thing he wrote: a few words scrawled on a pad, described as “the most succinct op-ed piece ever written—by a writer who was never at a loss for words.”

One thing that struck me was that even those who were opposed to his political beliefs or who found his personality off-putting still admired and felt affection for him. As Amis notes, “I think the key to Christopher is how intensely he was loved by so many people. Not many commentators are loved. I mean, some are valued and respected, but not loved.”

The program is ably narrated and moderated by D. D. Guttenplan, Editor at Large for The Nation. Click below:

Flowering plants remain viable after passing through the guts of waterfowl

December 16, 2018 • 9:00 am

We’ve long known that plant seeds can remain viable not only after floating a long time in fresh or salt water, but also when passing through the guts of birds, including waterfowl. In fact, I believe that at least half of the plants that arrive on oceanic islands, later to form new species, come from seeds pooped out by birds—as opposed to having floated across the ocean.

Now, however, there’s a new method of dispersal: instead of plant seeds being transported in bird guts, plants themselves can pass through a gut and remain able to reproduce (at least asexually). This is the first time it’s been shown for any flowering plant (“angiosperm”) in any bird, though there are previous reports of moss fragments and fern spores being able to pass through and remain viable in the guts of waterfowl. The study described here allows plants a new way of dispersal, and it happens to create a fortuitous mutualism between waterfowl and the plants.

The report, a short one, and free, is in Biology Letters of the Royal Society (click on screenshot, pdf here, and reference at bottom). 

The authors showed that the white-faced whistling duck (Dendrocygna viduata) and the coscoroba swan (Coscoroba coscoroba) eat a small duckweed-like plant called Wolffia columbiana, and that the plantlets—among the smallest of all angiosperms—can sometimes pass through the digestive tract of these species and remain able to divide (asexual reproduction) afterward. First, the players:

The white-faced whistling duck, found in the Southern hemisphere:

The coscoroba swan, endemic to southern South America:

And a mallard (not a whistling duck) eating duckweed, a similar plant, along with a close up of Wolffia columbiana (they’re tiny). Both regular duckweed (probably Lemna minor in the first photo below) and Wolffia are called “duckweed” because ducks nom the stuff with relish. (I’m kidding: they eat it plain!)

From a NYT story: Duckweed, and a duck, on a pond in Germany. CreditCreditKay Nietfeld/DPA, via Getty Images
W. columbiana on fingertip

 

A sarcastic tweet from the Twitter site #Wolffia:

The authors collected duck and swan poop produced by both birds in five temporary wetlands in southern Brazil that harbored the plant. The poop was taken from near resting waterfowl, and was inspected to ensure that no plants adhered to the outside of the excrement.  Some samples were frozen and then defrosted for dissection to see if plants were in the poop, while plants taken from dissected unfrozen droppings were incubated in Petri dishes to see if they could reproduce asexually—by division.

The upshot is short and sweet: whole plants were found in frozen droppings of both swans and ducks, and intact plants found in three duck samples (they didn’t do this for the swan samples, and I don’t know why), and the plants began to divide in three out of the five Petri-dish cultures. Admittedly, that’s a small sample, but still meaningful. Half of the samples, fresh or frozen, contained whole plants. And remember that these tiny plants divide rapidly to produce exponential increase in numbers, so if a duck pooped out a plantlet into a pond, it wouldn’t take long until the pond had a tasty mat of Wolffia.

Here’s a figure from the paper showing live and dead plantlets; the caption is below:

(From paper): (a) Wetland where faeces of D. viduata with W. columbiana were collected. (b) Intact plantlets obtained from faeces, showing a healthy appearance (bright green colour and integral structure). (c) Seven plantlets observed after 7 experimental days, confirming asexual reproduction. (d) Plants that died during the experiment lost their colour.

Previously, biologists had thought that these plantlets, and similar plants, could disperse by epizoochory—adhering to the outside of the bird, like many seeds do. But this paper shows another method of dispersal for whole plants or plant parts, one called endozoochory (“gut dispersal”). The latter method is less likely to kill the plants by desiccation, though gut acids could do a number on the duckweeds.

How far can the plants disperse? The authors say that “the average retention time for waterfowl faeces is several hours”, so Wolffia could move several km per day via ducks who fly from pond to pond. The swans migrate over a thousand km, so the potential dispersal through them is greater (remember, though, that swan poop didn’t show viable and reproducing Wolffia, since they didn’t look for it.)

