In From Brains to Consciousness (Allen Lane, £25, ISBN
0713991674), biologist Steven Rose brings together neuroscientists,
psychiatrists, mathematicians, computer scientists, philosophers and
pharmacologists, Midgley among them. There is a sense here of science as the
prodigal son returning, puzzled and slightly dazed, ready to admit that Old
Father Philosophy might be worth chatting to after all.

The contributions are gloriously varied and often at odds with each other.
Particularly good are Richard Bentall’s devastating and humorous deconstruction
of the whole notion of schizophrenia, and Midgley’s thoughtful overview of the
problems of researching consciousness.

Rose deserves credit for this stuff—a meeting of mindsets that could
just be the start of a beautiful friendship.

The Aryan Christ Richard Noll, Macmillan, £20/$25.95, ISBN 0333666186

Carl Rogers: A Critical Biography by David Cohen, Constable, £20, ISBN 0094770107

Dr Freud by Paul Ferris, Sinclair Stevenson, $30, ISBN 185619390X

IN an interview in 1938, Carl Jung spoke of Adolf Hitler as a “truly mystic
medicine man . . . a spiritual vessel, a demi-deity”. He went on to say: “This
markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler’s is what makes him do things which
seem to us illogical, inexplicable, curious and unreasonable . . .”

This pronouncement is interesting from several angles. First, it makes it
clear that Jung, even if not an outright Nazi sympathiser, was far from critical
before the outbreak of the Second World War. Secondly, in claiming that mystics
can flout the social rules, it is also a subtle self-justification: Jung would
surely have accepted the label “mystic” for himself, and there was much in his
behaviour that was thoroughly unreasonable.

As Frank McLynn’s excellent biography Carl Gustav Jung makes clear,
Jung was an arrogant, belligerent and intensely selfish man who destroyed
several people’s lives in pursuing his ambitions, made both his wife and his
long-term mistress Toni Wolff profoundly miserable, fell out with almost every
male friend he ever made, and bullied many of his patients or seduced them, or
both.

The confused letters of one browbeaten patient, Fanny Bowditch Katz, included
in Richard Noll’s The Aryan Christ, give a particularly shocking
glimpse of Jung at work. But that is not the main thrust of Noll’s book, which
sets out to show that Jung’s ideas were heavily influenced by the popular
German völkisch cults whose followers worshipped the Sun, believed
in polygamy and danced naked around bonfires, hoping to rekindle their pagan
Aryan past. As Noll points out, there is no evidence that Jung ever belonged to
any of these cults, it is just that certain colleagues, patients and
acquaintances did, and that Jung sometimes used language which was reminiscent
of their ideas.

The shock factor in this revelation, upon which the publisher was clearly
relying for media exposure, is that the same völkish ideas also
inspired the Nazis. But this would only be shocking if Jung had never been
accused of Nazi sympathies before. To avoid spoiling the hype, the previous
accusations are not discussed, and Noll never mentions the 1938 interview quoted
above, nor many other sources that provide evidence of Jung’s Nazi leanings.
This is unnecessary for those familiar with Jung, but it is does matter for the
general reader—and the sensationalist cover of the British edition, with
Jung’s head cut away to reveal a sun symbol, clearly aims to attract the
nonspecialist.

Noll’s other accusation, that Jung was trying to found a religious cult
himself, has also been made countless times before, although its nature was
never so clearly specified. While it is interesting to discover that Jung once
had a vision of himself as a lion-headed god, or might have thought he was the
Aryan Christ, this hardly makes Jung seem much more exotic than he did before,
on the basis of his many visions and occult interests.

In his enthusiasm to indict Jung, Noll does not deal with potential
objections to his theory. For example, he makes no mention of Jung’s well-known
visit to the US in 1925, when an old Pueblo Indian talked emotively of sun
worship to Jung, who later described how he suddenly saw the Sun from the
Indian’s point of view—”a novel and deeply affecting experience”. If Jung
was being truthful about his reactions, then he cannot have been a sun
worshipper from around 1912, as Noll suggests.

The paradoxical fact remains that Jung, for all his faults, did help many
patients, and that he was inspiring and sometimes full of insight into other
people, if not into himself. The same could be said of Carl Rogers, whose
near-saintly image takes a battering in David Cohen’s biography.

Unfortunately, this is another book where the need for hype has shaped the
content, so that extraordinary prominence is given to Rogers’s
failures—principally a deteriorating relationship with his wife in old
age, which led to a mild drink problem. These problems are made much of in the
jacket blurb and the first chapter, so if you never reached the last chapters of
this book (for which you’d be forgiven—it is a dull read), you could come
away with the impression that Rogers was a monstrous hypocrite.

In fact, all the evidence that Cohen uses against him in these last chapters
came from Rogers’s own pen—he made extensive notes on the rows with his
wife, writing down all the criticisms she made of him in a poignant attempt to
understand what had gone wrong. In the end they were reconciled just before her
death—and I suspect that Mrs Jung would have thought that Mrs Rogers had
had a pretty easy time of it.

