All You Ever Wanted to Know about Microevolution

obvious that there was a qualitative difference between seminal book What Is Life (1944, Cambridge University life and non-life. .. " (p. 53). However, all the evidence Press). When World War Two began the subject was goes to show that early men saw nature as being of one poised for major advances. kind, but for just the opposite reasons to nineteenth The war led to a great range of technical develop-century materialism, which tended to see nature as ments, and when peace returned instrumentation ad-purely mechanical. For prehistoric tribes, all nature was vanced rapidly. Digital computers first aided analysis, alive and peopled with gods; the stones and rocks, rivers and later began to be used for direct control of instru-and seas quite as much as plants and animals. The ments. Genes were soon shown to be composed of Milesians were the first Greek philosophers and for them nucleic acid, but two central questions remained: How too all nature was alive, or filled with Soul. do genes reproduce? And how do they act? These prob-During the later medieval period, and influenced par-lems are still being elucidated, but in a degree of detail ticularly by Aristotle's classification of the soul into that could scarcely have been imagined in the middle four levels—mineral, vegetable, animal, and human—scho-of the twentieth century. Determination of the genomes lasticism had reflected the hierarchical Roman church of yeast, C. elegans, and Drosophila, as well as the and stratified feudal society, and sought to mirror this human genome, and now of an increasing range of or-in a fundamentally unchanging world, with fixed species ganisms, is beginning to yield the rich harvest which and a short, biblical timescale. In geology the actual was promised half a century ago, both in structural and timescale slowly emerged from the rocks. Biology grad-evolutionary terms. ually became evolutionary, culminating in Darwin's Ori-In all, it is difficult to feel that Dr. Hunter has been gin of Species and Descent of Man. The ideological entirely successful in carving out a coherent body of problem for biochemistry was to remove in all its aspects material or in creating a clear picture of the history of " vitalism, " or the idea that life depended on a special biochemistry. In particular, one could wish that he had " vital force, " which ultimately descended from Aristot-kept a firmer grasp on chronology. However, he has le's theory of the …