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Review - Evolve or Die - Phil Gates

Here's one to upset the apple cart at any Creationist school - Horrible Science meets evolution - a book that hopefully for once and for all will kill off the strange idea that evolution is "just an unproved theory". (You might as well say that "gravitation is an unproved theory".)

On the whole, Phil Gates (as far as we can tell, no relation to Bill) makes a good job of it, and if the book hadn't tailed off rather into unstructured woffle towards the end, it would have got four stars. Gates starts with a whirlwind tour of the last 4,500 million years, before taking us through the basic history of evolutionary theory, starting with the original church view on where everything came through and working through Lamarck to Darwin, then on to genetics and all that good stuff.

There's useful stuff to help with the common problem of how something that seems useless (for example a half-formed wing) could continue to be a survival trait, and the usual collection of entertaining illustrations from Nick Arnold's usual illustrator, Tony de Saulles.

Sadly, it makes use of the irritating trademark upside-down answers to questions that break the flow in pretty well all the books in the series. There are also a couple of iffy facts (as they might put it in horrible science). We are told the well-out-of-date "fact" that humans have around 100,000 genes (it's actually under 30,000). And during a rather over-long side excursion into how similar fossils end up in different continents we are introduced to the rather old fashioned "continental drift" rather than the more modern plate tectonics.

But these are relatively small problems, and Gates gives us a good mix of people stuff in introducing the key characters in developing evolutionary and genetic theories and the science. Inevitably there's quite a lot on extinction, fossils (including a long section on how to fossilise your dad's slippers), dinosaurs and such, but given the age range of the target audience, this is hardly surprising.

Only in paperback (not available in the US - surely not because of the topic? - but can be shipped to the US from the UK for a few dollars more)

Reviewed by Jo Reed

* Our age range recommendation is an estimated guide, but individual readers outside the range could still enjoy the book!

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