I’ve just finished reading the new book by Marek Kohn: A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination. This is ostensibly a history of the theory of natural selection in England since Darwin by way of biographical studies of six major theorists: Alfred Russel Wallace, R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, John Maynard Smith, W. D. Hamilton, and Richard Dawkins, with briefer coverage of E. B. Ford, David Lack, and a few others.

An underlying theme is the strong influence of the ‘natural history’ tradition in British evolutionism - that is, the observation of animals and plants in the wild - as compared with the importance of comparative anatomy, physiology, or paleontology in other countries. I suppose there is something in this, but Kohn’s treatment of the theme is rather perfunctory, and closer study is needed of the natural history tradition in other countries before one can safely make comparisons.

The real meat of the book is in the biographical studies. There is nothing very new in the treatment of Wallace, Fisher and Haldane, who all have full length biographies already, but Kohn’s chapters on them are well-researched and enjoyable. There is more new material in the chapters on Maynard Smith, Hamilton and Dawkins, where Kohn draws on interviews and correspondence with the subjects themselves and their colleagues.

I was pleased to find confirmation of a suspicion of my own about volume 2 of Hamilton’s Narrow Roads of Gene Land. According to Kohn, ’His death in 2000 left his editors with a thousand pages worth of text and a remarkable dilemma. The book was as he wanted it, but he surely would have accepted major changes had he lived. The limited sales prospects for such a sprawling and necessarily expensive tome would have been pointed out to him; the essays would have been shortened and tightened. In the process, it seems reasonable to suppose, the editors would have persuaded him to lose remarks such as the suggestion that European Jews could have avoided persecution by limiting their population growth. In the end, the editors decided, quite properly, that without him they could not choose what to cut and what to keep. They passed the whole text…’

I wouldn’t recommend Kohn’s book as a single choice on the subjects it covers - Ullica Segerstrale’s Defenders of the Truthis better as an in-depth study - but it is a very enjoyable and readable introduction.

Addendum from Razib: The Guardian has a review of the above book by Andrew Brown (via Philosophy of Biology). Also, I'm sure David also knows this, but it confirms the reality that R.A. Fisher, also similarly depicted The Lady Tasting Tea (a short popular history of 20th century statistics), was a major league asshole. I was surprised to find out in the latter book that Karl Pearson, Galton's successor and the man that Fisher eventually far surpassed and rendered obsolete, seemed to be the more personable human being.

Also, for American and other non-British readers, since the book just got published in the UK, it might be a while coming to other shores....