Essays and Other Things

William Hamilton (1936-2000) was a naturalist and geneticist who died of a disease contracted in Africa when he was investigating the origins of the AIDS virus. At his funeral service in the chapel of New College, Oxford, Richard Dawkins announced that William Hamilton was now accepted as "the greatest evolutionary biologist since Charles Darwin". His official biography, Nature's Oracle, was released by Oxford University Press in April 2013 and reviewed by Alasdair Gray that year in the Scottish Review of Books. Between 1995 and 2005, three volumes of his collected scientific papers, The Narrow Roads of Gene Land, were published by Macmillan Press at Oxford, New York, and Heidelberg. The Dark of the Stars is his only novel.