Tag Archives: Evolution

Exploring Evolution – Michael Alan Park ***

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In this heavily illustrated hardback, (part of the same series as my Exploring the Universe) small enough to be readable in a way that coffee table book isn’t, but big enough to have some dramatic pictures, Michael Alan Park takes a look at evolution and its context.

The book begins with the age of the Earth and how it has changed over time, takes us through the basics of genetics and its relevance to evolution, examines the way species change over time – and how new species emerge – gives us a chapter with a particular focus on humans (we can’t help but be interested in humans!) and looks at the challenges to evolution from creationism and intelligent design. The final chapter, ‘How has the theory of evolution influenced modern society’ tries to put evolution into the context of its everyday significance, a difficult thing to do that doesn’t quite come off, so it’s an unfortunate ending.

Overall the content is fine – sometimes a little phrased the way an academic rather than a good writer would, but there’s nothing too obscure or incomprehensible. And the images are often stunning, full colour, glossy pages and well presented. It’s certainly a handsome and attractive book. There are one or two bits of the science that could be done better. In the genetics section it’s rather dismissive of the 98% of DNA that’s noncoding, where in reality, the more we learn about it, the more significant it is, showing that genes on their own really don’t tell the story.

I also think the key points about evolution that Dawkins brings out so well in his The Magic of Reality don’t really come across. One of the best bits in Dawkins book was where he imagines the whole pile of photos of ancestors for any individual and points out how each individual is the same species as its parents – you never see a species change from generation to generation – which really gets around a lot of the problems some people have with evolution. On the other hand, Park does a lovely reversal of the clockmaker analogy in his creationism section, pointing out that a clock is, in effect, evolved – because the clockmaker doesn’t design all the parts from scratch, but rather uses and adapts existing parts and mechanisms. That was brilliant.

Overall it’s an attractive book with some great illustrations.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Introducing Evolution: a graphic guide – Dylan Evans & Howard Selina ***

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It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners, puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point.

It is easy for the reader to get a little confused about which book to go for here as you can also choose Introducing Evolutionary Psychology and Introducing Darwin, the latter of which has significant overlaps with the current book. Of the two, I’d say this was probably the better choice for getting the basics of evolution – although both feature Darwin’s life and work, this covers the science better and makes better use of the illustrated ‘Introducing’ format.

The text flows nicely and the book works well as an introduction to the subject. It isn’t limited to the pure consideration of evolution by natural selection but also takes in the implications and the difficulties – so, for example, you will find quite a bit on altruism, which at first sight seems at odds with the concept of natural selection. I would have liked to see more on speciation, which is one of the areas of evolution that is less clear (even most creationists accept variations within species this way), and I was very surprised not to find a reference to evo devo (evolutionary development) in a book that is a lot more modern than the Darwin title.

The images are always important in one of these books and many of them here work well, though I found the ape-headed human used as a guide was a joke that became tired rather quickly. Overall a solid addition to the series though not an outstanding one.

*Marmite? If you are puzzled by this assessment, you probably aren’t from the UK. Marmite is a yeast-based product (originally derived from beer production waste) that is spread on bread/toast. It’s something people either love or hate, so much so that the company has run very successful TV ad campaigns showing people absolutely hating the stuff…

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Review by Brian Clegg

Shadows on the Cave Wall: a new theory of evolution – Keith Skene ***

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Anyone claiming to have a new theory of evolution had better have good credentials, field experience, and a thorough knowledge of biology. Otherwise they are probably a crackpot. Keith Skene has these qualities, and Shadows on the Cave Wall is not the work of a crackpot. Indeed, for breadth, thoughtfulness, and a kind of happy-go-lucky charm, the book is a real treasure. But its aspirations – to replace evolution by natural selection with a new theory grounded in physics – are well beyond its powers of persuasion.

Skene’s key idea is that the long- and short-term dynamics of living things can be best understood in terms of the flow of energy into, out of, and within different levels of biological organisation. The levels of organisation that interest Skene are proteins, individuals, populations, communities, and biomes. Notably absent from this list are genes and species, which Skene rejects along with evolution by natural selection.

Drawing on Plato’s metaphor of the cave, Skene argues that energy is the “sun” that lies behind all of the biological activity we see in the world, while everything from the gene to the biosphere are merely “shadows on the cave wall”, the outward effects of energy. It may seem that Skene’s focus on physics is reductionist. Banish the thought. By focusing on physics, Skene does not mean that biological phenomena are simply consequences of atom-level laws. He means that they are driven by the macroscopic laws of thermodynamics. Once we have seen this, he argues, we can see that no level of organisation – proteins no more than populations – is more “basic” than the others.

