Bryan Campbell Clarke FRS (1932-2014) was, from 1971, Professor of Genetics at the University of Nottingham. I only met him once. We fell into conversation at an evening meeting at the Royal Society in the late 1990s and found ourselves in such violent agreement that we were the last to leave. The only problem in recounting that story is that I cannot remember what we were in agreement about.
When the disgraceful book by Judith Hooper, Of Moths and Men: An Evolutionary Tale, was published in 2002, it was Bryan Clarke who reviewed it for the journal Heredity. For those not in the know, the late Michael Majerus (1954-2009) shot down Hooper’s insinuations in flames by producing direct confirmatory evidence of the research done on industrial melanism in the Peppered Moth, Biston betularia, by the people she had so viciously attacked.
Bryan Clarke’s object lesson in delivering brickbats began:
It is something of a shock to discover that the events of one's youth have become material for the history of science. It is more of a shock when the characters in that history bear only a superficial resemblance to the real ones.
In the 1950s, the Department of Zoology at Oxford was an exciting place to be. Niko Tinbergen was carrying out the behavioural work that led to his Nobel Prize. Michael Fischberg and John Gurdon were, for the first time, successfully cloning a vertebrate from its somatic cells. Arthur Cain and Philip Sheppard were involved in their classic studies of natural selection in Cepaea, and Bernard Kettlewell was organising his big experiments on peppered moths. There was an atmosphere of ferment and sharp questioning that kept everyone on their toes. Judith Hooper has written a book about it, but the department she describes is not the one I remember, and the people in it seem to be caricatures.
She writes about the origins of ecological genetics, and particularly about Kettlewell's experiments on the evolution of industrial melanism in peppered moths. She writes well, but the tone of her book suggests that she has purposefully set out to cast doubt on the evidence for natural selection. In doing so, she forsakes the prime responsibility of historians and biographers, which is to be fair to their subjects. Her talents as a writer make this failure the more regrettable. She repeatedly implies, but never quite states outright, that Bernard Kettlewell and his colleagues fabricated their data, and argues that they were, at the least, fatally careless.
Hooper has talked to most of the surviving people who worked at Oxford during the heyday of ecological genetics. They must have told her about the virtues and the vices of the dramatis personae, but somehow the vices are emphasised and the virtues are neglected. The cumulative effect is powerfully slanted. Hooper deals in the same way with the scientific evidence. Experiments and observations casting doubt on natural selection are highlighted, and supportive evidence is either ignored or disparaged.
She starts off as she means to go on. In the introduction, she describes EB Ford as a ‘megalomaniac’ who ‘headed a scientific coterie’. The experiments on peppered moths were ‘establishing the Oxford biologists as masters of their world’, but at their core lay ‘flawed science, dubious methodology and wishful thinking’, round which clustered ‘a swarm of human ambitions, and self-delusions’. When she gets into her stride, people working in ecological genetics are described as Ford's ‘disciples’, ‘acolytes’, ‘underlings’ or ‘protégés’, and those reporting evidence of natural selection were ‘exulting’, ‘declaiming’, ‘raving’, or ‘arrogant’. Fellows of the Royal Society from the Oxford department were ‘strutting’. In truth, of the four Fellows concerned, Alistair Hardy, Niko Tinbergen and Philip Sheppard were notably free of pomposity. EB Ford was eccentric and often unpleasant, but he never strutted. His mode of progress more closely resembled an insinuation. There was not a strut in the place...
He ended the review with:
By emphasising Kettlewell's insecurity as an amateur among the academics, Hooper insinuates further motives for slackness or fraud. Indeed, her whole book is a treasury of insinuations worthy of an unscrupulous newspaper. It is all a great pity, because a genuine talent for writing occasionally shines through the fog. There is a good tale to be told about the origin of ecological genetics, and about the extraordinary people involved in it. Kettlewell's life was a chequerboard of triumph and tragedy, and a more sympathetic writer could have made the story into an epic. As it is, Hooper's need to favour a particular viewpoint has got in the way, and history has been rewritten to accord with the prejudices of the author.
If you want to know about industrial melanism, you should read the book by Michael Majerus. If you want to know about the people concerned, you should wait, and hope, for an account that is balanced.
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| Bryan Clarke from Brookfield 2023 |
Clarke B. 2003. The art of innuendo. Heredity 90, 279–280. doi.org/10.1038/sj.hdy.6800229
Brookfield J. 2023. Bryan Campbell Clarke. 24 June 1932—27 February 2014. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 74, 109-121.
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