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Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory

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Edward Larson has capped a fine string of publications on evolution with this history. A study of the idea of evolution and consideration of the mechanisms driving it, this book introduces you to the major thinkers and researchers involved. Each chapter focuses on an individual or a concept, explaining the rationales behind the idea and its supporters. Larson's evocative prose style keeps the account moving smoothly, even when disputants over an idea grow disruptive and acrimonious.

Larson opens with consideration of the problem of deep time. With biblical authority decreeing a young earth and the immutability of species, the idea of change over time was deemed impossible, if not heretical. Ironically, the first scholar to open the notion of deep time was one of evolution's "staunchest foes" - Georges Cuvier. This French scientist was an early expert on comparative anatomy, stressing form resulted from functional use of an organ. His studies led him to argue that fossils truly represented extinct species. However, new species didn't evolve from the older ones, he argued, but were the result of an act of subsequent creation. Extinctions were due to some catastrophic event. The idea of species succession, however, introduced the notion of deep time - an Earth older than then supposed.

From Cuvier, Larson logically moves to the ideas of another French scientist, Jean Baptiste Lamarck. Today, Lamarck's ideas are blithely dismissed, but Larson shows the significance of his contributions. Although the paleontological record provided spotty support, Lamarck rejected Cuvier's "fixed species" sequences for a form of continuous change. Thinking that changes to the body would be reflected in later generations, Lamarck developed the thesis of "acquired characteristics". Larson makes clear that Lamarck's ideas, although denounced today, were a needed foundation for Darwin's great insight.

Larson's summary of Darwin's Beagle voyage and development of the concept of evolution by natural selection is clear and succinct. Except for Larson's insistence on calling it "evolutionism", thereby changing a scientific idea into an ideology, it's a fine synopsis. Larson is correct in concentrating on human evolution. No matter what Darwin wrote of pigeons or barnacles, people wanted to know how humans fit into the evolutionary scheme. More than one scientific and social issue depended on that pivotal point.

Larson describes the years of challenge to natural selection and the rise of Mendelian genetics leading the assault. Objectors to natural selection came from more than just the ranks of Christian dogmatists. Lord Kelvin's calculation of the sun's waning heat denied evolution sufficient time to operate. Others argued that breeding species blended traits instead of separating them into new species. Later, the most important student of heredity, Thomas Hunt Morgan, rejected natural selection in favour of a mutation-driven mechanism. The turning point came with J.B.S. Haldane, Sewall Wright and Ronald Fisher's new "biometric" studies in population genetics. The merging of Mendelian genetics with Darwin's natural selection is now known as the "new synthesis" or "neo-Darwinism". That combination has proven the most lasting and meaningful aspect of thought on the idea of evolution. From it, Larson explains, arose E. O. Wilson's innovative concept of sociobiology. The behaviour of social insects offer insight into group interaction and are applicable to human evolutionary history.

There are many books with information on the history of evolution as a concept. Why choose this one over any of them? The main reason is Larson's focus on evolution as an idea. The biological themes are discussed only briefly, keeping Larson free to relate the history of the concept. He describes some of the off-shoots of Darwin's original thesis, such as Gould and Eldredge's "punctuated equilibrium", but cautiously avoids any commitment to any of them. His purpose is relating how the idea came to dominate science. He also portrays its Christian opponents in the United States and how their strategies have been applied in driving education away from science to embrace religious themes, however disguised. As an overview, this book is an outstanding introduction. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Edward J. Larson manages to pack this little book. The author goes beyond the usual small format of the Modern Library Chronicles series only a little in terms of page number but seems to cram much more information in than the readers of this dazzling series usually encounter. And the joy is that he does it so effortlessly, with scientific jargonize only sneaking in near the very end. The concept of evolution is covered from Cuvier in the Napoleonic era through Darwin and onto the modern 21st culture wars in America. Everything important is touched on in a manner that makes it relevant, understandable, and interesting, and the story flows quickly and intelligently. It is one of the better volumes of the series making the best use of the space allowed in order to introduce important historical ideas and events to the general reader. A highly recommended read.

Larson is quite competent at describing the history of evolutionary thought up until recent decades. Then he becomes obsessed with Wilson's pop-sci "sociobiology" and completely misses the much more significant Zukerkandl & Pauling, Kimura, Jukes & Cantor, Walter Fitch, and the whole revolution in molecular evolution which brought evolution out of the swamps of mere "naturalism" and into serious molecular and genomic studies.