The worst one can say about Rogers is that he wasn’t absolutely perfect. He
had a reputation as the World’s Greatest Listener, which irritated his family
when things got tough and he wasn’t listening quite as much as they wanted. But
he kept trying to get things right.

And he put all his papers—including the notes of the marital rows, and
angry letters from his brother and his son-in-law—on open access in the
Library of Congress when he died. He clearly felt he had nothing to be ashamed
of, and most people would agree. Most of Jung’s private papers, by contrast, are
still under lock and key.

The truly important accusations that Cohen makes against Rogers are that he
claimed more success for his brand of therapy than was really merited. That is
probably so, but Rogers did at least try for scientific testing, whereas both
Jung and Freud used “Science” to sell their wares in the way modern shampoo
manufacturers use “Nature”.

In the case of Dr Freud by Paul Ferris, we have a gem of a book, the
first biography of Freud from an author outside the psychoanalytic field,
superbly written and extremely funny in places. Ferris has a great eye for the
absurd, and Freud and his followers are a rich hunting ground.

More seriously, Ferris has an extensive knowledge of Freud’s life and
thinking, which he manages to convey with great clarity, elegance and brevity.
This is a real book, not something that has been given silicon implants by the
publisher’s sales department.

IF YOU have ever wondered why surgical operations are carried out in an
“operating theatre” rather than, say, an “operating room”, The Wisdom of the
Body by Sherwin Nuland has some answers. This is the surgeon as theatrical
superstar, the surgeon as hero, the surgeon snatching patients from the jaws of
death with deft swipes of his scalpel. In places it resembles a string of
episodes of ER, retold by a rather grand and incorrigible old thespian,
who intersperses his wordy narrative with plenty of philosophical asides, bons
mots and literary quotations.

Aristotle, Freud, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Nietzsche, Emerson, Auden, Leibnitz
and Pope are all invited to put in their two-pennyworth. Elsewhere, the book
includes solid chunks of medicine or biology, explained with clarity and sewn as
neatly as a good suture into the surgical sagas.

The book covers a huge territory, from the details of DNA replication and the
discovery of neurotransmitters to the cause of sickle-cell anaemia and the
cooking methods used for traditional pig feasts in the New Guinea highlands. It
deals, in passing, with Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, the ritual
preparation of kosher meat, evolutionary speculation about the orgasmic
experiences of Neanderthal females, the history of vitalism and the author’s
feelings on the birth of his first child. Perhaps inevitably, given this vast
terrain, the literary style veers from cool scientific descriptions to grandiose
descriptive passages that seem to belong to another century, and then to casual,
streetwise, occasionally even slangy language.

The philosophical viewpoint changes just as unpredictably. In places Nuland
expresses a reductionist view of the most extreme sort, such as “It had long
been known that small differences in proteins are the reasons for the
differences between various species.” Elsewhere, he swings into an equally
extreme kind of biological mysticism. There is much about Man (sic) being only a
little lower than the angels and “fearfully and wonderfully mad”. For all its
faults this is, however, a wonderful book. The surgical dramas will keep you
turning the pages compulsively.

In his expert dissection of American psychiatry and psychotherapy, Fancher shows how various approaches – psychoanalysis, behaviourism, cognitive therapy and drug treatment – are painfully lacking in scientific credentials, despite their claims. They are, in Fancher’s phrase, cultures of healing, rather than sciences, and should be treated as such. That would involve more questioning and criticism of what they do, and the recognition that they have a powerfully persuasive effect on patients. Fancher began life as a philosopher and this shows in his masterly analysis of the pretensions and paradoxes of the various schools of therapy.

Fancher’s arguments are complemented by those in The Romance of American Psychology by Ellen Herman (University of California Press, $35, ISBN 0 520 08598 1), which examines the way in which psychologists have made dubious claims to scientific credibility in order to acquire powerful roles among American policy makers, beginning during the Second World War when they advised the army on morale-boosting. The author does not condemn this trend, but simply draws attention to it: “Does the rise of psychology herald a new chapter in the evolution of humanism or merely indicate that Big Brother is bright enough to arrive cloaked in the rhetoric of enlightenment and health?”

The next two books are dedicated to filling, with great verve and imagination, Fancher’s “distance between what we know and what we wish we knew”. Both The Natural History of Desire by Liam Hudson and Bernadine Jacot (Yale University Press, £18.95, ISBN 0 3000 62931) and Sons, Mothers and Other Lovers by James Park (Little, Brown £16.99, ISBN 0 316 91232 8) focus on why men and women differ in temperament, why they cannot easily communicate, and how their psychological differences might be resolved.

The Natural History of Desire concludes that the differences are unavoidable – they stem from the fundamentally different challenges that face girls and boys in their passage from infancy to adulthood. On a purely intuitive basis, their detailed argument seems quite persuasive, although their choice of evidence is quixotic. Can the life stories of Margaret Thatcher and the terrorist Ulrike Meinhof really tell us that much about women as a whole? Should characters in novels be used as evidence for theories about psychology?

