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Dauphin Publications The Case of the Midwife Toad by Arthur Koestler
On September 23 1926 and Austrian experimental biologist named Dr. Paul Kammerer blew his brains out on a footpath in the Austrian mountains. His suicide was the climax of a great evolutionary controversy which his experiments had aroused. The battle was between the followers of Lamarck who maintained that acquired characteristics could be inherited and the neo-Darwinists who upheld the theory of chance mutations preserved by natural selection. Dr. Kammerers experiments with various amphibians including salamanders and the midwife toad Alytes obstetricans lent much weight to the Lamarckian argument and drew upon him the full fury of the orthodox neo-Darwinists.Arthur Koestler had known about Dr. Kammerers work when he himself was a student in Vienna and he has always been interested in this tragic story. He gives a fascinating description of the venomous atmosphere in which the battle was fought and of the lengths to which apparently respectable scholars would go to discredit their opponents. Heading the attack on Kammerer was a British scientist William Bateson who hinted that the Vienneses experiments were fakes but who failed to examine the evidence including the so-called nuptial pads of Kammerers last remaining specimen of the midwife toad. It was a young American scientist who delivered the coup de grace; on a visit to Vienna he discovered that the discoloration of the nuptial pads was due not to natural causes but to the injection Indian ink. When his findings were published Kammerer shot himself.Mr. Koestler whose recent writings in books such as The Act of Creation and The Ghost in the Machine have been in part concerned with evolutionary theory decided to investigate this old mystery. When he started on his researches he expected to relate the tragedy of a man who had betrayed his calling for Kammerers suicide was accepted as a confession of guilt and his work was discredited from that day to this. Instead as Mr. Koestler read the contemporary papers corresponded with Kammerers daughter Batesons son and the surviving scientists who attended Kammerers lecture in Cambridge he found himself writing a vindication of a man who in all probability was himself betrayed. The story that emerges is on one level fascinating piece of scientific detection; on another it is a moving and human narrative about a much abused brilliant and lovable figure. Though no Lamarckian himself Mr. Koestler ends the book with an appeal to biologists to repeat Kammerers experiments with an open mind in order to verify or refute them. If Kammerers claims were posthumously confirmed our outlook on evolution would be significantly changed.A superb intellectual thriller whose implications still reverberate today The Case of the Midwife Toad is an entirely new kind of book for Mr. Koestler and perhaps only he could have written it for it required expert knowledge and familiarity with the academic world of science combined with the creativity and imaginative insight of an outstanding novelist.show more