“Facts are chiels that winna ding / An downa be disputed” (Robert Burns, “A Dream”, 1786) This is an important book. As well as a history of the Scientific Revolution, it is a polemical defence of the very notion of such a revolution and an attack on the relativism which has infected much of academia Read More
Death is an important subject in biology. After all, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace independently arrived at the concept of natural selection by contemplating death. After reading Thomas Malthus’s notorious Essay on Population, they realised that, unchecked by death, the ability of living things to reproduce would quickly result in astronomical numbers of every Read More
The Serengeti Rules is a an excellent book on ecology written by a molecular biologist, S B Carroll, in which he links mechanisms of control found at the molecular level with the factors determining the relative numbers of plants and animals living together in ecosystems. The decisions of policy makers and funders over thirty years have Read More
John Hemming is an explorer and writer especially interested in the Amazon region and its indigenous peoples. In Naturalists in Paradise, his focus falls upon the mid-19th century collecting exhibitions of three important British naturalists: Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates and Richard Spruce. Wallace is well-known to biologists, but is eclipsed in popular memory Read More