The payoff for this theory, says Skene, is closure on some key issues in evolutionary biology, including altruism, life on other planets, and the social behaviour of animals. But the “most radical implication” of the theory is a new way to save the environment from human exploitation – a path to salvation that, as Skene puts it, “has nothing to do with carbon.”

It turns out that the solution is not as new or radical as the 250-page build-up suggests. Skene points out that the problem underlying climate change is our excessive reliance on energy, especially in the food sector. He describes the environmental damage caused by artificial fertilisers and lists some ways to minimise this damage – from eating less meat to planting a border of nutrient-loving plants around crop fields. Not everyone would agree with these ideas, but no-one would call them ground-breaking.

For this reader, Skene’s energy-based theory also ended in anticlimax. Few people would deny that biological processes obey the laws of thermodynamics (otherwise they would be shoddy laws). So the big question is whether Skene can use those laws can enrich our knowledge of biological phenomena. Skene undoubtedly gives rich accounts of biological phenomena, notably an account of how different levels of organisation interact with one another. But it is unclear just how much these accounts owe to the Skene’s overarching energy theory. For example, one does not need Skene’s theory of energy to understand why an excess of nutrients in an ecosystem can harm the community. At other times, Skene seems to use “energy” to refer simply to the common notion of biological resources, as in: “it is the resource distribution that determines how many organisms can live in a given area, and, therefore, what kind of social group can form.”

Fortunately, many of the ideas in the book do not rely on the energy theory to be interesting. For example, Skene draws together a range of objections to orthodox evolution by natural selection: the fact that most organisms through history have acquired new genes not by random mutation but by horizontal gene transfer (HGT, the absorption of genes from other organisms); the notion that empty niches, rather than competition for an occupied niche, is the main driver of speciation; and others. The case against Darwinian evolution could certainly be more tightly argued. It is not clear, for example, whether HGT provides a real alternative to natural selection, or just a new source of genetic variation upon which natural selection can act. And there is not enough room in one volume for Skene to do justice to his other arguments, or (just as importantly) to address objections to those arguments.

Shadows is best read not as an argument but as an adventure, a fast-paced ride through key ideas in evolution and ecology. Skene has an unusual style, mixing anecdotes and chirpy asides with earnest contemplation of the big questions. Here he is describing a species of wildebeest that breeds only in December and January: “if a wildebeest set up a greetings card shop, the business would only run for a very limited time: extremely seasonal employment when Christmas cards and birthday cards would be for sale for only one month of the year!” The effect is bizarre but disarming.

On the whole, the Shadows experience is less like reading a book than watching a lecture by a keen and knowledgeable, but slightly eccentric, professor: personal, chaotic, insightful, and unfailingly fun.

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Review by Michael Bycroft

Why Evolution is True – Jerry A. Coyne ****

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There is no shortage of books about evolution, but few of them tackle the question of proof as directly as this one, and perhaps none of their authors do so in such an accessible way as Jerry Coyne. The result is a thorough, even-tempered and plain-spoken summary of the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Some glitches appear when Coyne strays from a simple catalogue of the material evidence for evolution, but on the whole the book is convincing.

Coyne sets a clear target in the first 40 pages. The problem, as he puts it, is a “simple lack of awareness of the weight and variety of evidence” in favour of evolution. Next he distinguishes six tenets of evolutionary theory: change of species over time, gradualism, speciation, common ancestry, natural selection, and mechanisms other than natural selection.

Readers may find it awkward that this six-fold distinction is not reflected in the structure of the rest of the book: the chapters are organised by the source of evidence for evolution (fossil record, biogeography, embryology, human evolution, and so on) rather than the six hypotheses that are the target of this evidence. But with his six tenets Coyne does a good job of untangling some of the conceptual knots surrounding Darwinian evolution.

The meat of the book is seven chapters on the evidence for evolution. For each of Coyne’s arguments and case studies, there will be many readers who, with a solid interest in evolution but no formal training, have seen those arguments and case studies before. But there will be few lay readers who will be familiar with all or even most of them. The value of the book is that it collects a wide range of standard pieces of evidence in one place.

