John Maynard Smith

This book contains a collection of essays about biology, most of which have been published before, in varied and often inacessible places, together with a new concluding chapter on dialectics. The authors have at least four things in common: they are Harvard professors, they have made distinguished contributions to the theory of ecology and evolution, they are dialectical materialists, and they write with wit and insight. Their thesis is that their philosophy is a valuable aid in the practice and understanding of biology. It is not only that Marxism helps in analysing the history and sociology of science: if you are a working biologist, they are saying, Marxism will help you to plan and to interpret the results of research. Crudely, Marxism is good for you. They argue that their own work has been helped by their philosophy. The claim is not only brave but necessary: I would not take them seriously unless they were willing to make it.

This is an ambitious book which suggests that a new picture of the nature of the universe is emerging from the study of thermodynamics, and that this picture will heal the breach between the scientific and the poetic view of man. Prigogine’s distinction as a scientist – the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977 – requires that we take his views seriously, at least on the first of these claims. The major part of the book is devoted to explaining, in non-mathematical language, the new science that the authors see emerging, and to which Prigogine helped to give birth. The ideas are hard, but I think they succeed. There are places, particularly in their treatment of quantum theory, where readers without some previous knowledge may lose the thread; certainly I did. But anyone prepared to make a serious effort will get some insight into what is happening.–

Karl Popper is perhaps the only living philosopher of science who has had a substantial influence on the way scientists do what they do. I say ‘perhaps’ because the same claim might be made for Thomas Kuhn. However, Kuhn seems to me a perceptive sociologist of science, but a poor philosopher. Also, in so far as he has had an effect on the way scientists behave, it has been pernicious: to be a great scientist, according to Kuhn, you must do revolutionary science, and the best evidence that you are doing it is that you are so obscure and inconsistent in your statements as to be wholly incomprehensible to others. This does not make for good science. In contrast, Popper has encouraged us to speculate boldly, but to be fiercely critical; it is true that we usually manage the latter only for other people’s ideas, and not for our own, but since science is a social activity, that suffices.

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 provided, that the species may never fail, nor perish, since every male may have its female, and of a proportionable age.’ But while that might do for man, it will hardly do for those many species in which there is no monogamous pair bond and no parental care, and in which one male can fertilise many females, and yet which have an equal sex ratio.

This is a translation of a book first published under the title Das Spiel in 1975. It is an ambitious book whose aim is to convey to the reader what it is to have a well-furnished scientific mind. Some years back, C.P. Snow persuaded us that the diagnostic characteristic of such a mind is familiarity with the second law of thermodynamics. His particular choice of a scientific law was unfortunate, because it is easier to talk nonsense about the second law than almost anything else, but in principle he was on the right track. A knowledge of theories is more relevant than a knowledge of facts. Biologists have to know a lot of facts, while physicists seem to know almost nothing. But although it is true that a well-educated scientist will be familiar with a number of theories, from Newton’s laws to the central dogma of molecular biology, I do not think that this is the critical distinction between understanding science and not understanding it. I suggest, instead, that it is a familiarity with the ways in which systems with different structures and relationships are likely to behave. It is this familiarity that Eigen and Winkler try to convey.