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If there’s a theme to Mary Midgeley’s current science reading it is
“interdependence”. She is reading Evelyn Fox Keller’s The Century of the
Gene (Harvard University Press, 2000) and Tom Wakeford’s Liaisons of
Life (Wiley, 2001)
(reviewed 26 May), which both take a shot at the
reductionist “selfish gene” model of evolution. Wakeford’s “extremely helpful”
book demonstrates the crucial role of microbes in the development of other
species, while Keller shows how outdated is much of our thinking on the nature
of heredity. She keeps coming back to her well thumbed copy of The Varieties
of Religious Experience by William…