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“... During the second half of the 18th century, the great enterprise of sorting out the biological world was at its most dynamic and magnificent. Empire-builders were sending home animals, indeed entire faunas, of a strangeness that defied traditional taxonomies. Scientifically-minded farmers were calculating pedigrees and codifying breeds in the quest for improved stock; physicians and surgeons were giving names to the apparently infinite congenital abnormalities that came under their not always very skilful care ...”

“... The Martiniquan poet and ideologue of négritude, Aimé Césaire, celebrated the sons and daughters of Africa as Ceux qui n’ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole ceux qui n’ont jamais su dompter la vapeur ni l’électricité ceux qui n’ont exploré ni les mers ni le ciel Césaire was too modest. Not only did Africans south of the Sahara fail to invent gunpowder, the compass, gas and electricity: they failed to invent, or even acquire in precolonial times, writing, the yoke, the plough and the wheel ...”

“... The evening of 22 August 1799 – the eve of his departure from Egypt – was surely one of the less happy that Napoleon Bonaparte had known. Unusually mindful of the mortality of empires, he is said to have declared to the mathematician Gaspard Monge, one of a collection of savants he had brought to Egypt, that he would far rather be a Newton than an Alexander ...”

“... For the past three years, the London School of Economics has been holding a seminar series, or rather a salon, snappily titled Darwin@LSE. These seminars are always invigorating, and never more so than one evening this February when W.G. Runciman urged the necessity of refounding sociology along Darwinian lines. Weary of such pronouncements though they might be, even the most sceptical sociologists could not have failed to realise that here was a serious challenge to theoretical orthodoxy ...”

“... away; too few, and there would be insufficient variation for evolution to work with. In Mutants, Armand MarieLeroi argues that in order to understand how people’s bodies are constructed, biologists need now to focus their attention on the bestiary of human variation, both normal and extreme. As people are not ...”

“... including his grand treatise on comparative zoology, the History of Animals – are the subject of Armand MarieLeroi’s new book. Aristotle may be most famous for his Physics and Politics, but his most voluminous writings were biological. Leroi celebrates him as the first truly ...”