Sons, Mothers and Other Lovers offers a completely different explanation – it is all the fault of Mother, smothering, controlling and humiliating her small boy, demanding too much, or being inconsistent. In this way she convinces her son that women are terrifying monsters and prevents him from ever achieving a deep relationship with his wife or lover. The author remembers to add, occasionally, that it is really Father’s fault for being too remote and making Mother so fed up with menfolk in the first place – but these brief asides are somehow not convincing. They lack the vehemence of Park’s tirade against Mother.

After all this, it is quite a relief to turn to A Dictionary of Mind and Body by Donald Watson (Andre Deutsch, £12.99, ISBN 0 233 98890 4) which is just blatantly antiscience. Apart from its mendacious title (it should be called “How to Bluff Your Way at an Aromatherapists’ Conference”), it is refreshingly straightforward. The entry on Conventional Medicine is entirely damning, while that on Colour Therapy is adulatory: “An excess of yellow in one’s environment can result in a loss of anchorage, a feeling of insecurity, lack of focus and a loss of any sense of purpose.” Occasionally, a therapy is a tiny bit too whacky even for this author, when words such as “unusual” are tactfully employed: “In one unusual form of treatment with gems, the patient’s photograph is exposed to a rotating disc set with gems. Since the presence of the patient is not required, this has been called teletherapy.” And I thought teletherapy was relaxing in front of the TV after a hard day.

It is a complex mix, which also zigzags geographically from the rock art of Lascaux in France to the caves of South Africa, from the river valleys of Indonesia to Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The book involves a cast of hundreds, mostly rampant individualists pursuing their personal theories with extraordinary zeal, so that theoretical consensus has been, and remains, almost nonexistent. Multitudinous ideas, some scientific, some philosophical, interact with each other and with the fossil finds to generate an intellectual picture that changes constantly like a revolving kaleidoscope.

The task of organising such complex material into a narrative account would have defeated most writers, but Tattersall has mastered it with remarkable skill. The result is a smoothly flowing and wonderfully readable book that grips the attention without oversimplifying the arguments. Nor does it gloss over the bitty and contradictory aspects of the fossil record. This is a far cry from the usual offerings of popular palaeoanthropology, where the triumphant story of human evolution is painted in broad and confident brush-strokes, any fossils that do not fit the author’s grand theory are ignored or curtly dismissed, and alternative notions mentioned briefly if at all.

Tattersall has been closely involved in this field for decades and he has a knack of bringing it alive with occasional gossipy asides such as “I recall colleagues complaining at the time how unreadably boring these descriptions were …” or “perhaps Jerusalem was an appropriate locale for this scientific farrago; the tone of the discussion was positively theological …” While adding zest to the book, these bits of insider gossip are also part of the serious business of analysing how this particular (and somewhat peculiar) scientific enterprise operates – how palaeoanthropologists and other scientists cooperate, clash swords, and, very occasionally, change each other’s minds. It is a process that the author has obviously thought long and hard about, and his insights will make this book as valuable to historians of science as to those interested in human evolution.

That sceptical note in the subtitle – “How we know what we think we know …” offers some hint of Tattersall’s long, cool perspective on palaeoanthropology. He is wise enough to see that we are still very far from understanding our own evolutionary past, and believes it better to acknowledge the weaknesses of the evidence than to paper over the cracks.

His last chapter is entitled “Where are We?”. Readers who like their authors to be in charge and in-the-know may be as distressed by this as they would be if the pilot asked the same question on a transatlantic flight. But Tattersall demonstrates that a author can be a real authority in his subject, yet not authoritarian. He writes with humour and panache, making this an altogether excellent book.

Separate research teams, at Yale School of Medicine, the Netherlands
Cancer Institute and the University of Dundee, have been scrutinising the
chemical events taking place within this compartment. All three report
their findings in Nature this week.

Immunologists have known for some time that in immune reactions cells
ingest antigens (from an invading bacterium, for example), partially break
them down, then return fragments of antigen to the cell surface. Cell biologists
were mystified because there was no known pathway within the cell that could
perform this crucial step.

‘We were faced with a paradox,’ says Colin Watts from the Dundee team.
‘The antigens must get far enough into the cell for them to be processed,
but must also return – as antigen fragments – to the surface.’ Researchers
knew that cells could ingest some molecules and break them down completely
inside small vesicles called lysosomes, but none of the products was transported
back to the surface of the cell. Alternatively, a cell could ingest particular
receptor molecules, hold them in vesicles called early endosomes and then
recycle them intact.

‘It was a puzzle how cells could partially break down antigen and then
return it to the surface. Now this puzzle seems to be solved by having these
specialised and unusual compartments,’ says Watts.

The Yale team has provisionally called the new compartment ‘CIIV’ (for
Class II vesicle). Some of the researchers believe that CIIVs are identical
to a structure already observed under the electron microscope and designated
MIIC, but others not convinced.

CIIVs are found in particular immune cells which can act as ‘antigen
presenting cells’ or APCs. On the surface of these cells are molecules called
Class II MHC molecules, which are like chemical forceps, holding antigen
fragments out for inspection by another group of immune cells called T cells.

