Abstract

He once recalled his delighted discovery as a schoolboy at Eton of J.B.S. Haldane’s book of essays, Possible Worlds; it changed his life, and after working as an aeronautical engineer designing aircraft during the war, he studied with Haldane and then went on to write his own series of career- inspiring books and essays for generations of students and professors around the world. The 1993 Introduction to the last edition of his 1958 classic, The Theory of Evolution, is an elegant and lucid overview of the progress in biology during his career, an essay nobody else could have written. But then that is true of just about everything he wrote, such as the essays collected in Games, Sex and Evolution (1988), and his books, The Evolution of Sex (1978) and The Problems of Biology (1986). In recent years he turned to fruitful collaboration with younger researchers. The Major Transitions in Evolution..