Hamilton: Heir of Darwin and Fisher?
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When asked to do this review I was reluctant. This biography of the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton has been widely and well reviewed—in the Journal of the History of Biology (Caniglia 2013), Nature (Harman 2013), Science (Boomsma 2013), and The Times Literary Supplement (Smith 2013), for example—so the task seemed redundant. I agreed when the appeal was made that Segerstrale being a sociologist, her book should be reviewed by one. However, on reading, I did not find it a particularly sociological take on Hamilton’s life and work (i.e., one which tends to be preoccupied with race, class, and gender) but more an informal, social psychological one. Segerstrale attributes his can-do attitude towards practical matters to his family’s New Zealand background, and his relative indifference to personal comfort (supposedly he had been stung by more than 1,000 species of wasps; p. 104!1) to his growing up in a relatively small house in a large family, which was not without resources...
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