Volume 21, Number 12 · July 18, 1974
A Biology of Russian Dolls
By Stephen Toulmin
The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity
by François Jacob, translated by Betty E. Spillman
Pantheon, 348 pp., $8.95
After a century of tissue rejection, the grafting of Darwinian evolution theory into the body of French thought is at last proceeding with all deliberate speed. One says 'deliberate' because even now very few true evolutionary biologists are to be found in either the universities or the medical schools of France. The paleontological and physiological traditions of Cuvier and Bernard are still influential among French academic biologists and medical scientists; and neither of these essentially structural modes of thought displays any great compatibility with Charles Darwin's populational approach. Yet at the pinnacle of the scientific hierarchy, at the Institut Pasteur and the Collège de France, there is a small group of remarkable biologists who are at last determined to achieve a successful transplant, and to install within the Cartesian world picture of French science a functioning account of variation, natural selection, and the rest—ideas that have hitherto provoked in France the reactions proper to 'foreign bodies.'
Review, 2323 words
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