It also seems likely that the plants most likely to move this way are those that, like W. columbiana, reproduce clonally. All you have to do to colonize a new habitat this way is to divide asexually rather than grow and produce sexual parts (stamens and pistils), and it’s probable that the latter would be more sensitive to being killed in bird guts.

Finally, while this is a mutualism (the ducks help the plants colonize new habitat, and the plant growth helps feed the ducks), it’s not likely to be an coevolved mutualism. That is, perhaps the plant has evolved resistance to being passed through waterfowl guts, since those plants able to resist gut acids would be more likely to survive and colonize new habitats, but it’s unlikely that the duck has evolved so as to harbor and not kill the plants. There would be little advantage, I suspect, to a new mutation in a duck rendering it less likely to kill plants, as those mutant ducks, moving from pond to pond, wouldn’t benefit more than ducks that didn’t kill plants (all ducks benefit from a Wolffia harvest on a pond).

The results may sound trivial and unremarkable, but may not be. While plants that can survive passage through waterfowl guts may be rare, they’re still able to colonize distant habitats in a way that other plants can’t. And we have no idea yet how many plants can disperse in this way. This paper may stimulate more work along those lines. As the authors note:

 Given that production of asexual vegetative propagules and an ability to grow from fragments is widespread in plants, dispersal of such vegetative propagules (e.g. fragments of grasses or pondweeds, or whole floating plants) by endozoochory may be an important and overlooked process.

h/t: Nilou

____________

Silva, G. G. et al. 2018. Whole angiosperms Wolffia columbiana disperse by gut passage through wildfowl in South America. Biology Letters, 14 (12), online

Susan Jacoby’s biography of Ingersoll

March 17, 2018 • 10:30 am

On my train rides up to and back from Madison, I polished off Susan Jacoby’s 2013 short (211 small pages) book on Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899). Ingersoll was an author, freethinker, and perhaps America’s most spellbinding orator of the 19th century, despite the fact that he was absolutely godless and spent much of his writing and speaking criticizing religion.  Click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon page, where you’ll see it’s been rated highly by readers:

It’s a good book, concerned more with Ingersoll’s ideas than his life, and well worth reading to see a true antecedent of the “New Atheists”. As Jacoby says in her antepenultimate chapter, “A Letter to the ‘New’ Atheists”, the hallmarks of what I see as New Atheism—its love of and use of science in dispelling religion as well as its uncompromising and in-your-face godlessness and antitheism—were all present in Ingersoll’s writings and speeches. And yet despite his atheism, which denied him the possibility of any public or elective position despite his fierce intelligence and drive, he regularly sold out his lectures, so wonderful a speaker was he. Further, most of his audience, unlike those attending the talks of people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or me, weren’t nonbelievers: many religious people came to see Ingersoll because of the power of his rhetoric.

Ingersoll was impressive in many ways. He was apparently as close to a perfect human as one could get: a devoted husband and father, a faithful friend, and someone whom even his enemies couldn’t fault. His virtues extended to his views: he was an ardent opponent of slavery and any law or behavior that discriminated against blacks, a strong promoter of women’s rights—complete equality with men—and a great popularizer of Darwin’s work. (Jacoby considers him a better explainer of evolution to the average person than was Thomas Henry Huxley, for Ingersoll had no scientific training and so was able to gauge and address people’s ignorance.) Ingersoll constantly emphasized the Founders’ view of the First Amendment, fighting against the incursion of religions such as Catholicism into government. Finally, he was also a lover and supporter of the arts, especially fond of Shakespeare and—his one flaw, in my eyes—Walt Whitman.

Jacoby feels, rightly, that all of us heathens should be aware that a New Atheist existed long before the genre got its name, and tells us why in her “Letter” chapter. I’ll let you read that for yourself. Although Ingersoll’s reputation waned after his death, and few modern atheists know much about him, it’s salubrious to see a man of our stripe being “strident” (the adjective doesn’t really apply: he didn’t have a mean bone in his body) and changing minds well before the rise of Fundamentalism.

