A reason for everything Book

A reason for everything is a fine and wonderfully well-written biography of the five British luminaries (after Darwin) who tended to the selectionist paradigm of evolutionary design that has since become rooted in the popular mind (Among most evolutionary biologists and molecular biologists nowadays, natural selection is not assumed to be the major force driving evolutionary change, just the sole mechanism for adaptive change). Marek Kohn moves chronologically from Darwin's contemporary, and the fellow discoverer of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, to R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, John Maynard Smith, William Hamilton and Richard Dawkins.

Most hailed from Oxbridge, overexpress quaint peccadillos, and all are literally, and at times have been figuratively, tone-deaf. This last trait implies some likely inbreeding, which would be a reasonable expectation for discussion in a book with the subtitle: Natural Selection and the English Imagination. Leaving aside the auditory shortcomings, what nutritive aspect of the English imagination made it fertile soil for the germination and continued cultivation of one of the greatest ideas in the history of ideas: evolution by natural selection? Kohn only approaches the question'what Stephen Jay Gould called the "British hang-up"'orthogonally with quotes and asides. Here's John Maynard Smith, "Because of the accident that Wright is American, whereas Fisher and Haldane were British, evolutionary biologists in America often place great emphasis on chance events, whereas we British know better." Kohn goes on to mention that this was, of course, no accident but sprang from the British penchant for colleting things'"the genteel fascination with snails and butterflies"'made light by the famous Maynard Smith quote: "I never met a birdwatcher who was not a naïve adaptationist." In other words pattern recognition combined with anthropomorphism, two very human qualities to be sure. Toward the end of the book we read the young Dawkins, sounding like Gould, describing the intellectual atmosphere as such, 'if you wrote an essay…which suggested that something was too trivial to count in natural selection, you got jumped on…it really became quite heretical, though it wasn't in the rest of the world, to ever talk about anything being neutral, or too insignificant to count. Selection was the great god, and selection was thought to be powerful enough to drive evolution to just about any lengths." Dawkins eventually fell in line and his assimilation was complete before he wrote the Selfish Gene. The other "British hang-up" was natural theology, a perspective that "came to regard living things as assemblages of adaptations, and [its practitioners] tended to see adaptations everywhere." Darwin, the story goes, coopted rather than overthrew this satisfying intuition and termed it natural selection.

Before Dawkins but after Darwin, the other god to contend with was Marxism. In an enlightening and absolutely fascinating chapter titled "Comrade Prof" Kohn narrates the conversion of J.B.S. Haldane from "loose cannon" to one of the "red recruits" of the Communist Party. In hindsight, pledging allegiance to Stalin'even giving him the benefit of the doubt in light of all the news coming in of the liquidations, prison camps, and show trials'is damming, even if the Marxism didn't flavor the science, which in Haldane's it seems likely. Kohn repeats the popular line that it was fear that motivated the intellectual left, fear of spreading fascism, failed democracies, and economic destitution, and drove them into Stalin's cold embrace, to the point where even Haldane, never one to pull a punch, supported the scientifically ignorant but politically adroit Trofim Lysenko, and the implementation of his catastrophic ideas. Another factor at play, at least for British geneticists, was the breeder's natural tendency to improve upon genetic quality, and, in observing inequality of traits in humans, to extend this framework into the popular social philosophy called eugenics. A politically motivated scientist such as Haldane could not deny such trait imbalances in humans the way the American Constitution did (self-evident that all men are created equal), but to look for a solution. "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," would be "nonsense if abilities and needs were equal," said Haldane. While the Terror continued and Lysenkoism in practice was an abject failure, the stubborn Haldane only quit the Party after Khruschchev's denunciation of Stalin spread throughout the West.

Kohn's gift for well-researched story telling is just as evenly administered to the rest of the subjects he brings to biographical life. Kohn interlaces their life's work and accomplishments, and personalities so masterfully that you leave with a feeling of near affinity for the subject on the page, even for someone as cold and distant at R.A. Fisher. For better or worse you also leave with a feeling that evolution by natural selection as a whole is not so much rigorous science as philosophical perspective. Bemoaning the speculative field of evolutionary psychology, the American evolutionary biologist, one of Richard Lewontin's former graduate students, Jerry Coyne said "In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables."