ABSTRACT
“Tout être vivant est aussi un fossile,” was one of the unforgettable sentences from the pen of the great geneticist Jacques Monod. Descartes had ruined the French for science with a combination of rationalism and dualism. Cogito ergo sum (or as they would prefer it in the language of ultimate reason: je pense donc je suis) had put clever thinking before honest fact. The French reveled in the freedom to exercise the autonomous pensée, or, as Lévi-Strauss put it in his delightful punning book title, La pensée sauvage: thoughts are as wild as the pansy L-S put on the book jacket. Thus they still feel it necessary to mount clever rationalizations of the obviously wrong Lamarck, just because he is French. But when they do get around to doing science, they do it very well indeed, and one of the best of them is Jacques Monod, as the Nobel Prize committee eventually decided.