T cells are the linchpin of the immune system and play a crucial part
in most immune responses. Different T cells are geared to respond to different
antigens, and before a T cell can go into action it must encounter its specific
antigen in the grip of a Class II MHC molecule. The antigen alone has no
effect.

It is the APCs which ingest antigen, break it down, combine the fragments
with Class II molecules, return them to the surface and ‘present’ them
to T cells. �Ӱ�ԭ��s have always assumed that the combining takes place
inside the APC, but until now the location was unknown. One of the problems
was that cell biologists were focusing on compartments that they already
knew about from studies of other cells, such as early endosomes and lysosomes.
The new compartments may well be unique to APCs.

Researchers already knew that there was a time lag of between 1 and
3 hours between the synthesis of Class II molecules within the APC and their
appearance on the cell surface, combined with antigen. The new findings
show that during this delay, the newly made Class II molecules migrate to
the CIIVs and stay there while antigen slowly trickles in. In time, when
all or most of the Class II molecules have bound to antigen fragments, they
migrate to the cell surface.

The CIIVs can now be isolated and studied in more detail. Knowing exactly
what goes on inside them, and why certain antigen fragments become bound
to Class II MHC, in preference to other fragments, could have practical
uses, in particular in designing vaccines.

‘I have a profound reverence for Abraham & Moses & Jesus Christ,
& I have much of the same reverence for you, whom I look upon as the
High priest of nature,’ writes Francis Boott, in what is undoubtedly the
funniest letter of this volume. ‘But the Church would condemn me to the
stake for my religious creed . . . & if I am to be damned for it, it
is at least a graceful recollection that the rose & violet, which you
make my fellow mortals, go with me.’

Boott, an elderly botanist, is describing the religious perplexity
that Charles Darwin’s book has produced in his mind. Such perplexity is
widely shared, but Boott’s lighthearted touch is rare. For the most part,
the year 1860 is full of the angry sounds of the old paradigm cracking asunder,
with all the disorientation and angst which this entails. It is the year
following the publication of On the Origin of Species, and the defenders
of Creation, Design and Natural Theology (God-revealed-in-nature) rage at
Darwin from the review pages of learned periodicals. During the Oxford meeting
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, there are scenes
of unprecedented mayhem. Darwin is at home, unwell, but as his close friend
Joseph Hooker reports: ‘The battle waxed hot. Lady Brewster fainted, the
excitement increased as others spoke – my blood boiled . . .’ Hooker, a
respected botanist and an Establishment figure, who has not previously declared
his support for Darwin to such a hostile public, surprises himself by leaping
onto the platform and entering the fray.

These were the first tremors of an intellectual earthquake that shook
the Western world, an inevitable seismic event given the accumulated pressure
of scientific information, but an event that needed a trigger. For a gentle
conventional man who wished to cause no bother, acting as that trigger was
painful indeed, and the letters show Darwin adapting gradually to his unsuitable
role.

He begins the year with much of his old diffidence, the bad reviews
almost shaking his belief in his theories. ‘I should begin to think myself
wholly in the wrong, & that I was an utter fool, but then I cannot yet
persuade myself that Lyell, & you & Huxley, Carpenter, Asa Gray
& Watson &c are all fools together,’ he writes to Hooker. As the
year wears on, Darwin’s confidence steadily grows. He realises that his
supporters are increasing in number and that some of his detractors are
softening their tone. The criticisms in the reviews can all be answered;
indeed, ‘I could myself write a more damning Review than has as yet appeared!’

By December, when he is preparing corrections for the third edition,
Darwin remarks to his publisher that he does so ‘in hopes of making my
many rather stupid reviewers at least understand what is meant’. This
is a very different man from the Darwin of 1859. The personal malice shown
by some of his critics, notably the zoologist Richard Owen, is hurtful and
incomprehensible to Darwin at the beginning of the year, but this too helps
to toughen him up, and by late 1860 he can almost shrug off Owen’s spitefulness.
The fierce opposition makes Darwin more combative: ‘I look at their attacks
as a proof that our work is worth the doing. It makes me resolve to buckle
on my armour.’

The collected correspondence for this pivotal year is a treasure trove
in which readers of widely differing interests will find some fascinating
theme to pursue. For me the letters threw an unexpected light on the puzzling
question of why Darwin should have triggered the earthquake. Men like Thomas
Huxley and Herbert Spencer – both of whom became vocal supporters – were
temperamentally more suited to Darwin’s role, for they relished the idea
of changing the world. They were fighters, leaders, intellectual revolutionaries.
Yet Darwin was more advanced, in a scientific sense, than either Huxley
or Spencer. His main passion was to observe nature closely and there is
no mistaking the pure enthusiasm of the letters describing his experiments
on insect-eating plants or his observations of insects pollinating orchids.
Darwin simply wants to know and he believes that ‘Nature does not lie’.
Both Huxley and Spencer are keen to see evolution as inevitable progress,
to make some moral point out of it, whereas Darwin is after truth for truth’s
sake. That keen but blinkered attitude kept Darwin hot on the scent of that
concept, evolution through natural selection, and prevented him from being
distracted by the emotional appeal of Lamarckian ideas, in which personal
effort supposedly leads to evolutionary progress.

