51动漫

It鈥檚 busman鈥檚 holidays all the way for Tim Birkhead. A professor of animal
and plant sciences at the University of Sheffield, Birkhead is tackling Peter
Raby鈥檚 Alfred Russel Wallace: A life (Chatto & Windus, 2001, see
review 9 June, p 46), deeming Wallace 鈥渂rilliant but odd鈥�. He is also reading
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin(Cambridge, 2001) which he says is
rather like hacking into the great biologist鈥檚 e-mail. However, he says that
鈥�1864 was a bad year for Darwin鈥檚 health and many of his letters are little more
than lists of ailments鈥�. Birkhead recently finished William Bateson
(Cambridge, 1928), a biography of Mendel鈥檚 鈥渁rrogant and dynamic鈥� publicist, who
believed evolution happened in jerks rather than by natural selection on minute
changes between individuals.