Abstract

Dashiell Hammett’s reaction was “sharp and angry, snarling” when he read, at her request, a work in progress by his friend and lover, Lillian Hellman. “He spoke as if I had betrayed him.” His judgment was absolute and his advice unsparing: “Tear this up and throw it away. It’s worse than bad—it’s half good.” That is exactly what I thought of Matti Häyry’s Rationality and the Genetic Challenge as, for the third time in the evening, I penned a note in its margins and sent it sailing across the room in disgust. Cambridge University Press knows its book binding, however, and the spine of the text was undamaged.