Customer Reviews

Evolution (Comstock Book)

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This is an excellent textbook-style introduction to its topic. Although a few of the more nuts-and-bolts chapters were pretty tough going for a Humanities guy like myself, overall the book is quite readable, amply illustrated, and very broad in its coverage. The topics include biological (heredity, genetics, mutation, selection) aspects of evolution, both in terms of internal mechanics and of large-scale case-studies, as well as political and religious considerations. It also includes an appendix with biographies of the major figures in evolutionary thought, a glossary, and a brief annotated bibliography. Although Richard Dawkins' _River out of Eden_ is shorter and more user-friendly, this is the most comprehensive brief introduction to the topic that I've seen.

Bought for an Evolution class; very comprehensive and a very good reference for Evolutionary study but not my favorite to pick and read. Essential for class study.

Colin Patterson (1933-1998) was the Senior Principal Scientific Officer in the Paleontology Department of British Museum of Natural History in London, from 1962-1993. He also gave a famous (infamous?) talk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on November 5, 1981, in which he asked the discussion group listening, "Can you tell me anything about evolution, any one thing that is true?" (Creationists had secretly taped this talk, and now sell recordings and transcripts of it.)

This book was originally written in 1978 (the edition I am reviewing here), and it was revised by him in 1999. He states in the Foreward, "In writing this book I have set out to produce an account of modern evolutionary theory which does not beg too many questions, and is complete enough to be coherent, but simple enough to be comprehensible to those with little or no technical knowledge of biology." He begins by stating, "The modern theory of evolution is the basis of biological science. It is an idea that unifies and directs work in all sorts of specialized fields, from medicine to geology."

He states, "Many species have features, like individual bristles in insects, details of wing coloration in butterflies or fingerprint patterns in man, which are genetically controlled, but appear to be so trivial that they can make no difference to the survival of the individual, and can have no selective value.... If these features are useless, how did they become fixed by natural selection? Genetic drift--a mechanism which could fix neutral or useless features by chance--provided a welcome explanation of such difficulties."

He adds, "Darwin cited several sorts of observations which would, in his view, destroy his theory.... Darwin's potential tests may strike the reader as pretty feeble, or as tests of natural selection rather than evolution. But many discoveries, not foreseen by Darwin, provide more severe tests of the theory. These include Mendelian genetics; the real age of the earth; the universality of DNA and the genetic code; and the evidence of protein biochemistry. Evolution has survived all these with flying colors."

The book was very much brand new, as it was said in the description when i purchased the book. I loved it