This article is only available in the PDF format. Download the PDF to view the article, as well as its associated figures and tables.
The author of this book professes to have discovered a major biological principle which he calls the "primordial pattern of biological response." He introduces his thesis by devoting some 23 pages to surveying historic theories on the nature of life from earliest man to the present, and he then turns to his so-called primordial pattern.
As a result of considerable doubt about Grigg's use of history, I asked Professor Bernard Saltzberg, a well-known biomathematician, to skim through Grigg's work; and I received the following note:
Dr. Grigg has become enamored to the observation that many responses rise more rapidly than they decay, and he then attempts to use inductive reasoning to arrive at a fundamental law of nature. The discovery that many natural phenomena can be approximated by a certain mathematical expression cannot be construed as a discovery of a grand scheme of nature, no matter how excited the