What Evolution Is

Rating:
Summary: Pay No Attention!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Modern evolutionary science clarified
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Great "refresher course"
Review: Firstly, I thought the book was very concise and made for fascinating reading. However, I have to agree with those that comment that you do need a bit of a "working knowledge" to truly mine the gems contained within this book. Though evolutionary biology is something that fascinates me, I havent carefully revisited it in many years and I found this book to be an incredible "refresher course" that quickly brought me up to speed with the thinking of one of the "big wigs" in the field. If youre a "natural sciences" student or, like me, wanted an "overview" synopsis of current evolutionary thinking, then this book is required reading. Definitely recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding complete compresion of the evolution concept
Review: If you are a Biologist or are a curious naturalist this is a book for you. Mayr makes an outstanding abstract of evolution, he clearly defines it with mastery. I would just like to add that this is my favorite subject and have read a good amount of books on evolution and this is clearly one of the best (don't be mislead by the size nor the price). Of course there are huge treatises on evolution (like The Structure of Evolution, of Stephen Jay Gould), but such a Bible is, for most of the cases, unpractical and unnecessary. Mayr clears evolutions' place in Biology putting it at its' very center. Great book, great style.

Rating:
Summary: Good primer for the serious lay student
Review: In the foreword, Jared Diamond says the book excels in filling a mid-level gap for educated lay people between biology texts and introductory material. He is right on the money. I was introduced to evolution in high school and college biology courses but further confused by television shows that are all over the map and all claiming to support evolution. I am a Christian Creationist but I do not hesitate to recommend this book for those interested in seeing a coherent account of evolution told by a true expert in the field. Mayr did not change my mind about macroevolution, but he did help me clear up a lot of my thinking about the current state of both evolutionary and creation science. I view the book as a very informative explanation, even a defense, of contemporary evolutionary thought. Mayr's gradualism is presented as the contemporary extension of Darwin's first revolution 150 years ago and of the evolutionary synthesis of the 1940's that brought molecular biology into the evolutionary fold. Other views of evolution and creation through the past 200 years are contrasted to Mayr's well-developed vision of how life gradually evolves. He generally builds a positive case for his position rather than directly attacking others.

Since Amazon has the technology to show the table of contents I will only summarize the contents of the book in an alternative way that Mayr himself hints at throughout the book. Chapters 1-4 are largely observations from the living world that suggest some sort of evolutionary process is at work. Chapter 5 devotes a lot of pages to modern theories of genetics and inheritance. Chapters 5-7 describe processes occurring within populations of living organisms. Throughout the book, Mayr stresses that diversity among populations, rather than unity of types, is the prevailing lesson of evolutionary biology. Chapters 5-9 form a major unit that describes the various mechanisms of microevolution including speciation. Chapters 10-12 get into higher-level macroevolution and use humans as a case study of mosaic evolution in a social species. I found these final chapters the least convincing and poorly backed by evidence (though it is well written and interesting to read). Mayr often admits the fossil record, especially for humans, is sketchy proof for evolution. To his credit he builds much of his case around observable biology rather than sketchy paleontology. Marvin Lubenow's "Bones of Contention" is an interesting and detailed analysis of the hominid fossils for those open to a very different (creationist) perspective.

Though I find much to disagree with in the philosophical assumptions and in some leaps of naturalistic faith used in the book, I think it serves its intended audience very well. The book could be better if it had more footnotes for further reading, especially to fossil statements and other phenomena such as rafting reptiles, teeth in baleen whale embryos etc. The bibliography is very extensive and Mayr does provide a list of anti-creationist books so the info can probably be located in those. If you are not well versed in biology and genetics you will probably want a dictionary handy, but this is exactly the sort of book I wanted as a deep introduction. Mayr is an honest, balanced and gifted writer for his position.

Rating:
Summary: Good primer for the serious lay student
Review: In the foreword, Jared Diamond says the book excels in filling a mid-level gap for educated lay people between biology texts and introductory material. He is right on the money. I was introduced to evolution in high school and college biology courses but further confused by television shows that are all over the map and all claiming to support evolution. I am a Christian Creationist but I do not hesitate to recommend this book for those interested in seeing a coherent account of evolution told by a true expert in the field. Mayr did not change my mind about macroevolution, but he did help me clear up a lot of my thinking about the current state of both evolutionary and creation science. I view the book as a very informative explanation, even a defense, of contemporary evolutionary thought. Mayr's gradualism is presented as the contemporary extension of Darwin's first revolution 150 years ago and of the evolutionary synthesis of the 1940's that brought molecular biology into the evolutionary fold. Other views of evolution and creation through the past 200 years are contrasted to Mayr's well-developed vision of how life gradually evolves. He generally builds a positive case for his position rather than directly attacking others.