This book does a good job at placing evolution by natural selection into its historical context as an idea. I enjoyed seeing the comparison of Darwin's ideas with the competing ideas of scientists of his time. The historical approach makes it clear why Darwin's ideas have been so successful: they have plenty of predictive power. This book makes clear that the central problem with creationist theories is precisely their lack of predictive power. In Darwin's time creationists could still claim to be reputable scientists. Unfortunately, the creationist hypotheses, such as that species could not go extinct, turned out to be wrong. In our time, it's easy to say that God created something, but what does that explain about why plants or animals are the way they are? Not much.
This book is for the college-level reader; it can be technical and a little slow-paced in places.

Larson in this book provides an easy to read (or as in my case, to listen to on tape) history of the development of Evolution as a theory and how it moved and weaved not only through scientific circles, but also through society.

In this regard, Larson is indeed very nuetral and soft-spoken in relating the "story" of evolution in a clear and easily traceable manner that any interested reader (or listener) can follow. It helps tremendously to have this overview and to understand the historical, social, philosophical and religious implications covered in this manner.

Far too often any conversation including the topic evolution can "evolve" into an argument very quickly, in large part because the term has come to encompass so many thoughts, values and ideas that people, even if their positions are similar, talk past each other and fail to define their terms and indicate the scope of how they are using the term.

Larson's book does a wonderful job in many ways demonstrating how that has come to be such an issue. Evolution spans far more than science though science may be its primary home. Many of the same battle taking place now have taken place in varying capacities throughout the past 150 or so years since Darwin's Origin of Species exploded into the world. Eugenics, socialism, Nazism are all touched on in part in this tome in addition to tracing how the concept of Evolution metamorphasized through time to the current era.

COmments are made throughout the book that touch upon creationism as well. It is not highly thorough in that regard and as might be expected, where there is some claim toward bias in examining the positions and history of interacting with creationism, it does take on some bias despite it's generally good record elsewhere.

For a good focus with a narrower scope in terms of this topic solely within the context of America with equal footing given to creationism, a good companion volume or follow up to it would be Larry Witham's, "Where Darwin Meets the Bible: Creationists and Evolutionists in America". Witham covers similar ground and includes a little more balance or neutrality in some areas in my opinion.

On the whole, however, an excellent introductory book and well worth the time to read or listen!

I can't add a lot to the other reviews here. I encourage you to read some of the other reviews to get a summary of the book's contents - I won't repeat those here. I recommend skipping the couple of reviews that are by people simply pushing an agenda. I applaud the Deacon, who while not believing in evolution, still read the book and gave it a fair and honest review (his review proves that fair-minded people can disagree with an author but still give an intellectually honest evaluation).

I enjoyed the book because it is exactly what it says it is: the history of an idea. It is not a primer on evolution itself. This book would best be read by those who are already familiar with evolution (but not experts) and aware of the broad outlines of the history of the concept of evolution. This book will then provide a concise, enthralling review of the roots of evolution in late 18th, early 19th century thought all the way through to the status of evolutionary thinking today. You don't get an in depth treatment of any one topic, but Larson covers all the major players and sub theories and competing theories in just the right level of detail. If you have read a lot about aspects and episodes in the history of science and evolution, as I have, this book pulls it all together wonderfully.

By comparison, Gould gives a similar "history of evolutionary thinking" in his mammoth _Structure of Evolutionary Theory_. Larson's is far better organized, far clearer, and way more concise than Gould's rambling treatment. Gould's history is interesting and accurate, but much, much harder to get through. The "Notes on Further Reading" at the end of this book is very helpful (though I wish it was even more extensive).

In short, if you are interested in the origins of one of the greatest ideas in human history, or interested in how it battled to preeminence over the last 150 years, this is an excellent choice. Thank you Mr. Larson!