The extent to which Darwin differs from his contemporaries becomes apparent
whenever the letters touch on grand themes or religious issues. Darwin himself
never initiates such correspondence, and when others do his replies are
usually short and inconclusive. ‘I grieve to say that I cannot honestly
go as far as you do about Design,’ he writes to Asa Gray, the American
botanist who is a keen supporter but has religious qualms. ‘I am conscious
that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I cannot think that the world,
as we see it, is the result of chance: & yet I cannot look at each separate
thing as the result of Design . . . I am, & shall ever remain, in a
hopeless muddle.’ The Scottish geologist Charles Lyell must also have found
Darwin a frustrating correspondent on such issues. In reply to a long heart-searching
letter, Darwin writes a few lines: ‘I am sorry to say that I have no ‘consolatory
view’ on the dignity of man; I am content that man will probably advance
& care not whether we are looked at as mere savages in a remotely distant
future. – Many thanks for your last note.’

The startling impression that emerges from these letters is of a man
who, to a large extent, does not see the problem. He is by nature a nice,
decent, patient chap; his marriage is happy; and he enjoys warm relationships
with all those around him (‘Talk of fame, honour, pleasure, wealth, all
are dirt compared with affection . . .’ he writes to Hooker). By training
he is a gentleman, and one who clearly delights in finding someone is a
‘good fellow’, while being puzzled by treachery or malice. His emotional
and spiritual world is orderly, stable and satisfying and probably did not
depend on a god (either the Christian God or the great god of ‘progress’)
to keep it so.

Perhaps it took a man of such naive good nature to venture so far along
the path of truth, for Darwin could not foresee the religious and moral
repercussions that lay ahead. By the time he was confronted with them it
was too late – he had spent 20 years collecting evidence and that evidence
could not be denied.

Certainly, Darwin does not want to damage the social order nor make
anyone unhappy. He greatly regrets causing distress to Lyell and Gray. ‘With
respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful
to me. – I am bewildered. – I had no intention to write atheistically,’
he confesses to Gray. In truth, he has changed everything, but the thought
is too terrifying to entertain, so he rushes with relief to his botanical
studies, or hides behind a smoke screen of muddle and fudge whenever challenged
by others on religious matters.

Exactly where Darwin’s priorities lie is nicely illustrated by the way
he treated the letters sent to him, such as one from Hooker written in June
1860 discussing how natural selection might relate to a ‘theistic element’
or ‘unseen power’. It is the only letter from Hooker to include any religious
discussion, but we will never know what the great botanist thought because
most of the relevant passage has been lost. Darwin was in the habit of burning
his letters except for any pages that contained useful facts. Page one of
Hooker’s letter has survived only because it contains some details on flower
structure. At the bottom of the page is the tantalising first half of the
paragraph on religion, but this has been crossed through. (Thanks to the
diligence of the editors at Cam-bridge University Press, such illuminating
details are included in the footnotes.)

The thought of hundreds of burned letters is enough to make any reader
weep. Darwin kept just 80 letters, and half of these are fragments. The
editors have tried to fill the gaps wherever possible, using other sources.
Lyell drafted many of his letters before sending them, and these notes have
survived to be included in the book. Occasionally Darwin sent an interesting
letter he had received on to Lyell, who made a copy in his own hand before
returning the letter (which then went on the bonfire). Even so, there are
less than a hundred letters received, compared to the 345 surviving letters
that Darwin sent to others. Perhaps the most tragic loss is the letter from
Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, recording
his reaction to the Origin of Species. The editors have very sensibly included
relevant passages from letters that Wallace wrote to others.

Fortunately for us, Darwin had a sense of humour. Thus he kept the
jokey letter from Boott, and one or two others that are curious or amusing.
More fortunate still, other people realised the importance of this modest
man and preserved his letters. Sometimes it is like hearing only one half
of a telephone conversation, but since the conversation is so interesting
– they are, after all, discussing the birth pangs of the modern world –
it is worth listening anyway.

Linda Gamlin is a science editor and writer.

Alfred Russel Wallace is usually just a footnote to the story of Charles
Darwin. He was the ‘other man’, a penniless butterfly collector and field
naturalist in the Malay Peninsula when he too thought of natural selection,
the idea taking shape in his fevered brain during a bout of malaria (or
so the legend goes). He wrote it up and innocently sent his paper off to
England, thinking that if anyone was interested in this topic it would probably
be that chap in Kent, Charles Darwin. Wallace was quite unaware that the
letter would come as a bombshell to its recipient, who had been carefully
honing his natural selection theory for years.

The rest of the story is well known: Darwin consulted his friends and
colleagues for advice, and joint publication of a paper on natural selection
was arranged, with On The Origin of Species being rushed into print the
following year. History generally credits Wallace with unintentionally being
the kick up the backside that the cautious, plodding Darwin needed, if he
was not to take his unpublished ideas to the grave with him.

