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Book Review: A Reason For Everything: The Origin of Eccentrics

Posted on: Tuesday, 7 September 2004, 06:00 CDT

A Reason For Everything

Marek Kohn

Faber & Faber, GBP 20

AS A child I wondered why salt and pepper pots have different tops, and was told it had something to do with the way they flowed more easily through one big hole or many smaller ones. Then I went abroad and found that in some countries the convention is reversed. The only reason why salt and pepper have different tops is so that you can tell one from the other.

There is a great urge to find a reason for everything, and it prompts the title of Marek Kohn's book about evolution and some of the biologists and mathematicians who have developed the theory since Darwin. Why, for example, do some trees go gorgeously red or gold in autumn? Some might say the trees' beauty was put there by God to please human eyes.

Darwin felt it was a mere accident - he could see no benefit to the trees in putting on such a display. But Bill Hamilton - dubbed by some as "the Darwin of the 20th century" - found evidence that the bright autumnal colours deter parasites.

The underlying theme of Kohn's book is an optimistic one. Many see evolution as producing a godless, soulless view of nature in which plants and animals - ourselves included - are reduced to vehicles for the reproduction of selfish genes. But evolution instead allows us to find meaning in every part of nature - if only we know how to look.

That still leaves much room for argument, and A Reason For Everything focuses on the lives and works of a small number of prominent figures who have steered the debate. The technicalities are sometimes intricate, and the subtleties of rival views may be more impressive to the specialist rather than the general reader. Of broader appeal, however, are the cast of eccentrics, egotists and obsessives Kohn lines up.

He starts with Alfred Russel Wallace, the Victorian naturalist who discovered the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin. Wallace's openness to new and heretical ideas made him "more Darwinian than Darwin", but he had no trouble accommodating evolution with spirituality.

In fact he believed evolution to be divinely steered, and in later life became an ardent spiritualist, attending seances and insisting on their authenticity, even when mediums were often exposed as frauds. Wallace, in the end, was so open-minded that his brain fell out. One of his last hobby horses was a theory that Edgar Allen Poe had written his final poems from beyond the grave.

Even the greatest of scientists can have their barmy side, and the overlap of evolution with eugenics can make such eccentricities downright sinister. RA Fisher used mathematics to merge Darwinism with Mendel's laws of heredity, but in addition to this great work he also collaborated with Otmar von Verschuer, whose research material came from Auschwitz. Kohn absolves Fisher of Nazism (while nevertheless noting his student fondness for "playing at Vikings and poring over Nietzsche"). But this example of a fine scientist showing moral blindness is far from unique.

A chilling example is Bill Hamilton (who died in 2000), imagining himself master of a desert island, saying "[I] would indeed with my own hands kill a defective baby." Whatever the point of such an evil deed, it could not be justified on evolutionary grounds. Individuals (other than Nazis) do not act so as to "improve the species", but so as to further their own genetic chances. Hamilton would have given himself better odds by killing healthy babies that might grow up and compete with his own offspring.

More endearing a personality, if no less bizarre, is EB Ford, described by Richard Dawkins, who knew him as a "fastidious old bachelor", and by others as a "wicked queen". Ford worked on the famous peppered moth, whose dark variety thrives in polluted cities - a classic if controversial illustration of natural selection in action. "In combining science and camp," says Kohn, Ford himself was an "exotic specimen", who liked to speak of "my friend the Pope", and enjoyed greeting his colleague's au pair with the inquiry: "How is your pussy?"

Various themes recur throughout Kohn's book. All his subjects are English males, with Oxford being their usual nesting ground. Maleness is a simple product of the bias that historically existed in higher education; but the striking dominance of the English in evolutionary theory has often been noted - by Karl Marx, Richard Lewontin and others. If there has to be a reason it could be the English love of gardens, bird-watching and butterfly collecting, which set the scene for Darwin's copious data collection.

Wildlife remains a British obsession - no item on the Today program is guaranteed to generate as much audience feedback as a story about birds or dogs - and A Reason For Everything is clearly packaged so as to appeal to the same enthusiasm. The cover shows a red admiral, a ladybird and a robin - three of the cosiest species you could imagine - over the subtitle "Natural selection and the English imagination". Readers thus lured may, I fear, be disappointed. Although Kohn makes intermittent attempts to set natural selection in a broader cultural context, this is not his true theme.

For the uses of evolution in justifying colonialism, for example, you would do better with Sven Lindqvist's Exterminate All The Brutes. And for thoughts on the way that genetics permeate contemporary thinking (albeit from a maverick viewpoint), one might suggest Richard Lewontin's It Ain't Necessarily So.

Kohn's is a detailed, well researched account that offers much on the personalities and ideas of JBS Haldane, John Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins and others. Dawkins emerges as something of an exception, not on account of gender or nationality, or even personality (virtually all the featured scientists are of the aloof, ivory-tower type), but rather because Dawkins, unlike the others, did all his work indoors, never venturing into the field.

According to jokers, he tried it once but was chased by a wasp. Dawkins gained his insights from computer programming, realising that evolution could be seen in terms of the information coded in genes.

Dawkins' greatest crime against humanity appears to have been his insistence on scientifically proving to his six-year-old daughter that there is no Santa Claus; but his militant atheism has left many feeling that evolutionary theory must necessarily be anti-religion. Kohn's book shows the contrary to have been true, from Darwin's era to the present. In fact, it seems that evolution can accommodate all manner of bizarre ideas.

Andrew Crumey's latest novel is Mobius Dick

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