Volume 32, Number 15 · October 10, 1985
Darwin, Mendel & the Mind
By Richard C. Lewontin
The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea
by Ronald W. Clark
Random House, 449 pp., $19.95
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin Volume I: 1821–1836
edited by Frederick Burkhardt, edited by Sydney Smith
Cambridge University Press, 702 pp., $37.50
Past Masters: Mendel
by Vitezslav Orel, translated by Stephen Finn
Oxford University Press, 111 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Past Masters: Lamarck
by L.J. Jordanova
Oxford University Press, 118 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind
by Jean-Pierre Changeux, translated by Dr. Laurence Garey
Pantheon, 348 pp., $19.95
The catalog of Harvard's Widener Library lists 184 books about Charles Darwin, his life and work (not counting 172 volumes of self-produced letters, autobiography, and scientific opera). On the subject of Gregor Mendel, there are only seventeen. The same disproportion is reflected in the books I have before me. Darwin is represented by a 702-page collection of letters all written before the age of twenty-seven, and a 449-page biography and subsequent history of the idea of evolution written by a professional biographer with no special expertise in the subject. When I contemplate yet another book about Darwin and Darwinism, I feel a bond of sympathy with the philistine Duke of Gloucester, whose reaction to a second volume of The Decline and Fall was, 'Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?' For Mendel on the other hand, the services of Vitezslav Orel, a great authority who has spent more than twenty-five years in historical research on the subject, have been obtained to produce a mere one hundred pages as part of a series of lives of the intellectual saints running from Aquinas to Wyclif.
Review, 6553 words
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