If, as Edward Larson says, Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species" "dealt a body blow to traditional Western religious thought," then how in the world did it succeed as quickly as it did in a society that was, to put it mildly, staunchly devoted to Christianity?
Larson, a professor of both law and history at the University of Georgia, has been trying to explain that for years. "Evolution" is the third and last volume of that study. The second volume in his saga, "Summer of the Gods," which covered the Scopes "Monkey Trial," won the Pulitzer Prize.
It may come as a surprise to many Americans, especially anti-evolutionists, who typically treat Darwin as having arisen complete, sort of like Athena rising from the head of Zeus, that Biblical creationism was moribund by the time Darwin wrote.
"By 1859," Larson says, "the idea of evolution did not seem as foreign or threatening as it once did to members of Britain's rising elite."
Yet, "by the end of the 19th century, Darwinism was on the ropes."
Nothing evolves faster than evolutionism, and today Darwinism is all triumphant. Unlike, say, cosmology, where there are research programs that are based on views radically different from the prevalent Big Bang explanation, in biology it is all Darwinism.
There is some political agitation for a form of creationism called Intelligent Design, but there is no research program to explore the implications of Intelligent Design, nor does Intelligent Design propose any testable ideas.
Although antidarwinians often allege that Darwinian evolution is "not science" because it does not make testable predictions, this is incorrect.
The biggest prediction, one that mystified Darwin until his death, was that his theory required inheritance of characters to be particulate rather than blending.
That is, a child with a blue-eyed mother and a brown-eyed father would not (always) have green eyes, but (usually) blue or brown.
The discovery of the gene around 1900 provided the mechanism for particulate inheritance. Until then, doubts about Darwinism had begun to conquer the academy.
By 1942, the "modern synthesis" had solved most of the puzzles of "descent with modification," as Darwin had called his idea.
"The synthesis," Larson writes, "generated a seemingly endless stream of testable deductions about how populations should act under controlled conditions and in the wild. Time and again the theory passed these tests."
Although Darwin said he had difficulty in composing the idea of a benevolent god with the observed cruelty of life, Larson opines that, "In practice, acceptance of the modern synthesis coexisted with all manner of religious faith" by the centenary of "Origin" in 1959.
In the generation since, public opinion in America (though not elsewhere) has become increasingly antagonistic to evolution, though no one has been able to mount a credible challenge to the science of it.
Larson is not a controversialist. His "Evolution" is presented, as the subtitle says, as "the remarkable history of a scientific theory." His tale is an evenhanded account of a "theory that ripped through science and society, leaving little unchanged by its force," with both the ups and the downs given thoughtful attention.
If there's a fault to "Evolution" the book, it is that too much is compressed into a mere, though clear, 300 pages.

For those committed to knowing how the theory of evolution itself evolved through the past 200 or so years, this neat text will provide you with all the highlights and some intriguing details. From Cuvier, the French naturalist who in 1796 was writing about speciation, through Richard Owens' 1861 delineation of geologic eras, periods, and epochs, Darwin's release in 1859 of "On the Origin of Species," and all the cultural and intellectual wars ensuing, Larson's straightforward presentation keeps you in the drama. The drama heats up considerably as a backlash against Darwin and T.H. Huxley throws the theory against Genesis and Christianity, a battle still raging in parts of the US today. Lest we forget, Larson points out how Francis Galton and Ernest Haeckel set the stage in the nineteenth century for "eugenics" and selective breeding in human populations, which fed the raging racism, sterilization programs (even in the U.S.), and extermination camps of the twentieth century. Others who signed on to a reductionist view of "survival of the fittest" felt all social programs to help the poor and weak were against the natural order of things and in fact were adulterating the survival of the strong. These views too are still with us, in conservative circles in particular. The Scopes trial of 1925 is given good coverage here, and one wonders what today's fundamentalists would say to Clarence Darrow's examination of their views.
It is clear by the end of this account that the theory of evolution is still in transition, and its development has still to be played out. Highly recommended history that will fill in the gaps on how we got to where we are in our "modern" view of this sweeping theory.

I have remarked elsewhere (somewhat controversially) that relatively few people, even biological scientists, really understand the Principle of Evolution. You will not become one of those few by reading this book. But what you will learn will be, to use the author's words, "remarkable." I have been a biologist for 30 years now and I learned something new from each page, not about biology but history, just as the subtitle says.

The author, Edward Larson is a professor in the School of Law at Pepperdine University. He has a Ph. D. in History from the University of Wisconsin and a J.D. from Harvard. He has several other works on the interaction between science and religion and works on various aspects of the legal history of the United States. His authority on this subject is well established.