After reading that book, I wanted to go further into Ingersoll. For those who feel likewise, here’s some other material you might essay (screenshots take you to Amazon page)

Here’s a half-hour interview of Jacoby about her Ingersoll book (by Chris M**ney); click on screenshot:

Finally, near the end of his life Ingersoll visited the laboratory of his friend Thomas Edison and recorded seven short bits of oratory. At the site below (click) you can hear the three ones that remain. The quality is poor, but at least you can get an idea of his voice and his cadences. (Remember, Ingersoll spoke to large audiences without a microphone.)

I end with a photo of The Great Agnostic himself (Ingersoll said there was no difference between an agnostic and an atheist) as well as my very favorite quote from him—about the “compatibility” of science and religion. I often use this quote in my talks about faith versus science:

There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: “Let us be friends.” It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: “Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet.”

Robert G. Ingersoll

BBC 4 broadcast on Rosalind Franklin

February 24, 2018 • 10:00 am

Reader Kevin called my attention to this BBC4 show on Rosalind Franklin. It won’t be available long, I think, so listen to the 43-minute program soon (click on the screenshot to go there).

Besides moderator Melvyn Bragg, the participants include Patricia Fara  (physics, University of Cambridge), Jim Naismith (structural biology, University of Oxford) and Judith Howard (physical chemistry, Durham University). The discussion covers her entire life, beginning with her childhood in a Jewish home, her Ph.D. studies at Cambridge (it’s horrifying to hear how women were treated there at the time), her work in France, the DNA race (of course), and her later work on viruses. It’s a good summary of Franklin’s life.

I find Franklin’s early death from ovarian cancer ineffably sad (she was just 38). As Matthew has speculated, she could have shared in the 1962 Nobel Prize with Wilkins, Crick, and Watson (since Prizes are awarded to at most three people in one area, the prize could have been split between biology—”medicine and physiology”‚ and chemistry). But Nobels aren’t given posthumously, and Franklin had died four years before. Here are the details of her interment from Wikipedia (note the “spinster” characterization).

Other members of her family have died of cancer, and the incidence of gynaecological cancer is known to be disproportionately high among Ashkenazi Jews. Her death certificate read: A Research Scientist, Spinster, Daughter of Ellis Arthur Franklin, a Banker.  She was interred on 17 April 1958 in the family plot at Willesden United Synagogue Cemetery at Beaconsfield Road in London Borough of Brent. The inscription on her tombstone reads:

IN MEMORY OF
ROSALIND ELSIE FRANKLIN
מ’ רחל בת ר’ יהודה
DEARLY LOVED ELDER DAUGHTER OF
ELLIS AND MURIEL FRANKLIN
25TH JULY 1920 – 16TH APRIL 1958
SCIENTIST
HER RESEARCH AND DISCOVERIES ON
VIRUSES REMAIN OF LASTING BENEFIT
TO MANKIND
ת נ צ ב ה [Hebrew initials for “her soul shall be bound in the bundle of life”]

Sadly, her contributions to the structure of DNA aren’t mentioned on the tombstone:

.

My WaPo review of A. N. Wilson’s Darwin biography

December 29, 2017 • 10:00 am

The new Washington Post “Outlook” section has on the cover my review of A. N. Wilson’s new biography, Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker.  I panned the book, for it was dreadful on both the historical (biographical) and scientific fronts. You can read my take by clicking on the screenshots below:


I’ll give just the last two paragraphs; do go read the whole thing. And then read the comments, where you’ll find several people denying evolution. That shows that even some readers of this fine newspaper don’t know squat about science.

Wilson’s use of the familiar and discredited tropes of creationism — humans are too special to be products of evolution, complex organs such as eyes can’t evolve, we see microevolution but not macroevolution, evolution can’t create new information in DNA, evolution is itself a religion, Hitler’s genocide traces back to Darwinism and so on — forces us to conclude that, even if he isn’t a creationist, he surely walks and quacks like one.

In the end, Wilson’s book is harmful, because its ignorance and denial of scientific evidence, coming from an established author, will promote the mistaken view that evolutionary biology is seriously flawed. And by flouting the research on Darwin carried out by serious historians of science, it betrays those historians and history itself.

I forgot to add in my review that the UK publisher of Wilson’s book—the original publisher—was John Murray, the very same house that published Darwin’s “Origin” in 1859. How COULD they?