THE TORCH OF LIFE

Rene Dubos, one of the best middlebrow popularizers of highbrow ideas-and-men, here tackles the evolutionary process and its relation to the human condition, what we can expect from it, what we can't, its psychosocial nature and the cultural- historical trends which frame it. Writing with his usual urbanity and talent for capsule criticism, Dubos' curriculum contains the themes and thoughts of Darwin, Rosenfeld, Azimov, Dobzhansky, Rostov and the great Jesult anthropologist Tellhard de Chardin; genetic diversity and genetic control (the author's against Professor Muller's artificial insemination proposals); the irresponsibility of planned obsolescence; the increasingly overspecialized and over adapted Western societies; the physicists' complementarily concept and the relatedness of contradiction via the matter/anti-matter contrast; and the hope that the intimate study of living things rather than the detailed analysis of lifeless fragments may yet provide evidence for a new principle of nature, possibly the universal cosmic consciousness becoming self consciousness -- all this and much more mark a profitable, pleasurable study for the scientifically educated layman.