A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the British Imagination

  • Marek Kohn
Faber & Faber: 2004. 400 pp. £20
A statistical geneticist and the Rajah of Bomb: R. A. Fisher (left) and J. B. S. Haldane. Credit: A. BARRINGTON BROWN/SPL

What's this cult of personality in evolutionary biology all about? There's the Great Leader, Chairman Charles, of course, and various lesser but substantial figures who are also worthy of the occasional parade. But why do we need so many? Experts on chloroplasts or chlorine manage, as far as I know, with living facts, and are not forced to attach them to dead heroes. But there's something in evolution that calls for immortals to whom we plebs must defer.

A Reason for Everything explores the lives of six members of the central committee of the English Evolutionary Party and their hangers-on. With a single exception, the players are toffs to a man, products of famous public schools followed by one of the older provincial universities. Charles Darwin (Shrewsbury and Cambridge) blotted his copybook by spending a student year in Scotland, but of the six discussed here, R. A. Fisher (Harrow and Cambridge), J. B. S. Haldane (Eton and Oxford), John Maynard Smith (Eton and Cambridge), Bill Hamilton (Tonbridge and Cambridge) and Richard Dawkins (Oundle and Oxford), all had a grand English education. Kohn's one great anomaly is Alfred Russel Wallace, who enjoyed a short period at Hertford Grammar School and thereafter had to make do with the University of Life.

Each is given a sympathetic hearing, although one senses that Kohn's patience is tried by the miasma of self-congratulation that surrounded some of the actors in his drama. Fisher claimed that his fundamental theory of natural selection occupied the supreme position among the biological sciences, although others dismissed it as a verbal trick. Fisher's colleague E. B. Ford, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a silly man in a silly place, did some desultory research and spent his later years bemoaning the presence of women in lectures and waiting for ecological genetics to supplant all that dull molecular stuff.

The most remarkable character is the earliest of Darwin's bulldogs (although he lived long enough to worry about air warfare). Wallace's expeditions were followed by a lifetime of devotion to the Great Leader and to a series of ingenious observations, including an attempt to prove, for a bet, that the world was not flat. His elegant demonstration led to death threats (and contempt from his better-off colleagues) but was good science. He turned, alas, to spiritualism and, as so often when scientists use their knowledge of nature to interpret the world of man, abandoned common sense.

Some of his successors were also happy to use Arts Faculty science — sweeping generalizations without the need for facts — when discussing human affairs. Fisher was, like his near-contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, an undergraduate fan of the Nordic myths. His Genetical Theory of Natural Selection became evolution's equivalent of The Lord of the Rings: full of gnomic and portentous truths with rather a nasty social agenda lurking beneath (Fisher felt it his biological duty to beget eight children). As Kohn points out, Fisher's followers, like those of Wagner — composer of a musical on the same theme — are obsessed with the fine detail of what the great begetter meant and are still far from sure.

Set against the bearded bigot, the Gandalf-like figure of Haldane is revealed in a rather better light. A daring and often reckless experimenter, he was known in the trenches as the Rajah of Bomb and was pursued by the whiff of cordite throughout his career. He stuck with the Communist party long after his colleagues had abandoned it, and Kohn provides a telling account of Haldane's readiness to support Comrade Lysenko even in the face of powerful evidence against his theories.

Haldane's representative on Earth was, for nearly forty years, John Maynard Smith (who had himself hung the hammer and sickle from his Eton window). Maynard Smith inspired many young evolutionists, and I have seen him hold an entire pub entranced as he discoursed to a group of undergraduates. His interview for this book reveals many details of his life and way of thinking, and shows how conflict has overtaken cooperation as the key to understanding animal behaviour.

In a recent magazine poll, Richard Dawkins, with his trademark hobbit smile, was voted Britain's top intellectual (a welcome kick in the teeth for the new generation of Creationists in our privately funded schools). He, too, spoke to Kohn, but perhaps not for long (“Dawkins, the most public but most private of scientists...”). Darwin's latest bulldog is, it seems clear, not best friends with the Bush regime but, unlike too many others, Dawkins has been scrupulous in not allowing his science to control his politics.

The most ambiguous character to emerge from these pages is Hamilton. He found it hard to make friends and nursed long, Gollum-like resentments in his search for the ring of truth. Kohn suggests that he may have suffered from autism. Autistic or not, Bill Hamilton was an outstanding biologist. Darwin's ability to generalize came from his huge knowledge of plants and animals. Few of his intellectual descendants can tell a hawk from a handsaw, let alone from an eagle. Hamilton could, and his daring tropical trips gave him the raw material for many leaps of the scientific imagination. His last, published posthumously, argues that the plants with the brightest autumn colours are telling parasites that they are fit and healthy, and to go elsewhere. Hamilton, sad to say, was also a martyr to political vapourings and lobbied for a cracked eugenical Utopia with Margaret Thatcher as Life President and caesarian births banned.

A Reason for Everything is a well-written and carefully researched account of some of the main British players in the world of evolution. Every evolutionist should read it — as a warning against personality cults, if nothing else. Kohn makes it clear that giants walked the Earth in those days. Those days are gone, but after perusing his chapter on the Oxford school of evolutionary biology in the 1950s and 1960s — some geniuses, no doubt, but also a fair sprinkling of prima donnas and right-wing zealots — one can only mutter, through gently clenched teeth, “Thank God!”