Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 2: Evolution of Sex by W. D. Hamilton,
拢50, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198503369
BILL HAMILTON was often light years ahead of his peers, waiting while other
great scientific minds caught up with him. In Narrow Roads of Gene Land,
the second volume of his collected papers, we have an atlas of genius that
maps the meanderings, mental and physical, of this great and lonely man. The
book contains updated versions of all of Hamilton鈥檚 major articles dealing with
sex and sexual selection from 1981 to 1990. So we have ample scope to savour his
unique style of tortuous sentences scattered with gems鈥攚ondrous natural
metaphors and effortless visions. Each of the 18 articles is preceded by an
autobiographical essay, providing a welcome and warm perspective to the cool,
often spare science that follows. They also reveal a man who was appalled by
many aspects of modern medicine, and by that dangerous mixture, science and
politics.
Hamilton died last year. Had he survived, how horrified (and yet, I suspect,
amused) he would have been by the unseemly haste with which certain eminent
scientists have attempted to bury debate about one of the major preoccupations
of his final decade. This was 鈥渢he unfashionable, not to say reviled, theory鈥�
(as Richard Dawkins describes it in his moving foreword) that the AIDS pandemic
was sparked by an experimental polio vaccine fed to people in the Congo.
Hamilton was 鈥�95 per cent sure鈥� that this hypothesis had merit, but nowadays we
see eminent scientists declaring in the pages of Nature that 鈥渂eautiful
facts have destroyed an ugly theory鈥�. I hope that some of Hamilton鈥檚 many
letters and private papers on the subject will eventually be published, perhaps
in the promised third volume of this series, as a riposte to those who parade
phylogenetic dating theory (and political expediency) as scientific truth.
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