THE CASE OF THE MIDWIFE TOAD

by Arthur Koestler ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 30, 1972

During his 30-plus years of writing, Arthur Koestler has covered a wide range of modern problems from brainwashing in totalitarian societies to the conflict between science and religion and, most recently (in The Act of Creation and The Ghost in the Machine), man's potential capability for evolutionary development through both natural and artificial means. It is not surprising then that Koestler should hark back to the opprobrious case of Dr. Paul Kammerer, an Austrian biologist whose controversial experiments on the evolutionary process (using among other amphibians the midwife toad, so named for its mating habits) were denounced as fraudulent in 1926 by an American herpetologist, G. K. Noble, in the pages of Nature -- whereupon Kammerer blew his brains out, seemingly confirming the old saw ""confession is suicide and suicide is confession."" But Koestler's investigation, begun as a study of a scientist who betrayed his commitment to truth, indicates that Kammerer, far from being a laboratory quisling, was probably innocent; a victim of an unknown colleague's machinations to discredit his work and therefore in the larger sense a casualty of the still unresolved war between the nco-Darwinist evolutionists who support the random mutation theory and the heretical Lamarckians who maintain (as did Kammerer's experiments) that acquired characteristics can be transmitted from one generation to another. ""I did not start with the intention to rehabilitate Paul Kammerer,"" says Koestler, ""but I ended up with an attempt to do so,"" and in the course of that effort he uses his skill as both inventive fantast and experienced researcher to give the midwife toad case a sense of drama and veracity. Those who found The Double Helix satisfying will enjoy this one too, no matter if they agree with Koestler's conclusions or not.

Pub Date: March 30, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION