My wife and I met as undergraduate biologists, did our doctoral work
together, and got teaching jobs in the same university. But, after two years,
she resigned because she was bored. Since then she has worked in business,
having little time for biology or biologists except, fortunately, me. Last
week I found her engrossed in a book about biology, probably the first that
has held her attention for 20 years.

The book was The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. There are too
many bad books written by biologists who seek to explain the human condition,
how it arose and where it might lead us. This is the only good book of
the genre that I have seen, and it deserves to be read by us all. It is
a passionate, informed, often witty, but always apposite account of our
relationship to the natural world.

Jared Diamond is uniquely qualified to take on the task, for he is an
accomplished naturalist, anthropologist, ecologist, physiologist, linguist,
explorer and science writer. I knew of his accomplishments, but I never
thought that I should see them all brought together. The community owes
a debt to Diamond’s twin sons, Max and Joshua, for inspiring the project.
Time and again, Diamond seems to ask himself ‘How much of what I love will
be left for them when I am gone?’.

For what his book achieves, Diamond wastes no paper. His aim in this
330-page extended essay is to explain our ancestry, to analyse the biological
properties that make us special, to define the recurring events of our history
and to herald alternative futures. In so doing, he takes us from the remotest
islands of the tropical Pacific Ocean, through primitive cultures, to the
very latest technological advances in phylogenetic tree reconstruction.
He summarises molecular, evolutionary and linguistic research with remarkable
facility.

Diamond thinks that he knows what made us special (language), why our
races have differentiated (sexual selection) and why we have made no contact
with other intelligent life forms (I’ll leave that one to him). Having made
his decisions, he is able to weave them into his theme. Other areas, such
as the evolutionary reasons for ageing, although less controversial, have
been inaccurately summarised in most popular books, but Diamond gets the
biological ground rules right.

He draws from his rich experiences of remotest New Guinea and its neighbouring
islands to provide insight into a life of earlier times. The theme that
impresses most is the universality of internecine tribal and racial warfare,
a claim hammered home by accounts of genocides in almost every civilisation
from historical times to the present. There were no Golden Ages. And just
as people have not been at peace with their neighbours, so we have never
lived in harmony with nature.

The human story is one of continued and ever-accelerating habitat destruction.
Before we moved in, each subcontinent was populated richly with large mammals
or birds. Within a few centuries of the arrival of humans, the stock of
species was decimated while their habitats were destroyed.

But the fates of mammals and birds have merely been indicators of a
deeper malaise. That is what terrifies Diamond and should terrify us all.
He writes of two clouds. Our inhumanity may be culminating in a nuclear
cloud, a topic well discussed elsewhere. But we are already enveloped by
Diamond’s second cloud: we may accept that an environmental crisis looms,
but we do not realise how far it has already advanced. The evidence is all
about us from the degraded environments of Easter Island, the Sahara Desert
and the North American midwest, to the extinct Moas of Tasmania, and the
pygmy hippos and giant tortoises of Crete and Cyprus.

Diamond does not simply bemoan our situation; he is doing something
to improve it. He has chosen to focus his conservation efforts on Indonesia,
one of the most populous and poorest countries. Irian Jaya is an Indonesian
province of New Guinea where Diamond helped to ensure that 20 per cent of
the land area would become a system of well-managed nature reserves.

The book is not an evangelical tract. Instead, it invites readers to
assess the implications of our history for our future. Diamond’s assessment
of our history may be unconventional and frightening, but it is undoubtedly
correct. His conclusions for our future are inevitable.

Paul Harvey is in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford.

JULIAN HUXLEY was born in 1887 and he died in 1975. From the end of
the First World War through to the early 1960s, he enjoyed a formidable
reputation as an evolutionary biologist, a science writer and broadcaster,
and as something of a political activist. His creed was humanism, while
his medium was the Eugenics Society and, for a time, UNESCO.

With incredible energy, he helped to found the World Wildlife Fund,
IUCN, the Ecological Society and the Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
He received numerous awards and other honours for his services to science
and to society. For example, he gained prizes for popularising science,
for writing English verse, and for contributions to planned parenthood,
conservation and evolutionary biology. Furthermore, he became a professor
at the University of London, was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and
was knighted. In short, he was a man for his time.

