Nature's Oracle: The Life and Work of W.D.Hamilton [Hardcover]

This is a must-read volume for all biologists and historians of science as well as offering real insights into the burden and pain of true genius. Here is the story of a gentle naturalist whose insights into social evolution - from bark beetles to humans - are supremely logical, cold and, to aesthetes and the anthropocentric, often disturbing. Hamilton challenged scientific and social orthodoxy and, as such often went head to head with the establishment. Yet that establishment, at least the scientific part of it, eventually recognised him for what he was - the most insightful 'darwinist since Darwin. Before his untimely death in 2003 he had been loaded with all the accolades his discipline had to offer yet still had to fight with journals to get his ideas published.

I knew Bill and his work well and cannot think of a more difficult biography to get 'right' - yet I think Dr Segerstrale has done it! Not only is his work presented well and accurately ( a task few biologists' would dare), the author also captured the double-side persona (maybe multi-sided would be better) and the sometimes tortured mental life Hamilton chose to lead. Yet his generosity and open heartedness was legion.

I was the undergraduate student whose piece on Bill is quoted from extensively on p. 113 (from my obituary piece 'Death of Greatness' ABC Books 2003)Nature's Oracle: The Life and Work of W.D.Hamilton. I was among the first third year class Bill taught in the autumn term of 1965 at Imperial College - curiously we are also the undergraduate class pictured in Plate 5 (which is from Spring term 1966). We are the rather scruffy looking ones on the right of the picture. In those far gone days the final year class (the third year in the UK system) spent its final term at Silwood. At that stage ), the IC classes were small - no more than 12 in a year. Bill handled these reasonably well and vice-versa. I believe it was only when classes expanded in the '70's that his teaching 'troubles' began.

A book to be owned, read, annotated and dipped into repeatedly by researchers, teachers - and human beings.

Roger Kitching

The last chapter of Nature's Oracle is a killer. It lays out the colourful, wide-ranging and enormously deep reaches of Bill Hamilton's lifework. It marvels with insights, angles, perceptions and appreciations. It lays out the uniqueness of the man and his accomplishments. Too bad it wasn't the first chapter of the book. I would have approached it differently, even anxiously. And I think many more will miss out because the whole book isn't framed by that last chapter.

For someone called the 20th Century Darwin, I think the name Bill Hamilton would not garner any sort of recognition outside his discipline. He needs a little buildup. He had an insatiable (as opposed to obsessive) need to understand the lives of all living things. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of them, and no one else came close to his expertise. He risked life and limb without thought to pursue that knowledge. He developed hugely important theories on altruism and sex in plants and insects. He was a pioneer user of computers. He spent endless hours modeling behaviours, long before that became easy and routine. But his biography was written by an academic colleague, clearly for other academic colleagues. Which is unfortunate, because Bill Hamilton's life is definitely worth examining by a much wider audience.

It's not until page 287 that we get this summation:"He wanted to know how nature worked, he wanted to become one with her. ...she was his inspiration and excitement, she was his true conversation partner." If that were stated up front, it too would have given me a framework to keep reading, but by page 287 it was trite.

On the personal level, it seems as if Hamilton's life got in the way of the story. His wife Christine wanted her own career and ended up moving to the Orkneys (!) to practice dentistry. Hamilton became lonely and morose, and took up with a journalist/colleague, Luisa. Or did he? They seemed to live in different countries, although she appears at his family home with the whole family when Hamilton's mother died. Was she accepted as his spouse? Did he ever divorce from Christine? Did they just agree to pursue separate careers? Did they ever reconcile? Did Luisa cause frictions? How did his daughters deal with it - and him? None of it is explored in what otherwise seems to be an exhaustive biography. It's odd because of the granularity of detail in the rest of the book, right down to the difference between O level and A level exams in the UK. You'd think the mother of his three children would merit at least some sort of closure.

The book could also use a glossary for those of us without doctorates in zoology and biology. Words like sosigonic simply do not factor into most vocabularies. But these five pound words are tossed off with total abandon throughout, and that inevitably slows the flow.

There is a not-so-small irony the author missed in Bill Hamilton's lifelong struggle with peer reviewed journals, particularly Nature. Bill Hamilton's discoveries and observations that resulted in the theories of the Parasite Red Queen, parasite avoidance, deleterious mutation elimination and others - had trouble finding print. These theories very much resemble the process of getting a new idea published in Nature. While Hamilton was busy pushing his revolutionary observations, the system was busy protecting the status quo from this maverick outlier. How ironic. And too bad the author missed it. His theories were clearly the centerpiece of his career, and it wasn't until his death that Nature freely admitted him to its pages. This struggle dominates these pages. But there is so much more to this life than those fights. I hope you will catch that when you read it.

"Nature's Oracle: The Life and Work of W.D.Hamilton" is an account of the intellectual career of W. D. Hamilton. Hamilton was an evolutionary biologist who helped to shape neo-Darwinism: the idea that biology can best be explained by selection among genes. If you want to read about Hamilton's ideas and how he created them and the internal politics of science, like acceptance and rejection of papers, priority claims and that sort of thing, you will find this book interesting.

The best parts of the book explain Hamilton's ideas, how he came up with them and how he struggled to get some of them published. Hamilton explained the willingness of animals to take a chance of not having offspring of having fewer offspring to save their relatives because those relatives share some of their genes and he undertook fieldwork to test this theory. He had a priority dispute he had with another biologist (John Maynard Smith) over this idea. Hamilton also had trouble getting some of his papers on it published and he blamed Maynard Smith for this as he was a referee for one of Hamilton's papers and advised that it should have major revisions before publication. Hamilton also came up with other interesting ideas, such as sex being a means to out evolve parasites.

As an account of Hamilton's ideas and the politics of science it seems accurate, but the book has some flaws. I think that some of those ideas, such as Hamilton's idea that medical treatment is problematic because it preserves bad genes, are bad, but they are explained accurately. There are some minor irritations like a couple of references to Hamilton using induction: a process that somehow turns observations into ideas. This can't happen since you can't know what observations will be relevant without ideas to guide you in what to look for and there are other problems too. The claims that Hamilton used induction is also contradicted by the text of the book, which describes how Hamilton came up with ideas and then tested them by observation. More annoying still is the fact that the author mentions the philosopher who refuted inductivism: Karl Popper but ignores his criticism of inductivism. I deducted one star for some of Hamilton's bad ideas and for the inductivism mistake.