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."

Hypothesis testing is not a straightforward matter in the fossil record and here, too interactions with biology can be extremely profitable. Quite simply, predictions regarding long-term consequences of processes observed in liv ing organisms can be tested directly using paleontological data if those liv ing organisms have an adequate fossil record, thus avoiding the pitfalls of extrapolative approaches. We hope to see a burgeoning of this interactive effort in the coming years. Framing and testing of hypotheses in paleon tological subjects inevitably raises the problem of inferring process from pattern, and the consideration and elimination of a broad range of rival hy is an essential procedure here. In a historical science such as potheses paleontology, the problem often arises that the events that are of most in terest are unique in the history of life. For example, replication of the metazoan radiation at the beginning of the Cambrian is not feasible. How ever, decomposition of such problems into component hypotheses may at least in part alleviate this difficulty. For example, hypotheses built upon the role of species packing might be tested by comparing evolutionary dy namics (both morphological and taxonomic) during another global diversi fication, such as the biotic rebound from the end-Permian extinction, which removed perhaps 95% of the marine species (see Valentine, this volume). The subject of extinction, and mass extinction in particular, has become important in both paleobiology and biology."