In his foreword, Mayr describes his book as an 'elementary volume'
aimed at those wanting to know more about evolution. Acknowledging
that there are now many books on the market that purport to explain
evolution, he argues that generally they are not didactic enough
and fail to present a 'concise, reader-friendly account'. This all
raises the reader's hopes that this book is going to be a
definitive and accessible guide to evolution. Unfortunately, it is
not to be. Mayr, a very distinguished figure in the field of
evolutionary theory and a Professor Emeritus at Harvard University,
has produced a text that is very hard work for the non-specialist.
Readers used to the crystal-clear prose of popularisers like
Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones will struggle with Mayr's dense
explanations of evolution. The main difficulty is that he has
little grasp of what the layman might reasonably be expected to
know, so he leaves out some fairly essential information. For
example, although he refers several times to 'Mendelian genetics',
nowhere does he tell us who Mendel was, or explain why his
discoveries were so important to evolutionary theory. He also has a
tendency to use technical terms without explanation; a typical Mayr
sentence goes: 'An even higher taxonomic level is involved in
so-called clade selection, a clade being a holophyletic group of
taxa forming a branch of a phylogenetic tree.' Another problem with
the book is that Mayr tends to smooth over some over the major
debates among evolutionists. He dismisses, with very little
discussion, Stephen Jay Gould's theory of 'punctuated equilibrium',
and Richard Dawkins's view that natural selection takes place at
the level of the gene rather than the individual. The reader with
little previous knowledge of evolutionary ideas would get the
impression that most of the big arguments have long been resolved
and settled, which is certainly not the case. Having said all that,
this is still a very thorough and detailed account both of Darwin's
theory of evolution and the evidence that exists to support it.
Readers who are prepared to persevere through the difficult early
chapters will find everything they need to know about how evolution
works, in theory and in practice. The later chapters (especially
the one on the evolution of humans) are particularly interesting,
and an easier read than the early ones. Nonetheless, a word of
warning: if you don't know anything about evolutionary theory, this
isn't the place to start. (Kirkus UK)
What we do and do not know about evolution, by one of the field's
pioneering thinkers. Evolution is the most important idea in
biology, with implications that go far beyond science. But despite
more than a century's progress in understanding, there is still
widespread confusion about what evolution is, how it works and why
it is the only plausible mechanism that can account for the
remarkable diversity of life on Earth. Now, for the first time in a
book aimed at a general audience, one of the founding fathers of
modern biology tells us what we know - and what we do not know -
about evolution. In showing how evolution has gone from theory to
fact, he explores various controversial fads and fallacies such as
punctuated equilibrium, the selfish-gene theory and evolutionary
psychology. He ends by looking at what we know about human
evolution and how, in turn, this knowledge has affected the way in
which we view ourselves and the world.
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