Development as an Evolutionary Process

major responsibility he assumed during his life was that of chair of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins. Fleming does an excellent job of integrating his account of Welch's personal life with the virtual revolution of modern medicine which began around the turn of the century. He skillfully sets the stage for his account of Welch's accomplishments. He establishes Welch's descent from a long line of doctors and discusses Welch's decision to pursue a career in medicine, although his initial ambition upon graduating from Yale College in 1870 was to be a tutor in Greek. Fleming also conveys to the reader a great deal about Welch's private life, which was not as idyllic as his public life. Fleming's biography is not as exhaustive as Simon Flexner and James T. Flexner's William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age ofAmerican Medicine (New York, 1941). Its merit lies in its accessibility and in Fleming's skillful entwining of Welch's life with the many upheavals occurring in medicine during his lifetime. The new afterword sheds some light on the directions which medicine has taken since Welch's death and also includes many suggestions for additional reading. This book represents a refreshing approach to biography, and I highly recommend it to students of medicine, public health, nursing, and American history. Development as an Evolutionary Process is the result of a symposium held in 1985 at the Marine Biology Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and is the eighth volume in the MBL Lectures in Biology series. The editors, Rudolf and Elizabeth Raff, chose the articles presented in the book in order to emphasize the experimental approaches available to studying the role of developmental processes in evolution. Their hope is to reunite developmental and evolutionary biologists in a field of evolutionary ontogenetics. This emphasis is a valid one in light of the growing awareness among the scientific community of the power of approaching problems from multiple aspects. The editors hope to move beyond the simple dictum, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," to an aggressive use of developmental study to elucidate evolutionary processes. The book covers a range of topics that illustrate this new approach. Michale Katz's discussion of the directedness of evolution in the chapter entitled "Is Evolution Random?" combines concepts from evolution, mathematics, philosophy, and development into a convincing argument. Other authors contribute chapters that emphasize the variety of approaches available, such as an example of an animal …