Humanist in a Lab Coat
LIPSET, DAVID
Humanist in a Lab Coat The Evolution of an Evolutionist By C. H. Waddington Cornell. 340 pp. $15.00 Reviewed by David Lipset C. H. WADDINGTON, Professor of Animal Genetics at the University of...
...Even the one explicitly autobiographical piece is about his ideas on the relationship between metaphysics and biological investigation...
...What human significance does Waddington attach to his own subject...
...By minimizing the role of genetics in human behavior, Waddington reveals himself to be a humanist in a lab coat...
...Unlike animals, man is not solely dependent on parents for skill and information...
...His focus then shifted to geology, then to plant genetics, and then to embryology...
...If evolution operates "by the selection of genotypes which endow their possessors with the capacity to react adaptively with their surroundings,' he writes, one may conclude that our perceptual apparatus has been "shaped to fit the character of those things with which it has to make contact...
...His curiosity led him as well through such subjects as the moral development of children and the relationship between art and science...
...It is true that biological changes continually take place, and have occurred in man since prehistoric times, but "it is difficult to argue that they have been the primary variables in the process, and indeed it is not at all clear that [genetic change has] had any importance...
...Man's fate is basically in his own hands, and "the real contribution of the study of human biology and human evolution will come when it is used to help in the formulation of a supra-ethical criterion...
...As a result of his confidence in man's greater flexibility, Waddington does not ask whether human evolution will in the future be manipulated by rational considerations, but rather what those considerations will be...
...Until the advent of Darwin, he notes, it was thought that the order found in the universe was both the doing of an Intelligent Being and the proof of that Being's existence...
...He introduces his essays with the confession that his field may have developed out of the esoteric symbolism of Alexandrian Gnosticism and Arab alchemy, and may be rooted in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead...
...At first, he studied paleontology...
...With comparable assurance, he dispatches the century-old opposition of biology to religion...
...it merely proposes process...
...Moving into philosophical territory, Waddington suggests an "optimistic" resolution to an ancient problem of epistemology...
...Yet his is not a neo-eugenicist position, for he insists on the need of ethical values...
...This book was an attempt to delineate the growth and nature of his various concerns...
...Waddington includes articles on "Selection of the Genetic Basis for an Acquired Character," "Genetic Assimilation in Limnea," "Schmalhauser and Genetic Assimilation," "Environment Selection by Drosophila Mutants," and discussions of archetypes, adaptation and process in evolutionary theory...
...Waddington is similarly suggestive on the issue of nature and culture...
...But "the essential feature of an evolutionary theory is the suggestion that animals and plants, as we see them exhibiting an apparently designed adaptedness at the present day, have been brought to their present condition by a process extending through time and were not designed in their modern form...
...As an undergraduate at Cambridge after World War I, he was more interested in poetry than science, and though he decided to leap into the "other culture," he did not land with feet firmly planted...
...What will interest laymen, however, are Waddington's excursions beyond science...
...The question of theism or atheism, which played such a large part in the public discussion in Darwin's day is not critically answered by an evolutionary hypothesis but must be settled, if it ever can be-in some other way...
...The Evolution of an Evolutionist stands, therefore, as the capstone of a long and distinguished career...
...The major task is to investigate the parallels and contrasts between the specifically human evolutionary system based on social transmission and what we know of the biological system based on genetics...
...He also expressed alarm at the state of global ecology long before it had become fashionable to do so...
...His interests always remained start-Iingly wide...
...Unless some sort of authority-bearing system is developed in the mind of the growing individual, social transmission would break down because nobody would believe what they were told...
...Evolutionary theory does not deny design, Waddington claims...
...Yet the general reader should not be misled by the title-the bulk of the pieces are intended for those with grounding in biology, more specifically, for practicing evolutionists...
...Waddington was an odd sort of scientist...
...and like Whitehead, too, he was a holist...
...and his capacity for language is unparalleled in nature...
...He believes that man has been gifted, that human ideas are not a "necessary consequence of environmental circumstances...
...In 1930 he invented a method that made "test tube" breeding possible, and in 1936 he explored material later identified by Crick and Watson as DNA...
...15.00 Reviewed by David Lipset C. H. WADDINGTON, Professor of Animal Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, died last October, shortly after this collection of essays appeared...
...Like Whitehead, Waddington was concerned with process rather than atemporal discrete items...
...What is surprising," Waddington declares, "is the magnitude of the gap between human ability and the best that any other animal can show in this direction...
...Most of the evolutionary changes which distinguish modern man from his ancestors of the Old Stone Age seem to have been in the first instance produced by social transmission...
Vol. 59 • January 1976 • No. 1