The theory of evolution through natural selection became known as Darwinism
rather than Wallacism, but there was endless goodwill between the two men,
and Wallace remained a staunch supporter, never envious of the limelight.
He made his own mark with detailed studies of biogeography, which benefited
greatly from his evolutionary viewpoint.

Indeed, the twin ideas of evolution and natural selection informed all
his thinking, and this anthology of his shorter writings is an intriguing
glimpse into the bubbling ferment of Wallace’s mind. For anyone interested
in the man, and needing a brief introduction to his ideas, it is an invaluable
book. ‘Brief’, of course, is a relative term, and Wallace has the usual
Victorian way with words. He produced 10 000 pages of printed matter in
his lifetime – and that was laboriously scratching away with a dip pen (he
is pictured doing just this on the bookjacket).

The range of topics covered – evolution, biogeography, anthropology,
astronomy, geography, geology, mesmerism, spiritualism, miracles, politics,
land nationalisation, the evils of exporting coal and the anti-vaccination
campaign – is astonishing by modern standards. Even in his own less specialised
times it was unusual. G. K. Chesterton remarked that he knew of no one else
who was a leader of both a major revolution in thought (the materialistic
tendency encouraged by evolutionary theory) and a leader of its counter-revolution
(antimateri-alistic ideas, represented for Wallace by spiritualism and some
of his social theories).

These were not opposing strands of thought, for Wallace welded spiritualism
with natural selection to produce a coherent, if bizarre, view of human
evolution. Like most Victorian thinkers, he was besotted with the notion
of progress. He believed that, just as evolution had led from single cells
to man, so man progressed intellectually and morally from lower to higher
levels and from the material to the spiritual world, where he would continue
the same gradual process of self-improvement.

Wallace’s belief in the spirit world was not blind faith, but based
on what he thought to be good evidence. He deals with it in a matter-of-fact
way that is often hilarious, as when he explains why so many communications
from the dead, received at seances, were trivial. Given the dubious character
of mortals that attended seances, Wallace thought, the better class of spirit
would want to steer clear of them, leaving only the riffraff: ‘ . . . a
very large majority of those who daily depart this life are persons addicted
to twaddle, persons who spend much of their time in low or trivial pursuits
. . . whence is to come the transforming power which is suddenly, at the
mere throwing of the physical body, to change these into beings able to
appreciate and delight in high and intellectual pursuits?’

In the same manner, Wallace explained the source of dreams that apparently
foretold trivial aspects of the future: ‘If we remember the number of very
commonplace people who are daily and yearly dying around us, we shall have
a sufficient explanation . . . The production of these dreams, impressions,
and phantasms, may be a pleasurable exercise of the lower spiritual faculties,
as agreeable to some spirits as billiards, chemical experiments, or practical
jokes are to some mortals.’

Natural selection is a recurring theme in his writings on anthropology
and social issues, where Wallace introduces it with fatherly pride and affection,
as a force that must surely bring progress to human life. His fundamental
belief is that natural selection – if permitted to work freely – allows
living beings to adjust to their surroundings, and such adjustment brings
health and happiness. In one essay, he notes that he and Darwin discussed
the problem of natural selection no longer acting on the human species.
Pausing only to reject the callous doctrines of the eugenics movement, Wallace
then devises a socialist utopia where women, well educated and financially
independent, make such considered and rational decisions over their choice
of mate that natural selection reasserts itself. (Of course, there are more
males than females to make this work.)

Inspired by this vision he concludes triumphantly that ‘we may safely
leave . . . the improvement of the race to the cultivated minds and pure
instincts of the Women of the Future’. In an earlier essay, however, he
sees natural selection as only working on races and nations, and complacently
accepts the ‘inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped
populations with which Europeans come in contact. The Red Indian in North
America, and in Brazil: the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealander . .
. ‘ Sadly, it is the negative side of these ideas that has turned out to
have lasting power. Bright Utopian visions have faded, but the destruction
of native tribal groups in the name of social ‘progress’ still takes place
in countries such as Indonesia, India and Brazil.

Of course, these insidious ideas were not Wallace’s alone – and, indeed,
he seems to have modified them, in his later years, writing passionately
against enforced colonisation. Unfortunately, the editor of this volume
does not remark on such changes of heart, nor mention other Victorian thinkers,
such as Herbert Spencer, a far more ruthless proponent of ‘social Darwinism’.
Here and elsewhere in this anthology, most readers would surely have benefited
from being told about the intellectual climate in which Wallace was writing.
On vaccination, for example, Wallace simply argued that it did more harm
than good, and some mention of John Stuart Mill’s philosophical objections
to enforced vaccination (as infringing individual liberty) would have provided
useful background.

Despite this, the anthology is well worth reading, for it gives a unique
insight, not just into one man’s mind, but into an age when science was
emerging as a potent social and political force. As Wallace remarked ‘Truth
is born into this world only with pangs and tribulations . . . ‘

Linda Gamlin is a science writer and editor.

