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“Rather chemical” is how Mary Archer describes her current reading list. She
sounds surprised when she says this, even though she’s a chemist at Imperial
College, London. Archer has just finished reading The Eighth Day of Creation by
Horace Judson (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1996). She says it’s a
“gossipy masterpiece” about the history of molecular biology, first published
three decades ago. She’s now into Dean Overman’s A Case Against Accident and
Self-Organization (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), which argues for evolution
by design, and Good Benito (Sceptre, 1996), a novel written by Alan Lightman
about the emotional troubles of…