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BIOLOGY AND MAN by George Gaylord Simpson. Harcourt, Brace & World. 175 pp.
$5.95

by Joshua Lederberg

"Biology and Man" is a collection of ten essays, many of them published
before in scholarly journals, by one of America's best known and highly respected
Students of animal and human evolution displayed by the fossil record. Several
of his essays are written from a platform of unassailable competence, and make
rewarding reading, equally for style and for content. His discussions of the
biology of race, of the significance of the evolutionary concept for human
nature, and of the biological foundations of language are unexcelled in writing
addressed to a general audience.

Simpson's final chapter, “Biology and Ethics", is an outstanding critique
of many contemporary efforts to derive ethics from naturalistic or scientific
principles. His criticism is too effective to leave very much standing, and
he makes few pretensions for any system of his own. He does make the powerful
point that the essential contribution of science is not to ethical theory but
ethical practice, through the power and responsibility of rational foresight.
Ignorance is bliss, for we can then ignore the unforseeable consequences of
our acts, and therefore suspend ethical judgment altocether. (I would inter-
polate that this may be the most threatening aspect of scientific discovery:
when we know that malnutrition stunts the growing minc, how can we ignore the
consequences of world poverty?)

In the end, Simpson suggests that ethical systems be "adaptive to existing
conditions.” He may be closer to Julian Huxley than he admits, if this means
placing a high value on the continuity of human evolution. Or perhaps I single

out this element as a projection of my own views.

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The first few chapters, on the current situation in biology, are marred
by a peevigh and poorly informed attach on molecular biology, which he believes
is overemphasized in contemporary research, on mission-oriented research, on
the space program in general, and on exobiology, the effort to find evidence
for extra-terrestrial life, in particular. His style in these discussions is
to erect a straw man from unrepresentative quotations of untenable statements,
then generalize to the whole field with a dogmatic pronouncement far removed
from the informed detachment with which he deals with his own science. Thus ,
exobiology is "unscientific" becaase there is no conclusive evidence for life
anywhere beyond the earth (agreed!) and becyffse Simpson is convinced that
"the chances of usefully communicating with intelligent beings anywhere else
in the universe are effectively nil" (a rash assertion when there is no evidence
on either side). In fact, exobiology is pursued because conclusive evidence
for or against extraterrestrial life is a matter of overriding importance to
solidify our understanding of biological evolution. I suspect that Simpson's
impatience with this effort is connected with the reliance it must place on
biochemical methods of analysis, and interpretation.

Perhaps we had better take this all in fun. We can, after all, be encouraged
that recent trends, both in molecular biology and in space research, are more to
his liking. It is harder to know what to make of this remark: "all attempts to
answer that question ("What is man?") before 1859 are worthless and that we will
be better off if we ignore them completely." On the other hand, post-Darwinian
biology is equally fruitless: “in my opinion nothing that has so far been learned
about DNA has helped significantly to understand the nature of man or of any
other whole organism." It helps to understand Simpson's frame of reference by

his response to some humanists’ attaci’on science as "uncultured": that he will

choose his own definition of culture, "just the way people live’ Perhaps science
in general is simply that which paleontology illuminates, and molecular biology
does not.

I am no less énthusiastic an evolutionary biologist than Simpson. The
evolutionary perspective is the principal theme of my own interest in DNA. We
should hardly turn up our noses at quantitative measurements, for example that
the human DNA comprises five billion nucleotide units packaged in 23 pairs of
chromosomes and that this is about a million-fold increase in genetic complexity
over the simplest viruses. Molecular biology is hardly a derogation of Darwin;
it is more nearly a fulfillment of his insights in convergence with other sciences.
(I hasten to add that far more vital insights about man were articulated
before 1869.)

The history of academic biology is full of a glaring anomaly. Many
students of naturalistic and systematic biology have paid lipservice to evolu-
tion as the central principle of biology. At the same time, they compart-
mentalized the subject into plants and animals, and specialized divisions of
them, like vertebrates versus invertebrates. Woe to the young physicist who
might want to turn to biology and concentrate on what was common to life on
earth generally: I can still recall my vivid astonishment that one of my most
gifted colleagues was deterred from an appointment at a major university because,
as a biophysicist he was not prepared to concentrate on either botany or zoology,
and in fact intended to work mainly on bacteria and viruses. Unfortunately,
these primitive and experimentally accessible forms of life were scarcely
recognized in the academic schedules of the time.

Simpson's misguided complaints about molecular biology belong to the same
era. They might be left with the snows of yesteryear. However, we are entering

a period of newfound concern about the rational management of the biosphere,

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in effect how to keep the earth habitable for man, his crops, and a wildlife
whose importance we only begin to recognize. As never before we need to
integrate every available insight we can find. The accumulation of hard
pesticides like DDT is, for example, a matter of deep concern. To understand
its significance we surely need field observations on vulnerable

species. We need to understand individual variation in response within
species. We also need chemical studies on the distribution and ultimate dis-
position, if any, of DDT. Finally, we must not neglect the molecular biology
of DDT effects, which can only be understood by an examination of the bio-
chemistry of protein synthesis, and the distoriton of enzyme patterns that
DDT can induce in low concentrations. Unfortunately, Simpson's negative

and petulant criticisms of molecular biology may impede the development of

ecological research as the kind of integrated biology he so vehemently demands.