The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of...
One of the many curious discoveries made, earlier this century, by ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen was that fighting in animals is restrained and, as they called it,...
The ant-lion builds its traps in sandy soil. It fashions – somehow – a geometrically perfect inverted cone. At the tip of the cone the ant-lion lurks, buried and invisible, waiting...
Tony Smith, reviewing J.K. Oates’s Penguin on herpes (LRB, Vol. 5, No 9), sounded, thank God, a cheerful rather than a holy note. Far from being a divine visitation on lechery, herpes is a...
Numerous accounts, not least among them Ronald Lewin’s pioneering survey Ultra goes to war, have familiarised us with the remarkable story of Anglo-American achievements in breaking enemy...
In W.H. Hudson’s autobiographical study, Far Away and Long Ago,* there is a passage which it is hard to make oneself read. The subject is the gaucho method of slaughtering a cow or bullock....
Almost every year some new disease becomes a focus of prurient, even voyeuristic attention on the part of the British public. The choice seemingly depends more on the whims of fashion than on the...
A great many new facts about human evolution have been found in recent years, all of them strengthening the belief that our ancestors were rather like apes. Indeed it becomes more and more likely...
A reassessment of Florence Nightingale and her achievements requires consideration of her public work, her personal character and the relation between the two, and F.B. Smith has interesting...
Lewis Thomas is a physician, a scientist, a medical administrator, and a man of letters whose previous books, The Lives of a Cell (1974) and The Medusa and the Snail (1979), and occasional...
In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If...
Why, in the great majority of animals, are there equal numbers of males and females? For John Arbuthnot, writing in 1710, it was evidence of the beneficence of God: ‘for by this means it is...
Modern evolutionary biology seems prone to idle argument and useless controversy, as if it had an urge to experience once again the exciting atmosphere of the Darwinists v. the Creationists, or...
Agonistic, aleatory, vertiginous, mimetic: those are four classes of game, or more accurately four game-elements which can be combined in different ways to create different genres. Mimetic games,...
Daniel O’Keefe’s massive survey of magic not only tells us ‘how to do it’ but gives us some policy recommendations too. His book reads like the transcript of a Royal...
It is hard these days to open the newspapers without seeing a reference to the notion that Nato should improve its conventional defences. One day General Rogers, the Supreme Commander of Nato, is...
It is time for a change, even in the small world of historical epithets. For ages, philosophers and historians have been haunted by intellectual tags, such as Was ist Aufklärung? There have...
Most people know that Charles Babbage was a pioneer of the computer. This absorbing, though hagiographical, new life makes very clear how many other things he was as well: pure mathematician,...