What Evolution Is (Science Masters Series) Kindle Edition

Ernst Mayr was one of the most influential biologists of the 20th century and was an active participant in the formulation of the new synthesis. His words are gold. While some things have changed since 2002, I think students greatly benefit from reading this book. It's required reading in my AP Biology class and my students become comfortable with evolution and well versed in the subject. He also introduces them to a lot of important ecology and genetics terms and explains cladistics.

I'm not sure who the intended target audience is but if you are a lay reader, the jargon, which the author makes no attempt to explain, may make this a hard read. I finally just gave you trying to understand.

This book is a high level discussion of the process of evolution. It is written almost as a point/counter-point debate of the different theories of evolution (and there have been many) which have developed since Darwin's "Origin Of Species".

Even though I have read several other books on evolution prior to this one, the text seems to be aimed at a higher level reader than someone who is curious about evolution. This would be a good text to go to once you have the basic knowledge gained elsewhere under your belt.

Despite the above, I find this to be a good book since it does detail all of the theories that have emerged and is able to compare them and contradict ones that have not stood up to testing or the evidence revealed since their original proposing.

If you are a student of evolution and/or life sciences, I would recommend this book be on your bookshelf as it is on mine. If you are just starting out, trying some more introductory texts before trying this one.

It's been a long time since I took college biology courses so I had to refer to the glossary on occasion but I do have a good science and biology background so that helped, but it is a book that requires some careful thought. That's what I liked about it, a view of evolution from macroscopic ideas with a sprinkle of micro scopic examples.
It broaden my decades long simplistic view of evolution what was for me a expansive learning experience. Its not that my onderstandong of evolution was wrong at all, but this brought in a whole new concept of the effect from individual populations. If you like learning and challenging yourself this book fits that bill.
I ordered 2 more for my grandchildren who are home schooled and very science literate.
And who could not marvel at the age Dr Mayr was when he wrote this.

Ernst Mayr is a commanding figure in the field of evolutionary biology. Having published an awesome average of nine scientific papers a year since 1925, he has produced (at age 97) a comprehensive book on evolution for the general public. I think "What Evolution Is" will best suit readers who already have some familiarity with biology as well as with science in general.
The author does not take the reader's acceptance of evolution for granted. On the contrary, he pays considerable attention to opposing views and carefully builds a case using the mass of evidence which has accumulated in the 140 years since Darwin's speculative missile burst on a comfortably religious 19th-century world. That world was almost universally assumed to be inhabited by specially-created humans presiding over a vast array of plants and animals provided solely to sustain, entertain and amuse them.
Mayr ably describes and explains the chain of factual evidence and logical inference which has established (with extremely high probability) that in actuality all living things evolved over billions of years through a partly random, partly directed, wholly automatic process which tended to suppress harmful changes and reinforce beneficial ones. The inevitable conclusion is that humans were not supernaturally created as finished products, but rather were simply fortunate enough to emerge from a very lengthy parallel development contest as hands-down winners in the intellectual capacity category. Implicit in Mayr's section on human ethics is the idea that along with markedly superior intelligence should come a self-imposed sense of moral responsibility.
As an active participant in the development of evolutionary science, Mayr doesn't hesitate to state clearly and defend vigorously his positions on controversial issues. He freely acknowledges (as did Darwin) that evolutionary rates can and do vary considerably, but he views the Eldredge-Gould punctuated equilibrium concept as no more than a minor modification of the classical picture. On another contentious question, Mayr holds firmly that natural selection should be viewed as acting on the whole animal (the phenotype) rather than on individual genes or subsets of genes.
The last chapter contains Mayr's views on the current frontiers of evolutionary biology. As major unsolved problems he cites a) finding the true extent of biodiversity; b) solving the mystery of static species ("living fossils") which hardly change over hundreds of millions of years; and c) explaining the relatively rapid (200-300 million years) proliferation of new structural types in the early Cambrian. The second of two appendices is a sort of rap session in which the author gives pithy responses to twenty-four FAQs about evolution. These serve as a quick-reference guide to many of the points Mayr has tried to drive home in the main text.
"What Evolution Is" includes a generous complement of good quality illustrations and charts. Mayr makes liberal use of technical terms, but is careful to compensate by providing a fairly comprehensive glossary. I recommend this book to anyone ready to step up a notch from the normal run of popular books on evolution.