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The distinguished British biologist J B S Haldane (JBS) was the son of John Scott Haldane (“Uffer”), the equally famous physiologist.When JBS was 12, Uffer put him in a leaking diving suit and let him down 40ft in a freezing lake, where he was kept for half an hour and almost drowned.
Quite what this sadistic detail reveals is difficult to imagine. It may well have affected JBS’s hearing, however: of which more later. But Marek Kohn’s book is written in the belief that the upbringing of scientists and their attainments in science are crucially intertwined. The thesis is controversial, and hardly true, I would have thought, of physics and chemistry; but evolutionary theory inhabits a class all of its own. Kohn believes there is something peculiar about the early formation of the minds that produced the theory of natural selection. Liberated from the restrictions of testable hypotheses, evolutionary theorists have tended to give their imaginations free rein.
To test his contention, Kohn has produced a catalogue of absorbing stories about a constellation of brilliant English biologists who have thrown a variety of ingredients into the turbulent cauldron of evolutionary biology. As one of their number, Ronald Aylmer Fisher, opines, natural selection is a mechanism for generating a high degree of eccentricity. But one should not think less of evolutionary theory, he adds, because large parts of its canon were written by “odd white males”. One wonders.
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Alfred Russel Wallace, for example, the 19th-century joint author with Darwin of the great theory, learnt early the knack of mesmerism. His victims were invariably boys. He would hang a chair on a child’s outstretched arm for five minutes, and induce him to tear off his clothes by telling him his shirt was on fire. Kohn relates that Wallace’s mesmerism led to a belief in spiritualism, which, combined with a late lurch to the political left, made an ideal mix for selectionist thinking.
It is easy to believe that outlandish beliefs and radical politics shape perspectives in the outer reaches of evolutionary ideas, especially sociobiology: although it seems less certain that there is a singular English connection. During the 19th century, ideas about evolution were dominated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who expounded the theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. (The world was still waiting for the explanation for transmission of genetics via the work of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel and his peas.) Flying in the face of the biological evidence, Marxist-Leninism favoured Lamarck’s views since they seemed of a piece with optimism about radical societal change. Following the rise of Stalin, an obscure autodidact called Trofim Lysenko attempted to employ the idea in agriculture, chilling seeds so as to plant them early in the hope of increasing grain yields. The scheme ended in famine.
Kohn is convinced that politics and atheism had a deep effect on the thinking of John Maynard Smith, a distinguished British exponent of evolutionary theory in the second half of the 20th century. At Eton, he had fallen under the spell of the writings of Haldane (who was also at Eton). Maynard Smith decided that “you either believed in God or you believed in Darwin”. Like other key evolutionists, Maynard Smith was drawn towards communism, and became a well-heeled red at Cambridge. The sensible biologist in Maynard Smith rejected Lysenko’s practical experiments, but theory was something else. “As a Marxist,” Kohn tells us, “he expected development to take place dialectically, in nature, or through history. Agents or forces acted upon each other, in dialogue or struggle.”
In a series of fascinating biographical sketches, Kohn provides an impressive study of several generations of British evolutionists’ connecting and contrasting aptitudes. But was it significant, he asks, that Haldane, Alfred Russel Wallace and William Hamilton were all tone deaf? Kohn professes scepticism on the lack of musical ear. “There must be a reason for everything,” he declares. “But everything does not have to be a reason.”
Yet he contrasts the physical and mental deficits of his leading biologists with a repertoire of their complementary strengths. For example, Maynard Smith (who died this year) had a flair for constructive simplification that he exerted in private, influencing generations of students. Richard Dawkins (who gets an all-too-brief mention) is characterised as shy, yet his scintillating literary talents have made him a huge public promoter of Darwinism.
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William Hamilton, meanwhile — conservative, agnostic and something of a tacky eugenicist — had a gift for extremes of imaginative boldness: he thought, for instance, that when the leaves burst into colour in the autumn they are signalling insects to go elsewhere for their feasting.
Not every biologist will welcome this entertaining book. There is a view among the stricter, reductionist biologists that their subject is being destroyed by the subjective, unscientific thinking of theorists who see “purpose” everywhere in blind nature. The purists argue that this is not just lazy but scientifically calamitous, discouraging the true biologist from seeking deeper truths that are often counterintuitive and resistant to homely metaphor. Dawkins, one of the more guilty (and uncontrite) of the subjectivists, cheerfully owns up to what he calls his “harmless anthropomorphisms”, of which the “selfishness” of the gene is a famous example. But for all its glorious gossip, Kohn’s book will draw many readers into an enthralling subject, which, but for the unbridled anthropomorphisms, would remain beyond the ken of non-specialist readers.
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