Volume 29, Number 8 · May 13, 1982
Storming the Fortress
By John Maynard Smith
The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance
by Ernst Mayr
Harvard University Press/Belknap, 974 pp., $30.00
The Possible and the Actual
by François Jacob
Pantheon, 70 pp., $3.95 (paper)
To write a history of the world, a man would have to be slightly crazy. He would have to be possessed by some single idea which, he believed, could illuminate the whole course of history, and in the light of which all events could be judged. To write a history of biological thought, particularly one confined to thoughts about biological diversity rather than physiological mechanism, is a less ambitious undertaking, and Ernst Mayr is certainly not crazy. But the task is sufficiently formidable, and Mayr has succeeded at it only because he does indeed have a single, unified vision, which he uses to evaluate scholars from Aristotle to Theodosius Dobzhansky and R.A. Fisher.
Review, 2655 words
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