Volume 19, Number 4 · September 21, 1972
The Head on Jung's Pillow
By David Joravsky
Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason
by Norman Macbeth
Gambit, 178 pp., $6.95
The Case of the Midwife Toad
by Arthur Koestler
Random House, 188 pp., $5.95
The Roots of Coincidence
by Arthur Koestler
Random House, 160 pp., $5.95
Arthur Koestler and Norman Macbeth, a lawyer, are annoyed with biological science, sufficiently so to publish criticisms of it. A century ago that fact would hardly have been noteworthy. Now it is as startling as the appearance of a living fossil. Any willingness to challenge scientists in their special fields by now seemed doomed to extinction, not only by deference to expertise but also by disdain. Everybody, it seemed, agreed with Robert Frost's wisecrack that nature is not 'Pretty Scenery' but 'the Whole Goddam Machinery,' to be investigated by mechanics called scientists. Back in 1850, when Tennyson saw that he was losing his struggle against this vision of nature, he accurately forecast a typical reaction:
Review, 3241 words
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