Ullica Segerstrale

The last chapter of Nature's Oracle is a killer. It lays out the colourful, wide-ranging and enormously deep reaches of Bill Hamilton's lifework. It marvels with insights, angles, perceptions and appreciations. It lays out the uniqueness of the man and his accomplishments. Too bad it wasn't the first chapter of the book. I would have approached it differently, even anxiously. And I think many more will miss out because the whole book isn't framed by that last chapter.

For someone called the 20th Century Darwin, I think the name Bill Hamilton would not garner any sort of recognition outside his discipline. He needs a little buildup. He had an insatiable (as opposed to obsessive) need to understand the lives of all living things. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of them, and no one else came close to his expertise. He risked life and limb without thought to purse that knowledge. He developed hugely important theories on altruism and sex in plants and insects. He was a pioneer user of computers. He spent endless hours modeling behaviors, long before that became easy and routine. But his biography was written by an academic colleague, clearly for other academic colleagues. Which is unfortunate, because Bill Hamilton's life is definitely worth examining by a much wider audience.

It's not until page 287 that we get this summation:"He wanted to know how nature worked, he wanted to become one with her. ...she was his inspiration and excitement, she was his true conversation partner." If that were stated up front, it too would have given me a framework to keep reading, but by page 287 it was trite.

On the personal level, it seems as if Hamilton's life got in the way of the story. His wife Christine wanted her own career and ended up moving to the Orkneys (!) to practice dentistry. Hamilton became lonely and morose, and took up with a journalist/colleague, Luisa. Or did he? They seemed to live in different countries, although she appears at his family home with the whole family when Hamilton's mother died. Was she accepted as his spouse? Did he ever divorce from Christine? Did they just agree to pursue separate careers? Did they ever reconcile? Did Luisa cause frictions? How did his daughters deal with it - and him? None of it is explored in what otherwise seems to be an exhaustive biography. It's odd because of the granularity of detail in the rest of the book, right down to the difference between O level and A level exams in the UK. You'd think the mother of his three children would merit at least some sort of closure.

The book could also use a glossary for those of us without doctorates in zoology and biology. Words like sosigonic simply do not factor into most vocabularies. But these five pound words are tossed off with total abandon throughout, and that inevitably slows the flow.

There is a not-so-small irony the author missed in Bill Hamilton's lifelong struggle with peer reviewed journals, particularly Nature. Bill Hamilton's discoveries and observations that resulted in the theories of the Parasite Red Queen, parasite avoidance, deleterious mutation elimination and others - had trouble finding print. These theories very much resemble the process of getting a new idea published in Nature. While Hamilton was busy pushing his revolutionary observations, the system was busy protecting the status quo from this maverick outlier. How ironic. And too bad the author missed it. His theories were clearly the centerpiece of his career, and it wasn't until his death that Nature freely admitted him to its pages. This struggle dominates these pages. But there is so much more to this life than those fights. I hope you will catch that when you read it.… (lisätietoja)

This book is rightly celebrated as THE place to go to to learn about the socio-biological (and related) disputes of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Segerstrale had an uncommon degree of access to the central figures in the debate, and also an uncommon degree of access to those less-famous working scientists who largely pass judgement on these sorts of debate.

The big weaknesses of the book are its small but decided bias in favor of EO Wilson, whom the author obviously likes personally; and Segerstrale's persistent refusal to properly entertain the possibility that the institutional interests of science might mitigate against a fair judgment of truth in some of these matters, which all essentially go to the question of how powerful that institution ought to be.… (lisätietoja)

Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate by Ullica Segerstrale is a comprehensive (exhaustive might be the better word) analysis from a sociologist of the actions and motivations behind the parties in the "Sociobiology Debate," which began with the publications of E.O. Wilson's book, Sociobiology, in the 1970s. Wilson basically proposed that "the genes hold culture on a leash." Other parties include Richard Dawkins (also of the genetic determinism bent, though he later denied it), and, in the opposite corner, scientists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. While Segerstrale presents a fairly objective analysis, and nobody comes out of it looking much better, I think she betrays a small bias towards Wilson.

(Reviewed at Question Technology: http://www.questiontechnology.org/blog/2006/07/recent_reading_.html)… (lisätietoja)