The ubiquitous protein is profilin, a small molecule which plays a crucial
role in cell movement and organisation. It does so by binding to actin,
best known as a muscle protein, but also found in single filaments within
every cell.

Profilin’s task is to bind to single actin molecules as they are synthesised,
thus preventing them from joining together into filaments. Profilin holds
the actin molecules ready for when they are needed.

A pollen grain is packed with actin and profilin, bound together, awaiting
the moment when the pollen lands on the stigma (female part) of another
plant. The pollen grain has to deliver its sperm cells to egg cells within
that plant. It does this through a pollen tube, an elongated cell which
forces itself through the flower’s female tissues. Actin plays a vital role
in this process.

A pollen grain landing in a human nose soon ruptures and releases its
profilin, and an allergic reaction may follow. Only a few hay-fever sufferers
respond to profilin, rather than to other pollen proteins. With those allergic
to birch pollen, as studied by the Austrian team, the figure is 10 per cent.

This difference between hay-fever sufferers allowed the team to make
some interesting comparisons. Those allergic to profilin were unusual in
showing no seasonal changes in the level of the antibody that is responsible
for allergy, IgE. (It is IgE that binds to the pollen proteins and thus
causes cells known as mast cells and basophils to release their inflammatory
products.) In most hay-fever sufferers the level of pollen-specific IgE
falls when spring is past. But in people who are allergic to profilin, it
would seem that the body’s own profilin fans the flames of allergy throughout
the year.

Rudolph Valenta and his team reproduced the basic allergic reaction
– basophil degranulation – in the test tube, using cells from these people
mixed with human profilin. The human profilin had clearly sparked off the
basophils, though not as powerfully as birch-pollen profilin, because of
differences between the molecules resulting from millions of years of separate
evolution (Science, 2 August, p 557).

Whether the autoimmune reaction to profilin could be harmful is not
known. One likely trouble spot is around damaged blood vessels, where the
blood cell fragments known as platelets throw out actin filaments to form
a blood clot. Profilin could be abundant at such sites, and the triggering
of basophils might aggravate the inflammation that follows.

Charles Darwin: The Man and his Influence by Peter J. Bowler, Basil
Blackwell, pp 250, £19.95

Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
in the British Periodical Press, 1859-1872 edited by Alvar Ellegard, The
University of Chicago Press, pp 394, £14.25 pbk

‘Upon my life it is almost laughable the trouble I cause you, and how
you can be so goodnatured, I hardly understand,’ wrote Darwin to William
Tegetmeier, a pigeon fancier who helped him to procure laughers and scandaroons,
carriers, dragons and Leghorn runts – all grist to the Darwinian mill as
he mused on domestication and artificial breeding.

The apologetic tone is typical – though he willingly gave his own time
and information to others, he was filled with gratitude for any help he
received. ‘Forgive all this immense trouble if you can . . . ‘ he wrote
to Joseph Bosquet, a German pharmacist, when inquiring exactly how fast
carrier pigeons travel if covering distances of three or four hundred miles
(might they stop on the way and could birds thus disperse seeds to oceanic
islands?).

‘Let me thank you cordially for your really to me very valuable letter.
The kind spirit with which you have answered my not little troublesome letter
has gratified me extremely,’ he responded to Edgar Layard of South Africa
(were the hybrids of wild African cats and domestic cats fertile, showing
that species could sometimes interbreed?). To his friend Thomas Huxley,
with a query about the distribution of Ascidians (sea-squirts) in the tropical
and temperate oceans: ‘The Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
ought to be at me, for troubling you, overworked and unwell as you are;
but I do cruelly want one question answered . . . ‘

Mercifully, Darwin cannot know the trouble he has caused to the present-day
compilers of his correspondence, who have anguished over his frequent misspellings
(should they be preserved?), over his odd habit of writing ‘lb’ for ‘bl’
(to correct ‘albe’ to ‘able’, or not?), over undated letters, illegible
writing and the pages he saved from letters received without recording who
wrote them. The ‘Notes on Editorial Policy’ in this collection run to five
pages: it is too painful to imagine Darwin’s paroxysms of apology if he
were to have read them.

The main fascination of Darwin’s letters is to see the emerging threads
of thought that eventually became woven into the fabric of The Origin of
Species. But you cannot browse through Darwin’s letters without encountering
the man behind the myth, and without the growing conviction that here was
a thoroughly nice chap – decent, honest, humble, kind and infinitely agreeable.
But ‘honest’ and ‘agreeable’ do not always live easily together, and for
Darwin the conflict caused enormous pain.

