Customer Reviews

Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology

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I came to this book for an introduction to the statistics at the heart of current evolutionary theory. It gave me that, and a whole lot more--a great round up of issues in evolution at the professional level, most of it way over my head. I felt well satisfied that I'd been introduced to modern evolutionary discourse, to how professional evolutionists think about the subject and what issues matter to them. I noticed how little that discourse connects to the roots of evolutionary theory in the 19th C. Discussion of basics went back no further than the 1920s and '30s. My overriding impression was that professional evolutionists no longer have a language in which to talk to laypeople about lay interests. I recommend that, if you want to argue with evolutionists about something, you read this book first and see if your "something" can be framed in their discourse. If not, you may be met with an expression of well-meaning puzzlement--"what are you talking about?". Well-written, easy to read, except for the inscrutability of the subject matter itself, which I ultimately found just uninteresting.