Volume 13, Number 7 · October 23, 1969
The Molecular Shadow
By P.B. Medawar
Biology and Man
by George Gaylord Simpson
Harcourt, Brace & World, 175 pp., $.95
The Relations between the Sciences
by C.F.A. Pantin
Cambridge University Press, 206 pp., $7.50
Approaches to a Philosophical Biology
by Marjorie Grene
Basic Books, 295 pp., $6.95
Towards a Theoretical Biology
I.U.B.S. Symposium, by ed. C.H. Waddington
Aldine Publishing Company, Vol. 2, 351 pp., $12.50
George Gaylord Simpson is one of the most distinguished zoologists of the present day. He was the first to apply to paleontology the special blend of genetic and 'population dynamical' thinking that most Americans learned from Dobzhansky, Mayr, and Sewall Wright, and most English students from Fisher, Haldane, and E. B. Ford. To zoologists of my generation, brought up on morphological abstractions and collections of old bones, Simpson's Tempo and Mode in Evolution[*] came as a revelation. The older zoologists could reconstruct an animal from its fossilized remains, but Simpson reconstructed populations of animals, and made us see how they might have responded to evolutionary forces of the same kind as those that shape the genetic structure of populations alive today.
Review, 2540 words
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