Customer Reviews

In Mendel's Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology

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I want to warn others away from the Kindle edition of this very valuable book. The Kindle edition is poorly scanned and frequently inaccurate and/or unreadable. The text won't scale properly, and it's blobby and ugly at the default size. Worse yet, there are numerous typos. At one point Hydra comes out as something like I- lydi a. Many of the footnote numbers can't be read and some are in the wrong places. It would be nice if the index and footnotes were linked so that they could be used, but so few Kindle texts do this it's probably not worth mentioning. OUP should be ashamed.

The method behind most of these essays is: pose a question, posit a set of answers that covers the space of possible answers, examine how the shape of (biological/evolutionary) outcomes can discriminate between them, then look at the data to see what fits.

The essays are succinct, clear and often use either approximate equations or the results of simulation runs to assist the analysis -- very little "armchair" stuff here.

The only essay that I found a bit gratuitous was the one on "Born Again Creationism" which was (thankfully) much more salient in 2003 than it is today.