Since Amazon has the technology to show the table of contents I will only summarize the contents of the book in an alternative way that Mayr himself hints at throughout the book. Chapters 1-4 are largely observations from the living world that suggest some sort of evolutionary process is at work. Chapter 5 devotes a lot of pages to modern theories of genetics and inheritance. Chapters 5-7 describe processes occurring within populations of living organisms. Throughout the book, Mayr stresses that diversity among populations, rather than unity of types, is the prevailing lesson of evolutionary biology. Chapters 5-9 form a major unit that describes the various mechanisms of microevolution including speciation. Chapters 10-12 get into higher-level macroevolution and use humans as a case study of mosaic evolution in a social species. I found these final chapters the least convincing and poorly backed by evidence (though it is well written and interesting to read). Mayr often admits the fossil record, especially for humans, is sketchy proof for evolution. To his credit he builds much of his case around observable biology rather than sketchy paleontology. Marvin Lubenow's "Bones of Contention" is an interesting and detailed analysis of the hominid fossils for those open to a very different (creationist) perspective.

Though I find much to disagree with in the philosophical assumptions and in some leaps of naturalistic faith used in the book, I think it serves its intended audience very well. The book could be better if it had more footnotes for further reading, especially to fossil statements and other phenomena such as rafting reptiles, teeth in baleen whale embryos etc. The bibliography is very extensive and Mayr does provide a list of anti-creationist books so the info can probably be located in those. If you are not well versed in biology and genetics you will probably want a dictionary handy, but this is exactly the sort of book I wanted as a deep introduction. Mayr is an honest, balanced and gifted writer for his position.

Rating:
Summary: What Evolution Was
Review: This book covers almost every aspect of evolution. A good book for understanding darwinism and evolution. This book is written for people of various backgrounds. Moreover, the charts and text boxes are used in a manner that add substance to the book. The second appendix is awesome. Twenty tough questions about evolution are asked, including questions such as: is darwinism a dogma and is evolution a scientific fact. The answers though are less than convincing and tend to sidestep the questions.

Mayr has some of the best material on speciation that I have read. In this book, Mayr covers issues such as human evolution, macroevoution, natural selection, variational evolution, mutations, etc. He goes in depth but not so much so that laymen cannot follow.

Overall, the author has written a good book. Problems revolve around Mayr's refusal to adapt his writings and beliefs to current facts. In other words, Mayr still argues that the fossil record is the best evidence for evolution. A fossil record showing stasis best illustrates evolution??? Is not this the ultimate display of blind faith. Horse evolution is the most complete picture of evolution?!? WOW!

Maybe Mayr has grown hardheaded in his age and needs to keep update with current findings. Further, Mayr says embryology supports darwinism. Haven't we got past this yet? Problems like this show how old myths die hard and prove that perception is actually more important than reality.

Buy the book if you want a great reference for what evolution is, just remember when reading that dogma dies hard.

Rating:
Summary: Good Technical Overview
Review: This book is not aimed at refuting creationism or primarly defending evolution. While there are some chapters dealing with the evidence for evolution, the book is largely a technical overview of evolutionary theory. There is a lot about speciation, and an introduction to concepts of macroevolution.

In reading the book, I got the impression that Mayr is a bit miffed at how various others in his field have misunderstood certain concepts, or tried to ride his coattails. The average laymen has probably heard of punctuated equilibrium, but has probably not heard of parapatric speciation. That's a shame, because parapatric speciation is easily the more fundamental and far reaching idea.

Some of the terms where a bit technical, but I usually skipped them and kept reading. I was still able to pick up the main points. I think this book is an excellent companion to Ken Miller's Finding Darwin's God, which address the creation/evolution issue directly. Read Miller's book, and then read this one.

Rating:
Summary: Must read for anyone interested in evolution
Review: This book is simply a MUST for anyone interested in the theory of evolution, including, and especially for, those human beings who are curious about the origins of their present constitutions, both biological and psychological, and who want to be informed of the most up-to-date natural and scientific explanations about them, rather than to continue to lie ignorantly, though comfortably, in the consolation of religious or supernatural dogmas.

I cannot think of anyone else who is able to present all levels of the complexity and subtely of the process of evolution and the theory of natural selection with such precision and clarity than Ernst Mayr, a venerable scientist, "the world's greatest living evolutionary biologist" (Steven Jay Gould), "the Darwin of the 20th century" (New York Times).

