'Natural history' is seen by some professional biologists as hardly deserving to be regarded as a part of science. Compared to the experimental sophistication of molecular biology, and the apparent generality of its conclusions, natural history is no more than a collection of particular facts of little theoretical or practical import. There are two reasons why one should dissent from this judgment. The first is that the task of biology is to explain the living world, and that world is irreduciby complex. If I am interested in molecular biology - and I am - it is because it helps to explain how that complexity arose. A biologist who was not interested in the diversity of living things would be like a historian who did not care what had actually happened in history, and confined his attention to the study of experimental psychology.

LRB 1 April 1982 | PDF Download