It is not surprising that a number of centennial events were organised
during 1987 to celebrate Huxley’s life. For the working scientist, the most
interesting of these was probably the 24th Annual Symposium of the Eugenics
Society held in London. Evolutionary Studies, the published version of this
symposium, contains about a dozen chapters by prominent research workers,
reflecting on how Huxley’s work influences current thought in their area.
Dressed up in different ways, the answers seem to be ‘not much’; Huxley
was a man for his time but not for ours.

I started reading this book with an open mind, relishing the prospect
of revelations that were to come from evolutionary biologists, such as Bryan
Clarke and Tom Kemp, from ethologists including Pat Bateson and Robin Dunbar,
and from that most ‘allometrick’ of primatologists, Bob Martin. Each seemed
to pay little more than lip service to Huxley but, at the same time, their
chapters are marvellous lucid expositions of particular areas of expertise.
For that reason alone, the volume is well worth reading.

The very fact that these particular scientists felt moved to write in
memory of Huxley says a lot for the legacy he left us which, I conclude,
is more one of inspiration than of scientific achievement. R. A. Fisher,
J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright left behind books that, like Darwin’s,
contain insights that have yet to be exploited. Julian Huxley’s published
works have not stood the test of time; his vision of progress in evolution
that led him to revere Teilhard de Chardin is one example.

For those who want to learn more about Julian Huxley, this volume contains
several personal accounts of his life and times. For example, W. H. G. Armytage
provides a useful description of Huxley’s tumultuous time as the first director
general of UNESCO, while David Hubback writes of Huxley’s views on genetics
(to my mind they were about as penetrating as those of E. B. Ford).

Enveloping this book is a part of the Huxley family tradition: the Eugenics
Society’s Galton Lectures. Julian gave the lecture in 1936 and 1962, and
Julian’s half brother Sir Andrew Huxley gave it in 1987. The 1962 and 1987
Galton Lectures are published as the first and last chapters of this book.
Sir Julian’s, which now reads as dated and politically naive, provides an
evolutionary perspective on eugenics, while Sir Andrew’s is a more comforting
family view of Sir Julian himself. The latter is a fitting tribute, matched
only by Juliette Huxley’s 1986 autobiography which gives something of the
flavour of a great man whose scientific legacy has, unfortunately, withered.

Paul Harvey is reader in biology at the Department of Zoology, University
of Oxford.

JOHN MAYNARD Smith serves many functions for evolutionary biology. At
once he is a research scientist, a communicator and a populariser. Common
to each role is his ability to reveal the essence of a problem. His speciality
has been to take ill-defined or poorly circumscribed research areas and
identify the central questions. Quite often, for good measure, he throws
in the answers as well. The questions are unified by their simplicity, typified
by the reader’s response: ‘Of course, but why didn’t I think of that?’ It
can be claimed reasonably that Maynard Smith’s distinguished career has
been marked by the belief that there are no complex problems in evolutionary
biology. So far, he has been proved correct. This collection of his book
reviews and essays demonstrates that quality in abundance. He reduces the
most complex and perplexing issues of the day to straightforward questions.

There are some of his best essays here. Perhaps the most infamous is
his review with the late Neil Warren of Genes, Mind and Culture by C. J.
Lumsden and E. O. Wilson. It is worth spending a little time on that essay
because it illustrates so much that is good about Maynard Smith’s work.
Three times in his career, E. O. Wilson has needed to work with somebody
to do his sums. To his credit, two of those collaborators have been Robert
MacArthur and George Oster. Unfortunately, he was third time unlucky. Lumsden
could turn the handles and pump out the equations (the book is full of them),
and Wilson could write the text. But did the text necessarily accord with
the equations? In particular, were the claims made for the genetical evolution
of human societies supported by the analyses presented in the book? They
were not. The important point to be made here is that there were many negative
reviews of Lumsden and Wilson’s book, but most were knee-jerk responses.
It seemed that few of the reviewers had read the book and none had worked
through the details. Richard Lewontin had made a fair point when he argued
that the central model used was chosen because it was bound to produce one
major conclusion that Wilson needed. Other, more natural models would not.

Maynard Smith took a different approach. He examined each of the results
in the book and asked whether they were surprising. There were not many
new results, and he summarised the reasons for each in his review. But two
of the conclusions seemed to be contradictory: culture slows down genetic
change, and culture speeds up genetic change. You can’t have it both ways,
unless you are using separate models based on different assumptions. Indeed,
after spending some months ploughing through the book and corresponding
with Lumsden for the fine details of the equations used, it turned out that
Lumsden had been using two different sets of assumptions, one of which was
not clearly specified.

The first model, that culture slowed down genetic change, turned out
to be based on a purely genetic model with no cultural component. The second,
that culture speeds up genetic change, was an unexpected result. It was
a consequence of using a model in which the presence of culture is costly
in terms of fitness. Because absolute fitnesses of genotypes are reduced
by a constant amount when culture is present, the ratio of fitness of different
genotypes (which predicts the rate of genetic change) becomes larger. For
example, if there were genes which influence whether we smoke or not, and
non-smokers have a fitness of 1.0 while smokers have a fitness of 0.5, then
the ratio of fitness is 1.0:0.5, which is two to one. Now subtract the fitness
cost of culture from both genotypes, say 0.25. The ratio of fitnesses is
changed to 0.75:0.25, which is three to one. That is why culture speeds
up genetic change in Lumsden and Wilson’s model. It seemed that the authors
were unaware of the reason for their conclusion.

It is typical of Maynard Smith that he will take as much time as is
necessary to understand fully what other scientists are saying. And then
he will summarise the argument with crystal clarity in just a few lines,
frequently relating it to work on other problems. These are enviable traits,
and evolutionary biology over the past 20 years would have been a more disparate
field if Maynard Smith had not been around. His syntheses have brought many
separate research workers together, and they have profited from the experience.

Take, for example, his own work on the application of game theory to
evolutionary biology, which is described in one of his essays. It provided
a powerful technique for finding that behavioural strategy which maximises
Darwinian fitness. But, at the same time, other biologists were applying
a variety of optimisation techniques to different evolutionary problems.
Maynard Smith brought this work together in a review that ran counter to
the prevailing approach for modelling evolution.

Population geneticists typically work by specifying different genetic
alleles with different fitnesses, mutation rates, starting frequencies,
migration rates, and so on. They then seek the equilibrium gene frequencies.
Nothing is optimised. The approach is purely kinematic. Now it is becoming
obvious that the optimisation approach, which takes into account genetic
and developmental constraints on evolutionary change, is providing new biological
insights. And that, of course, is what the best theories should do.

There are essays here on different topics. The supposed threats to neoDarwinism
from conspirators who have nothing else in common, and certainly not a constructive
approach to science, are dealt with parsimoniously but effectively. Symbolism,
myth and structuralism in science are given an airing. Maynard Smith defines
problems in the origin of life with the same clarity that he uses to explain
how science can best be communicated to a popular audience. A series of
essays on the use of mathematics for modelling biological problems, and
the evolution of sex and sex ratios, develops some of his fortes.

I spent more than 10 years trying to work in the corridor at the University
of Sussex inhabited by Maynard Smith. It was not a peaceful existence. Several
times during the average day he would bound in to my room and provide a
new insight into science, whether or not I happened to need it. Occasionally,
I would try to match it, and he would usually explain so very clearly why
I was wrong. If I was lucky he would tell me where he had published the
idea in 1958, 1968 or 1978. Once or twice a week, there were long well-lubricated
evening sessions, frequently entertaining visiting speakers, but just as
often alone or with a graduate student or two. Many of the essays in this
book were written during that time, and they are precious. Some others were
written since, and I can hear the oracle. I am proof that you need neither
to know much nor be above average intelligence to appreciate this particular
polymath. There are few who will read and not enjoy.

Paul Harvey lectures in the department of zoology, University of Oxford,
and is tutor for graduate admissions, Merton College.