This book is not only consisted of rigorous arguments, but also full of compelling illrustrative examples picked up from the diversity of living beings on our earth of various geological ages (from the fossil record to modern human beings) and places in support of those arguments.
Mayr's knowledge in biology is so comprehensive and his narrative so straighforward and lucid that he recounts those examples of evolution history just like a grandfather telling some everyday stories to his grandsons.

And I especially recommend those who once found or still find the so-called "GENE EYES' VIEW" (as popularized by Richard Dawkins) attractive shall seriously study this great work. And then he or she, I think, will soon discover that how imprecise and misguiding is the metaphorical language of those sociobiologists in their description of almost every parts of the process of evolution. This book shall at least provoke our cautions towards the trend of reductionism and atomism in various branch of scientific endeavor.

Besides, Jared Diamond's preface is also well written. It let us have a look into the extraordinary life of this great scientist. I am especially moved to read that Mayr "at the age of 97, still writing a new book every year or two."

Finally, I have also to point out what seems to me to be hardly a harmless drawback of this otherwise excellent work. This is the author's explicit belief, as expressed in the section on HUMAN ETHICS, in the "moral education" of the "world's great religion", especially for the "cultures of the Christian world". I feel quite puzzled how Mayr could think that some "perfectly sound" ethical principles could ever be deduced from a utterly absurd world-view, as that which is presented by the creationists, which, in so far as I understand it, seems to Mayr to have already been completed refuted by the Darwinian evolutionists.

Rating:
Summary: Evolutionary Theory Is Misleading
Review: This book will mislead Americans, And, evolutionary theory, if taught in school, will mislead our children. Let me explain these statements.

After the long debates on epistemology between empiricists and rationalism, in the 1920s a group of linguistics discovered that empirical data are primarily symbolic. This discovery gave semanticists a major role in all fields of thought, tells us that `theory' and `facts' are inseparable, and that the scientific method must be used to develop knowledge. Thus, when a biologist collects empirical data, the data must be described with symbols that have meanings. With meanings, symbols can be related and formed into precise symbolic languages.

To date, only the school of physicists has developed such a precise symbolic language. This language is precise because the empirical data of physicists apply only to non-living objects The symbolic language of the field of physics is precise because the meanings of the symbols of this language are derived from six fundamental physical qualities. As a result of their success, physicists have found laws that are widely accepted worldwide. Unfortunately, the current symbolic language of biology was not developed properly. This improper development was initiated primarily by Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theory. This improper development came from the highly flawed English language in which British empiricists had embedded the flawed logic of Aristotle for centuries.

So, I must ask, `What empirical data have our biologists found?' I don't believe anyone knows because all empirical data in biology apply only to living objects. Biology and physics are very different because living objects cannot be formed from non-living objects, as biologists claim. If living objects could be formed from non-living objects, the school of biology could use and expand the precise symbolic language developed by our physicists. Don't try this foolish thought. I conclude that biology is on the wrong path of research. Thus, biologists must `bite the bullet' and accept the theory that all living things are `spirit-body' objects. With this theory, a new research agenda is needed for the field of biology.

Spirit-body objects were not embedded in the English language when Darwin rejected them in his Descent of Man (Ch. VI). He disagreed with other naturalists who were impressed with the spiritual power of man and wanted three kingdoms - Human, Animal, and Vegetable. Darwin said '... that the mental facilities of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree.' Unfortunately, this degree is infinite because the sign languages developed by animals cannot be compared with the symbolic languages developed by humans. This is a major error of Darwinism.

The author said that in debates with creationists, evolutionary theorists claim that powerful evidence induces most biologists to disagree with the account presented in Genesis. I also have problems with the creation theory presented in the Genesis and other scriptures. But, a number of Judeo-Christians have produced a new creation theory. It goes beyond creation data presented in all scriptures. This new creation theory began with the work of Bishop Nicholas of Cusa in the 15th century. This beginning was then amplified by Johannes Kepler and Gottfried Leibniz. Then, in the 19th century, Georg Cantor, brought this new creation theory into certainty with a new form of mathematics. Unfortunately, the work of Cusa reached the USA only in 1979.

Books on the new creation theory are becoming available on the Internet. Also, I am writing a book on the new creation theory. So, evolutionary theorists must eventually expand their debates with a new group of creation theorists. The new theory accepts God. But surprisingly, the new creation theory views all objects in the universe as `spirit-body' things.