The book starts in France, in the midst of the enlightenment, with the story of the man who managed to squash any real discussion of evolution throughout his lifetime and for 30 years after, Georges Couvier, the granddaddy of modern comparative anatomy. He argued against any form of gradual speciation on the grounds that the organ systems of each species were too essentially integrated to allow for any variation. Variation would lead to death, which happens to be right most of the time, and the essence of Couvier's argument remains at the heart of the objections of the advocates of Intelligent Design yet today. Couvier spent his career making sure that Lamarck's "ascending escalator" of species never got off the ground and the story of these two men and the changing ideas of the early 19th century is worth the price of the book.

But the origins of evolution are more to be found in fossils than finches, so the book turns to the work of Charles Lyell and the other rock choppers of England who founded simultaneously the sciences of geology and paleontology. It was Lyell's book, "Principles of Geology" that Darwin read and reread on that five year journey of the Beagle. It was Lyell that allowed Darwin to see back through the time available and necessary for evolution. Lyell's work was the bedrock on which Darwin eventually constructed his theory using the bricks and mortar supplied by Thomas Malthus. Darwin took his time with this construction and it's unveiling and this makes for a good story.

Professor Larson then describes the fanatical proselytizing for the ideas of evolution by "Darwin's Bulldog", Thomas Huxley, and Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, the founder of Social Darwinism. One of the weakest points of the book is the author's failure to explore adequately the fact that the fervor of these men was every bit the equivalent of that of those similarly well-meaning folk who opposed the teaching of evolution insisting on Heavenly mechanisms 60 years later. The acceptance of both God and science by Darwin's American ally, Asa Gray, likewise remains unexplored. Huxley and Galton embraced the science so they might free themselves from religion, but that embrace is then how science becomes a religion, as it has for many people. That religion of science can lead to the same irrationality sometimes found in other religions. Social Darwinism has killed far more people than the Crusades.

The book also struggles in places as it progresses through the 20th century, but then the science does start to get trickier here. The treatment of Mendel (his work was not discovered until the 20th century so it is dealt with here) is appropriately generous and that of Jay Gould appropriately harsh. The appeal here is the description of the scientists who followed Darwin to found modern genetics (lot of founding going on around this, hmmm), their lives and their interactions with each other which slowly lead to the synthesis of genetics and natural selection that we now call evolution.

The book regains its stride in its discussion of the rejection of evolution by many in the United States in the 20th century and of the Scopes Monkey Trial. But it should, Professor Larson has written another book on just that subject, "Summer for the Gods", the book that evidently lead him down this historical path. The movie "Inherit the Wind" is a lie and Professor Larson says so. But while the treatment of the deniers of evolution is fair, accurate and measured, the undertone of scorn is unmistakable.

For those who do want to know the science before they read this book, the starting point is easy - Darwin. Origin of the Species is easily the best non-fiction book of the 19th century and the corner stone of modern biology. For those who really want to try to understand the science, I recommend Douglas Futuyma's text, "Evolution." For those who just want to know the "remarkable history of a scientific theory" this is your place.

Edward Larson's book on Evolution I found to be extremely useful and a valuable resource. Larson is the author of a fine study of the Scopes Trial called "Summer for the Gods." This Modern Library book in its 300 pages is chock full of useful information on this topic. This is not a book just about Darwin, though of course he is the central character, but more about what preceded Darwin and what went on after the Darwinian breakthrough, all the way to the present, in Europe and the U.S. In other words, this book places Darwin within a highly useful framework, what occurred before the "Origin of Species" and what transpired thereafter. An initial chapter focuses on pre-Darwinian developments beginning with the Enlightenment in biology and geology among other fields, including individuals such as Lamarck, Agassiz, Lyell, and Hutton. The next several chapters deal with Darwin and his argument, including the later "Descent of Man." A really superb chapter on the "Ascent of Evolutionism" discusses the debates that ensued after Darwin announced his theory, including non-Darwinian theories of evolution. Subsequent chapters deal with the "missing link" problem; the evolution of genetics; the development of eugenics; and the religious opposition (principally in this country) to evolution, including the Scopes trial and "intelligent design." The book concludes with an analysis of the most current theories relating to evolution, including the tremendous impact of DNA technology. Excellent notes, outstanding illustrations, and Larson once again demonstrates his ability to explain complicated scientific concepts to the layperson--a rare talent. A treasure trove of information on this topic presented in a highly attractive format--i.e., it is just fun to read.