Judith Hooper – författare

This edition does not include illustrations.The tale of a flagrant scientific fraud and its cover-up, and scientific incompetence behind the most important paradigm in evolutionary biology: Charles Darwin’s `Theory of Evolution’.Every schoolchild is familiar with the peppered moth experiment that `proves’ natural selection: in the early 1950s a black variety of the moth thrived in industrial areas because camouflage on blackened trees protected it from predatory birds. However, these findings, now immortalised in our biology textbooks, were botched and inaccurate. They came from a scientist who ignored the truth for the sake of fame and recognition. `Of Moths and Men’ is a fascinating story of hubris, delusion and heartbreak behind the most important paradigm in 20th-century evolutionary biology.

In the 1950s, a British physician and amateur lepidopterist named H. B. D. Kettlewell went into the English woods to catch "evolution in action" among the now-famous Peppered Moths. His work became "Darwin's missing evidence," an evolutionary experiment as influential as any in the last century. Compellingly told, Of Moths and Men reveals Kettlewell to be a deluded scientist, a man tyrannized by his mentor, the powerful E. B. Ford, an imperious, eccentric Oxford don, a Darwinian zealot determined to crush all enemies in his path. In a revelatory, controversial work that will be debated for years to come, Judith Hooper uncovers the intellectual rivalries, petty jealousies, and faulty science behind one of the most famous experiments—and myths—in the history of evolutionary biology. Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Arm yourself against my dawn, which may at any moment cast you and Harry into obscurity, Alice James writes her brother William in 1891. In Judith Hooper’s magnificent novel, zingers such as this fly back and forth between the endlessly articulate and letter-writing Jameses, all of whom are geniuses at gossiping. And the James family did, in fact, know everyone intellectually important on both sides of the Atlantic, but by the time we meet her in 1889, Alice has been sidelined and is lying in bed in Leamington, England, after taking London by storm. We don’t know what’s wrong with Alice. No one does, though her brothers have inventive theories, and the best of medical science offers no help. So, with Alice in bed, we travel to London and Paris, where the James children spent part of their unusual childhood. We sit with her around the James family’s dinner table, as she – the youngest and the only girl – listens to the intellectual elite of Boston, missing nothing. The book is accompanied by Hooper’s Afterword,“What was Wrong with Alice?,” an analysis of the varied psychological ills of the James family and Alice’s own medical history.