It is part of the ideology of science that it is an international
enterprise, carried out by a community that knows no barriers of nation
or culture. But the reality is somewhat different. Despite the best
intentions of scientists to form a single community, unseparated by
differences of national and political viewpoint, they are, in fact,
separated by language. Scientific literature in German is not generally
assimilated by French workers, nor that appearing in French by those
whose native language is English. The problem appears to have become
more severe since the last war, because the ascendance of the United
States as the preeminent economic power led, in a time of big and
expensive science, to a pre- dominance of American scientific production
and a growing tendency (at least among English-speakers) to regard
English as the international language of science. International
congresses and journals of world circulation have come more and more to
take English as their standard or official language. As a result,
students and scientific workers in the English speaking world have
become more linguistically parochial than ever before and have been cut
off from a considerable scientific literature. Population genetics has
been no exception to the rule. The elegant and extremely innovative
theoreticaI work of Malecot, for example, is only now being properly
assimilated by population biologists outside France. It was therefore
with some sense of frustration that I read Prof.