Structure-wise, some neat work is Coyne’s chapter entitled “Remnants”, which deals in one blow with vestigial traits, atavistic traits, embryology, and bad design. This is a smart way to package an array of evidence that could easily be confusing, or rendered overly complex, if it were scattered through the book. The decision to devote a chapter to human evolution is also a good one, since it addresses a psychologically compelling objection to Darwinism – that it seems impossible that humans in all their complexity evolved from the ancestors of monkeys.

Argument-wise, Coyne knows that a single example is rarely convincing, and leaves readers in no doubt about the quantity of evidence that supports each of the many lines of argument. To take just one case: as evidence for evolution by natural selection, the example of the peacocks tail is striking; but the fact that 232 experiments in 186 species indicate sexual selection is overwhelming.

The book’s main drawback is that Coyne spends so much time describing the evidence for evolution that he sometimes forgets to check whether that evidence distinguishes between evolutionary theory and alternative theories, especially creationism. A common pattern of argument in the book is that creationism can only accommodate the facts by arguing that God has arranged the facts to make it look as if evolutionary theory is true – an accommodation which, as Coyne argues, would be absurdly ad-hoc.

This argument works well with embryology, vestigial organs, and the fossil record, but less so in other cases. Evolution has a good explanation for the existence of different species, with the same survival functions, in different parts of the world. Creationism doesn’t have a built-in explanation for this, but it is not much of a stretch to suppose that the Creator just happened to make things this way. Likewise for the existence of fibrinogen – a protein used in blood-clotting – before it was deployed to help clot blood (in sea cucumbers). Evolution predicts this, Coyne argues, since it cannot build a complex process like blood-clotting from scratch. But it is not asking too much to suppose that the Creator used fibrinogen more than once in evolutionary history.

One conceptual quibble is that Coyne insists on calling evolution a “fact”, despite the common distinction between “facts” as directly observable states of affairs in the world, and “theories” as general statements that are inferred from the facts. Coyne implies that evolutionary theory is not a “fact” in this standard sense when he describes how the theory is confirmed – it is confirmed not by checking its truth against nature but by deducing predictions from it, and then checking the truth of those predictions against nature. This may just be a linguistic issue, but it’s better not to add fuel to the sceptic’s fire, however spurious the fuel might be. Why not just call evolution a “true theory”?

Another weakness is that Coyne ignores debates within biology about the nature and status of natural selection. He notes that debates exist about the details of how evolution occurred, and the relative roles of various evolutionary mechanisms (especially genetic drift). But the claim that biologists disagree about evolution is such a common one among sceptics that a few more pages – even a chapter – on the significance of these disagreements would have been useful.

Lastly there is the book’s jacket-cover claim that evolution is “a fact we should embrace without fear.” In the last chapter Coyne argues against the view that accepting evolution means endorsing immoral behaviour in present-day humans. He rolls out some standard arguments: the theory of evolution has no moral consequences because it is a scientific theory; many European countries embrace evolution but have not slipped morally; moral codes are stricter now than they have ever been; and we have other sources of meaning such as work, family, literature and science. All promising arguments, but they are too briefly delivered to convince anyone who does not already agree with Coyne on the issue.

Coyne writes that “every fact that has something to do with evolution confirms its truth.” This is surely an exaggeration, but Coyne summarises many of the facts that do confirm the theory of evolution, and does so in a way that any reader – whether or not they have a prior interest in biology – can grasp. Not all of his arguments work against creationism, but most of them do. Any evolution sceptic who reads this book, and is not tempted to change their view, is either dishonest or has not read the book properly.

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Review by Michael Bycroft

Introducing Darwin – Jonathan Miller & Borin Van Loon ***

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It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (about 80 books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners, puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Many of the pages feature large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise a point.

This contribution to the series is as much curate’s egg as marmite. Written by the then-famous (perhaps now rather less so) Jonathan Miller, it mostly does what it says on the tin, concentrating on Darwin with only a relatively small amount of context and post-Darwinian development of his ideas. It’s very old for a popular science book – written in 1982 (though this is a new edition). This means that evolutionary development doesn’t get the weight you would now expect in the post-Darwin coverage (there is a small amount of indirect reference to it at the end), nor does molecular biology. Even so, it isn’t as out-of-date as a physics book of the time would be.

