Two books on Russian Darwinism have recently appeared, underscoring the current interest in rethinking not only the introduction but the interpretation of Darwinism in different countries. The extent to which various aspects of Darwinism were acceptable or not differed in France, Italy, Germany, and Russia. A careful analysis of these differences provides historians with an opportunity to point out the importance of both social and intellectual constraints on the acceptance of scientific theories.
Todes's interpretation, emphasized in his title Darwin without Malthus, demonstrates that a metaphor or allusion that is powerful in one cultural setting may have entirely different overtones in another. The longstanding criticism of Malthusian views on overpopulation within the Russian intellectual community caused the strongest objections to Darwin. Evolution and natural selection, Todes argues, encountered no major barriers, but the "motor" driving natural selection, in the form of a rejected economic theory, decidedly did. This is a fascinating study of the development of social and scientific ideas, and Todes has done a beautiful job of laying out the early pre-Darwinian opposition to Malthus and then showing us how the same arguments were invoked against Darwinian Malthusianism. For someone interested in French Darwinism, for example, it is startling to find natural selection accepted but Malthusian arguments rejected in Russia. This is just the opposite in France where Paul Broca called Malthusian overpopulation "Darwin's law" while rejecting natural selection as evolution's major mechanism.
Todes begins by analyzing the writings of a number of major figures, while also providing contextual biographical and social information about them. Some of these scientists, like the botanists * Daniel P.