Customer Reviews

Evolution

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I'm not a Molecular Biologist or an Evolutionary Scientist by profession. So I think my friend who loaned me this book was a bit surprised when I asked if I can borrow the book from her. It is after all a text book for students in extremely specialized field(s). The thing about this book is that you don't have to be in a specialized field to be reading it. It is for anyone who has ever wondered about life on earth, how it evolved, time scales involved in the evolutionary journey, various stages of evolution, different mechanisms life has employed to adapt, etc. etc. It is a fascinating work built upon the original idea proposed by Charles Darwin himself in "On the origin of species", with theories that have since been proven to be facts, and more in depth knowledge about the subject than any other book of its kind out there. This book will literally take you through the tree of life, with wonderful illustrations, and have you thinking about Life like you've never thought before. This book will make you feel connected to the Universe and every life form that has ever existed on the Earth and you can't help but feel both immortal yet insignificant. The particles in your body have been around for an eternity, and will be around long after you're gone. You're part of the Universe and the Universe is a part of you. I'm very fortunate to have had the chance to read this book. It is now part of my collection of books and I highly recommend it to all the curious minds out there.

At first glance, the book is fantastic. Only when you start reading it, you discover that it is too unwieldy and tries to accomplish too much. Authors decided not to choose any particular knowledge level for their audience, but instead cover a lot of ground very quickly. The learning curve in this book is extremely steep! This is a book that will take you from description of molecular nature of DNA all the way to such complex concepts as average fitness excess and beyond. Unfortunately, this means that explanations are brief and many things are given as a fact of the matter, without proper explanations of their origins and/or importance. It also means that if you are like me, a scientist with quite a decent knowledge of biology and evolution, then for 80% of this book you will be bored, for 10% you will have no clue what the authors are talking about, and only 10% will be of any reasonable interest to you. In the end, the book is just not fun to read. Very disappointing...

I generally don't like writing reviews, but this is such a bad textbook for me that I have to vent about it somewhere. I love the topic of evolution and have read a few books on evolution, but I have pretty much no clue in what's going on in some of the chapters. In a nutshell, the authors just didn't do a good job of explaining things and made even simple concepts incredibly hard to understand. I'd suggest anyone that's looking for an evolution textbook / reference book to go with something like Ridley's Evolution book instead.