Steven Rose

The distinguished geneticists Brian and Deborah Charlesworth charge me with overstating the reductionism of classical genetics and underestimating its contribution to the study of development (Letters, 20 October). They also dismiss the work of Needham, Waddington and the Cambridge Theoretical Biology Club (TBC), as ‘contributing nothing’. They correctly point out that one of the founders of modern...

Mike Jay’s description of how, in Revolutionary France, psychiatry became part of the state apparatus, helps locate the origins of a continuing tradition of political psychiatry (LRB, 21 May). In 1971 I was able to smuggle into Moscow copies of the just published English-language translation of Zhores Medvedev and his historian brother Roy’s A Question of Madness, an account of the time spent by...

Harold Dorn (Letters, 7 September) takes issue with comments I made on the scientific and political claims of sociobiology in my review of E.O. Wilson’s autobiography. His argument, as I understand it, is that: 1. neither Wilson nor any other sociobiologist offers reductionist explanations of social phenomena in terms of genetics or physics; 2. there is no metaphysical or philosophical analysis that...

Apologies to Francis Crick for the psycho/typo gremlin which intervened between my brain, fingers and keyboard and transformed his Astonishing into an Astounding Hypothesis (LRB, 7 July)!

Nicholas Wade’s review of The Code of Codes (LRB, 20 August) reveals a misconception unfortunately too common among those captivated by the power apparently offered by molecular biology to explain life. ‘Nature,’ he informs us, ‘requires only five million pieces of information, the units being the base pairs strung along the chemical backbone of DNA, to specify a bacterium … 3000 million...