The September issue of HARPER's included a review by David Quammen of three recent books on the subject of the Neanderthals. What caught my attention, and made me want to commonplace a bit of this, was Quammen's digression onto the two different sorts of biology in general. There are biologists who look at their field as a batter of applied chemistry -- molecules interacting and compounding. There are also biologists who look at life on the level of the organism, or on the still broader level of the whole populations or ecosystems. Reductionists versus holists, if you will, although those words are judgment freighted. Quammen speaks of organismic versus molecular biology. Here's a passage, without further comment. You may have missed this argument, unless you work in the field or are somehow involved with the allocation of university budgets and buildings. It has been quiet and internecine but bitter, and traceable back to the late 1950s and early 60s, when Edward O...