Book Review: A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination.

A Reason for Everything is a popular history of British evolutionists from the mid nineteenth to the end of the twentieth centuries. It is well-written and researched throughout. The author, Marek Kohn, read biology at Sussex University, and is the author of numerous other works on drug culture, evolution, biology and society. Six evolutionists are discussed in increasing biographical detail: Alfred Russel Wallace, Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, John Maynard Smith, William Hamilton and Richard Dawkins. The series of biographical sketches grows more in depth and contains some new material when we reach Maynard Smith, Hamilton and Dawkins because Kohn makes use of interviews and correspondence with family, colleagues and the subjects themselves. It would have been nice had Kohn included a sketch of Charles Darwin, especially since it was Darwin who first discovered the significance of and coined the terms ‘natural selection’ and ‘adaptation’, terms which Kohn’s book particularly targets. However Kohn considered that Darwin’s case is so wellknown and abundantly available that he would focus on others. It is hard to disagree with him. The first evolutionist to be discussed, therefore, is Wallace who is usually remembered as the ‘co-discoverer’ of evolution by natural selection. This is a distinction both deserved and undeserved. While Wallace did independently propose that varieties of organisms will diverge from an ancestral stock to the point of speciation by differential survival of well-suited forms, it is perhaps an unfortunate short-hand to say that he and Darwin discovered ‘the same’ theory. By assuming a singular entity ‘the theory’ we shrink what actually happened historically to an unwarranted simplicity. It is also somewhat misleading to then attach the name Darwin coined for his ideas to the thought of both men. As is often remarked, there were many differences between them. Wallace never