Just as A.N. Whitehead famously argued that "all moral philosophy is footnotes to Plato," Tudge (The Second Creation), a research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy at the London School of Economics, argues that "all genetics is footnotes to Mendel," taking us from the 19th-century Moravian friar's monastery garden to headline makers like the Human Genome Project and Dolly, the instant sheep. The comparison is doubly appropriate given how heavily the moral question hangs on Tudge's narratives as he endeavors to put the public's fears about cloning and other issues to rest. His discussions of evolutionary psychology—the study of the genetic roots of human behavior, which today bears the taint of Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism and of eugenics—are careful and reasonable, as is his handling of the controversial idea of "designer babies." Tudge invokes the concept of noblesse oblige, arguing that moral responsibility grows in direct proportion to power over life. Throughout, his attitude is "cautious optimism." Tudge has great facility as a popularizer, here breezily showing how Von Neumann's game theory was the only kind of math that could come to the aid of Darwinism, there speculating about the relative stability of the gene pool as a whole: "people who cannot outsmart New York lawyers do not fade into oblivion." While perhaps a little too credulous of the evolutionary psychology gospel for some readers, and not alarmist enough for others, Tudge's account will draw in and satisfy the curious neophyte, if not the embroiled activist or random browser. (July)
