FOUR BOOKS

Storm over Biology (Prometheus Books, hdbd., 324 pp., $24.95) is a collection of essays by Harvard bacterial physiology professor B.D. Davis. I bought it after reading a glowing review in Commentary, but found it most disappointing. The author is on the side of science against Science for the People and other stormtroopers, but only just, and with very tame defenses. There is no mention of Prof. Hernstein who had to be saved from a student mob shouting "Fascist!" after he showed that the Teaming abilities of carrier pigeons depend on heredity as much as on environment; and the case of Harvard Prof. Walzer, whom the liberal champions of academic freedom forced to abandon studies of XYY chromosomes, is treated very superficially (XYY bearers have an extraordinarily high incidence of criminality.) His arguments for genetic engineering are weak, and his discussion of IQ tests and allied subjects evades a central question: if the races are truly equal in inborn ability (as I would think they are), why does nobody dare to put the hypothesis to a scientific test? Is it because they are afraid of the answer?

Perhaps not surprisingly, outside his own field, Davis has fallen victim to the Science for the People propaganda after all. Technology, he writes, progresses at the cost of exhaustion of "nonrenewable" resources, accumulating pollution of the air, a Malthusian population explosion,... Somebody ought to send him a copy of Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource.

Environmental Radioactivity from Natural, Industrial, and Military Sources by Prof. Merril Eisenbud (Academic Press, hdbd., 475 pp., $55 net) is the third, updated edition of this most excellent, fact-filled and readable book, including a special subchapter on the Chernobyl accident. The only thing wrong with it is its inflated price.

Our Radiant World by D.W. Lille (Iowa Univ. Press, hdbd., 226 pp., $21.45 ppd.) is also on radioactivity, contains an afterword on Chernobyl, is also well written and very readable, but lacks Eisenbud's many tables and graphs that make a book a reference work.