For me, this was one of the less effective books in the series as far as the use of illustrations go. They rarely added much, and frequently seemed to refer to Alice in Wonderland for reasons that aren’t entirely obvious. Every drawing of Darwin’s face was different, sometimes almost unrecognizably so. Miller’s text was also variable. Some of the detail gone into in Darwin’s gradual development was a touch tedious, suggesting an over-scholarly approach – but then there were some surprising factual errors. For example William Paley, the ‘watch on the heath’ man, is referred to as a bishop, which he wasn’t, and there’s a very strange comment about the Lunar Society of Birmingham. It was called the Lunar Society because they met on the full moon so it could light them home. But Miller writes that they met on the ‘new moon’ (i.e. when the moon gives no light). This even contradicts the illustration, which shows a full moon.

Bits of the text seemed quite childlike in approach. For example ‘He worked much harder than most ordinary people, and enjoyed a happy life with his large family.’ is the sort of thing I’d expect to see in a children’s science book. But elsewhere it has a much more adult feel. There’s another contrast in style with the last 14 pages covering the post-Darwin new synthesis. Here the illustrations drop away to a negligible little bar at the bottom (up to here you can’t miss them, but you tend to ignore these), and the text flows much more like a conventional book.

This isn’t a bad book on Darwin and his work, but it’s not outstanding writing, and the visual approach doesn’t work particularly well, so it’s not a high point of the series.

*Marmite? If you are puzzled by this assessment, you probably aren’t from the UK. Marmite is a yeast-based product (originally derived from beer production waste) that is spread on bread/toast. It’s something people either love or hate, so much so that the company has run very successful TV ad campaigns showing people absolutely hating the stuff…

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Review by Brian Clegg

Evolution, nature and Stuff – Glenn Murphy ****

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I’m assuming that the ‘stuff’ in the title of Glenn Murphy’s book is not the same ‘stuff’ as in his companion volume, Space, Black Holes and stuff. This is bio-stuff, where that was cosmo-stuff. Murphy starts out by telling us what life is about (no, not the meaning of life in philosophical terms, but the nature of life). He moves onto life on Earth, biology, a look at the classification systems of biology before homing in on animals with backbones and finally mammals. Inevitably along the way there’s an introduction to evolution and a bit about the human animal.

I don’t know if it’s my relative ignorance about the subject, but I was much more satisfied with this book that with the cosmology volume. Murphy pitches it just right, and takes us on an excellent tour of biology. It might seem that the sections listed above miss out the invertebrates, but they do get a fair mention, they just don’t have a section of their own. Plant life is much less well covered – in fact it’s best to regard this as a book on the animal side of nature. I was particularly impressed with the section on evolution, which doesn’t fall for the ‘Darwin did it all’ simplification, and gives us more than the basics of natural selection, while making it clear that evolutionary theory is a work in progress, rather than a definitive answer to every question in biology.

The only thing that remains as a pain is the style, where the text is interlaced with a whole lot of questions, supposedly from children, interrupting the flow and generally being unnecessarily cutesy. Even some younger readers find this patronising, and I hate it.

What, you find it irritating?

Yes, I really do.

Despite this, Evolution, nature and stuff is one of the best introductions to animal biology for the young reader than I have come across.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Thank God for Evolution – Michael Dowd ***

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This book is hard to review, because it’s the wrong book on the right subject. The thesis of the book is excellent, but unfortunately the way it’s written won’t easily get that thesis across – at least, not to the science book reading community.

Michael Dowd achieves the remarkable feat of being able to quote Richard Dawkins in support of his religious idea. Dowd proposes an approach to religion that absolutely accepts evolution. More than that – he proposes that our starting point of religious revelation should be scientific data, rather than the sort of personal revelation that has shaped religions to date. Yet this is no ‘God of the gaps’ he proposes, dealing with the bits that scientific theory hasn’t rendered unnecessary. Instead, Dowd suggests that we should draw a parallel with the way complex and intelligent systems – like an ant colony or a human being – are built from small, simple structures which of themselves have no intelligence. God, he suggests, is the synergetic sum of the whole universe.

To an extent this sounds like pantheism, but Dowd takes it further, putting scientific theories at the heart of his religious exposition. However, he doesn’t suggest throwing away existing religions, suggesting that they give us the kind of metaphorical story-based understanding humans need – but that we should always be aware we are dealing with metaphor, rather than literal truth.

