Every Wednesday night, a chubby French biologist named Jean Rostand* sips a glass of cognac in a railroad cafe at Ville-d'Avray and plunges bravely but vainly into a village chess tournament. The rest of his week is spent in lonelier fun: a lifelong love affair with a house full of frogs and toads.
"In my frogs," says the 57-year-old scientist, defiantly twirling his walrus mustache, "I see the entire universe." The more he learns about his frog-shaped universe, the more he worries about the human-shaped conscience. Biologists, says he in the current Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, ask themselves whether they can...
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