Darwin's retriever

摘要

In the decade-and-a-half between 1964 and 1980 a group of oddball academics from Britain and America did something quite remarkable. From the unpromising material of natural history, long seen as the Cinderella of biological science, they fashioned an ideology as powerful and transformative as any philosophy or religion before it. These were the men (and a handful of women) who put the "ism" into Darwinism. They showed, in intricate mathematical detail, how the "red in tooth and claw" process of natural selection could result in sophisticated collaborative behaviour. They thus brought society, including human society, firmly within biology's grasp.