This is a version of religion that I suspect is more likely to appeal to those in (or interested in) science than creationists or other fundamentalist believers, as it requires them to throw away their belief that religious texts are literal – which is why I say it’s the wrong book, because it is written very much in the style of books aimed at religious believers. Dowd’s language veers between syrupy and overblown, and the whole feel is wrong for a title that should really appeal to the popular science audience if it were only written right. But because the ideas are so interesting, I would encourage the reader to persevere, even though it can be hard going.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist – Adrian Desmond & James Moore ****

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“The full enigma of Darwin’s life has never been grasped.” In their biography of Darwin, this observation leads Desmond and Moore in two directions. One is to show that Darwin’s life really was enigmatic, that is was filled with confusion, conflict, and inconsistencies. The other is to make those enigmas less mysterious by relating them to his social and political environment. Their method fits their goal: they want to open up Darwin’s inner life by sorting through his voluminous personal writings, making use of recent volumes of his letters, manuscripts, commentaries, and memoranda. On the whole the book is a marvellous success, though its richness causes it to raise new enigmas as well as settling old ones.

What is the main enigma? It is Darwin’s ambiguous attitude towards evolution, especially his long delay in publicizing his ideas on the topic. And what is the main explanation, offered by this book? Darwin’s science drove him towards a radical and godless doctrine; but his upbringing, his wife’s faith, his Cambridge connections, and many of his scientific acquaintances, coupled with his “instinctive reverence for rank”, all forced him into secrecy.

The book uses Darwin’s “social context” as a framing device rather than a set of theories about Darwin’s life and work. It contains remarkably little analysis of its subject matter. Except for the introduction, authorial comments are thin on the ground, either in the form of moral or intellectual judgments, generalizations, or scrutiny of secondary sources. Insofar as the authors draw parallels between Darwin’s thought and political events (French uprisings, the Reform Bill, Chartism, the Vivisection Bill, the Crimean War…) they do so implicitly, by showing not by telling. Sometimes this lack of analysis is the opposite of enlightening. For example, we never get a clear explanation of why Darwin, the gentle white-supremist, could upbraid his own son about the evils of slavery. And we do not find out whether Darwin’s ill-health was primarily physical or psychological in origin.

The upside of the book’s narrative form is that it licenses the authors to explore every aspect of Darwin’s life in great detail, and to recall them in a fresh and vivid way. In this sense the book resembles Darwin himself, that “billionaire of bizarre facts.” We already know that Darwin dropped out of medical school: what this book tells us is what Darwin and his brother ate when they arrived in Edinburgh, and the stench and horror of Darwin’s first dissection. We know that Darwin disagreed with Owen: in this book we see Owen drilling with the Honourable Artillery Company, and Darwin, the closet transmutationist, breakfasting with the Owens in London. The writing helps a lot here. In this story, events move swiftly on the back of snappy prose.

Desmond and Moore reveal Darwin’s inner life indirectly, through his responses to outside events, so it is no surprise that the authors offer no summary assessment of Darwin’s character. Instead of a portrait we get a gallery of sketches: Darwin the heartbroken father, the calculating suitor; the grumpy recluse, the jolly companion; the impressionable youth, the grand old genius; the hater of Owen, the magnanimous rival of Wallace; the brave man of science, going forward alone; the timid Darwin, hanging on the approval of friends. Here are more enigmas. Desmond and Moore let them hang.

What of Darwin’s science? It is true that Desmond and Moore show (for example) Darwin developing the principle of “division of labour” by analogy with industrial workshops, and the bloody Crimean war informing his chapter on the Struggle for Existence. But the “enigma” that this book helps us to grasp is emotional and social, not intellectual. What “tortured” Darwin were not the implications of believing his theory of evolution (Lyell suffered the most from this kind of torture), but the implications of publicizing it. If this is what the authors want us to grasp then the book is an outstanding success, even if it leaves some of the interpretative work in the hands of the reader.

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Review by Michael Bycroft

Upgrade Me: our amazing journey to Human 2.0 – Brian Clegg ****

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I’ve read a lot of books about evolution – but Brian Clegg’s book takes a startling look at the way we have gone beyond evolution. Far beyond. Upgrade Me is about the way that human beings have used our brains to exceed our basic capabilities. Tellingly, it’s not all about the high tech stuff that springs to mind when we think about enhanced humans. Clegg points out that part of the inspiration for the book was going on a long walk on a hot day. For an animal to evolve the capability to survive in a very dry environment with no water around for days, would take millions of years of evolution. We just go out and buy a water bottle.