The years 1856 and 1857, which this sixth volume of correspondence covers,
are, in a sense, Darwin’s last days in Eden. Here he is, breeding his fancy
pigeons and mounting their skeletons, counting the seeds found between the
toes of partridges, and cheerfully badgering friends and acquaintances for
scraps of information, his enthusiasm for natural history undimmed by the
controversy that The Origin will unleash. Yet he knows what is in store,
and his nerve often fails him. In a letter to his close friend and cousin,
William Fox, he confides that the idea of writing a preliminary essay on
his theory (as urged by geologist Charles Lyell) gives him a ‘fit of the
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The letters sit comfortably with the traditional view of Darwin as a
reluctant scientific revolutionary, a man with a new and terrifying truth
who wanted to keep it to himself for as long as possible, but who was finally
forced into the open by Alfred Wallace. It is an image that the myth-busters
of the modern ‘Darwin industry’ (as Peter Bowler himself describes it) are
intent on refuting. In Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence, Bowler
depicts Darwin as a shrewd tactician, cautiously sounding out fellow naturalists
for their views on ‘the species question’ and gradually converting the most
sympathetic to his own viewpoint. In this way, argues Bowler, Darwin created
a fifth column of ready-made supporters, who could champion his theory when
he finally felt sure enough to publish.

As Bowler ably demonstrates, this fifth column – led by Huxley, Lyell,
and the botanist Joseph Hooker – was indeed a powerful force, keeping the
debate over evolution alive, ensuring that its supporters got into positions
of influence, and generally outmanoeuvring the opposition. But whether Darwin
cold-bloodedly planned such a strategy seems more questionable.

Shining through the laboured politeness of Victorian letter-writing
is an unmistakable innocence and straightforwardness, that argues against
a premeditated ‘campaign to subvert the scientific community’. Darwin’s
letters reveal a man who was courageous and timid by turns, regularly seeking
reassurance from his peers that he was on the right track, fearful of making
blunders, anxious for their encouragement and approval.

Ironically, as Bowler goes on to show, it was Darwin who was the truly
rigorous intellectual among them. He alone could think through all the consequences
of his branching model of evolution. Apart from Darwin, few could really
grasp the novel concept of natural selection, and only he could cut through
all the religious preconceptions of his time to envisage nature free of
moral values or self-improving tendencies.

At the same time he was keenly aware of the moral and religious implications
of his views, and of the two significant historical precedents: Lamarckism,
and Robert Chambers’ anonymously published book Vestiges of Creation. Bowler
brings out a political aspect that is frequently overlooked in scientific
accounts. Lamarck’s ideas had become linked with a materialistic, atheistic
philosophy that was seen by French revolutionaries as undermining established
religion, and thus the king. The terror of a revolutionary epidemic spreading
from France was enough to suppress any discussion of Lamarckism in England.
Chambers, in the 1840s, sought to counter this with a bourgeois vision of
evolution as a divinely instituted staircase, ascending inexorably to mankind.
Far from being reassured, the public was alarmed by such blatant linking
of humanity with the animal world.

As Bowler’s account makes clear, Darwin steered a skilful path between
these philosophical quicksands, wisely allowing for the possibility of some
vague divine role in his evolutionary scheme, taking the harsh edges off
the ‘struggle for survival’, and scarcely mentioning human origins. But
this deliberate fuzziness allowed many of Darwin’s followers – even Huxley
– to be mere pseudo-Darwinians, gathering behind a figurehead but avoiding
his more discomforting conclusions. Bowler argues convincingly that Darwin
acted as a catalyst for a massive swing of public and scientific opinion
towards evolution, but not towards Darwinism. Instead, the Victorians opted
for a progressive ladder-like version of evolution, more akin to that of
Lamarck and Chambers, thus vindicating their beliefs in progress, industrialisation
(with its painful social changes), hard work, racial superiority and empire.
Towards the end of the 19th century, natural selection became increasingly
discredited.

This broad flow of changing opinions is charted, in its many complex,
interconnecting rivulets, by Darwin and the General Reader, a book first
published in 1958, and long out of print. Alvar Ellegard’s chapters each
deal with a particular topic in relation to Darwinism, ranging from Miracles
to the Argument of Design, from the Descent of Man to Missing Links. Widely
recognised as being ahead of his time, Ellegard used statistical methods
to study opinions on Darwin expressed in popular periodicals. He surveyed
115 British magazines, newspapers and journals and classified them according
to their religious, political and class status. He then divided his period
(1859-1872) into three parts, and analysed the changes of opinion accordingly.
It was a ‘scientific’ way of studying history that only became widely accepted
and appreciated 20 years later.

Ellegard’s Preface to the original edition provides an insight into
the continued fascination of Darwin and Darwinism.

‘Practically all the attitudes and beliefs that prevail on these matters
at the present day can be traced in the vigorous and wide-ranging Mid-Victorian
debate,’ Ellegard observes. He also quotes Darwin, in a letter to Huxley,
remarking ‘The pendulum is now swinging against our side, but I feel positive
it will soon swing the other way . . . It will be a long battle, after we
are dead and gone.’ That was 1871.

What did Darwin (then 62) imagine as he wrote those words? Did it suggest
another 30, 40, possibly 50 years of controversy?

Surely he never contemplated the battle still rumbling on with as much
vigour and ill-feeling 120 years later? And such a modest man could never
have foreseen the Darwin industry of today. He would, I am sure, have wished
to apologise for causing us all so much trouble.

Linda Gamlin is a science writer and editor.