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It’s busman’s holidays all the way for Tim Birkhead. A professor of animal
and plant sciences at the University of Sheffield, Birkhead is tackling Peter
Raby’s Alfred Russel Wallace: A life (Chatto & Windus, 2001, see
review 9 June, p 46), deeming Wallace “brilliant but odd”. He is also reading
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin(Cambridge, 2001) which he says is
rather like hacking into the great biologist’s e-mail. However, he says that
“1864 was a bad year for Darwin’s health and many of his letters are little more
than lists of ailments”. Birkhead recently finished William Bateson
(Cambridge, 1928), a biography of Mendel’s “arrogant and dynamic” publicist, who
believed evolution happened in jerks rather than by natural selection on minute
changes between individuals.