Clegg’s thesis is that our urge to upgrade was inspired by the development of the ability to see beyond the present. It was the first time our ancestors could think about the future, and wonder ‘what if?’ From that came our awareness of what could go wrong and the inspiration to go much further than evolution, which biologists will tell you effectively stopped over 100,000 years ago, made possible. The main part of the book is divided into five sections, five applications of this urge. These are extending our life – once we realized we were going to die, cosmetic improvements to make us better at attracting a mate and to give social standing, improvements in our (very feeble) natural strength, enhancements to the brain that enabled us to upgrade ourselves in the first place, and repairs to failings in our body.

Generally the mood is very upbeat, and Clegg takes on those who see enhancement as being unnatural, making us something unhuman and undesirable, in a way that puts them firmly in their place. He also casts doubts on the ‘Singularity’ concept (see Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near) that implies that fairly soon in the future we will merge with electronics to become Human 2.0. That doubt arises from the fact that we are already far beyond version 1 – and though the enhancements described here do sometimes involve incorporating technology in the body, the extrapolation used to suggest the Singularity will soon be on us appears to be flawed.

If I have a negative comment it’s that once or twice there are just too many examples thrown at us of the different ways we have modified ourselves through history – I wasn’t too interested in the part on clothing, for example – but it serves to make the point.

Sometimes the best part is finding an unexpected application that takes you by surprise – seeing how dogs, one of our earliest technologies that is still in use, have become a significant human upgrade, for example. Or discovering the amazing possibilities from combining high technology with our bodies, whether in enhancing our senses or producing living, moving tattoos. All in all, a thought provoking and thoughtful read. Recommended.

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Review by Peet Morris

Please note, this title is written by the editor of the Popular Science website. Our review is still an honest opinion – and we could hardly omit the book – but do want to make the connection clear.

Dissent over Descent – Steve Fuller **

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I was delighted when this book thumped down on the ever-growing review pile, as its timing couldn’t have been better. I had just started a short series of posts on my blog covering the debate between intelligent design and evolution. As someone had kindly sent me some material on intelligent design, I wanted to take a step back from my prejudices and try to take an open-minded view purely on the facts as they were presented from both sides of the argument.

As this book is subtitle ‘intelligent design’s challenge to darwinism’ I thought I had the ideal prompt for my summing up (though I was a little concerned by that word ‘darwinism’ which only tends to be used by creationists as a kind of insult to evolution to force it into a similar position to a belief system).

Unfortunately, after reading the book I was really no more the wiser. I am told Steve Fuller is a sociologist of science (whatever that is), but the book comes across as philosophy of science of the dullest kind. It is almost as if the author sets out to put the reader to sleep, the approach is so unhelpful to understanding what is being said.

Furthermore, as often seems to be the case where there is an element of post-modernism about a piece of writing, it is almost impossible to be sure just what conclusions one is supposed to draw from reading this book. I think, but I’m not all sure, that the author’s conclusion is that both intelligent design and evolution are science, in that they try to offer an explanation for the existence of something, but that they are both bad science, because neither can offer any useful predictions about a specific species etc. So I got nothing useful here, apart from reinforcing my prejudices about philosophy of science – but that’s a whole new debate which I will leave to another day.

All in all, a huge disappointment.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Just looking at the subtitle of this book, what exactly is the nature of the ‘challenge’ that Fuller thinks intelligent design makes to Darwinism? Well, it’s not really a scientific challenge, since he seems to believe that if you understand both theories broadly enough, they can explain the stuff of life equally well. However, where they differ, as the dust jacket says, is in their ‘intellectual roots’ and their ‘political prospects’. Fuller shows that both run a lot deeper than other books on this topic have stressed.

All told, this is a book about what the dispute says about the nature of science itself. Fuller argues this point on many different levels. Readers will find some of these disorientating mainly because he seems to revel in taking the reader off his guard. For example, Fuller doesn’t think Darwin should be counted as a scientist because when he rejected intelligent design he also rejected the idea that there was a grand unified theory of everything waiting for science to know.

A recurrent theme in the book is that almost everyone has a distorted view of science because they misunderstand the history of science. Fuller doesn’t think there’s anything especially ‘Darwinian’ about the history of genetics and molecular biology in the 20th century. You could be a creationist and pretty much accept the lot – and apparently some do. He ends the book by encouraging intelligent design people to take back some of this history as their own, especially when they teach their views.

Fuller is very much a philosopher telling scientists their business but what he has to say is interesting even if not completely plausible.

Community Review by Bill Sysmeck