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Summary: Cat fighting among the old guard in evolutionary biology
Review: Well, Darwin's soul really isn't up for grabs. What is at stake is just who among the illuminati of the Darwinian establishment really have the goods on how evolution works and how it doesn't. "Spandrels" of the mind, "habitat tracking," how complexity affects evolution, "species sorting," whether evolution proceeds by leaps and bounds or just plods along, and other contentious matters form the body of this unsteady but interesting book.The main antagonists are the usual suspects, Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, Richard Lewontin, et al., proponents of punctuated equilibrium and a "holistic" approach to evolution on the one side, and Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, John Maynard Smith, et al., gradualist reductionists, the so-called "orthodox Darwinians," on the other. Dawkins, et al. believe that natural selection is the only really important factor in evolution while Gould, et al. believe that natural selection alone cannot fully explain how evolution works. Morris reviews their various publications and quotes them, revealing that they behave rather badly at times, sometimes resorting to unseemly personal attacks on one another--which leads me to observe that Darwin, who never involved himself in hot debates, much less in name calling, must be turning over in his grave. The irony is, as Morris fumbles to makes clear, the seemingly substantive differences that are being so hotly debated are for the most part actually ones of emphasis and interpretation. Nobody involved doubts the supremacy of natural selection as the driving force in evolutionary change, any more than any of them doubt the fact of evolution. Morris gives the reader some background information about evolution and introduces complexity theory in order that the debate may be followed. In the penultimate chapter he gives a summary of the evidence as he sees it. A final chapter entitled, "Controversy and Discovery," includes the currently hot idea "that evolution can proceed at a more rapid rate than anyone had suspected." (p. 233) There is an annotated bibliography and a useful appendix listing relevant Web sites. Morris tries to avoid taking sides in this debate. Indeed, he bends over backwards to be fair, and that attitude, along with a beguiling, easy to read style, is the strength of the book. There are weaknesses, however. His focus is too narrow with its concentration on Gould, et al. and Dawkins, et al. and their differences when there are much more interesting and immediate questions currently being debated. (I imagine that the young lions in evolutionary biology are very tired of seeing those old guys still getting all that ink!) For an interesting book by a young evolutionary psychologist on some of the newer controversies see Geoffery Miller's The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000). And then there are all those typos! I found typos on pages 41, 47, 107, 114, 199, 203, 228, and 232. In one case the word "would" was left out. In another the word "out" was used when the word "at" was meant, and in a couple of places extraneous words were left in. For example, on page 203 a sentence begins, "You should not should not automatically conclude..." When one sees a lot of typos in a book it suggests that the author did not read the proofs, or if he did, he did a cursory job of it. Worse than the typos (and if I found eight, there are surely others) are some misstatements of fact and intent. On page 34 he writes that the mammals that survived the K-T extinction "are not more <evolved> than their dinosaur predecessors." As Morris points out on page 32 "a frog is just as <evolved> as a human being." But that means frogs living today and human beings living today. To compare how "evolved" the dinosaurs living 65 million years ago are to mammals living today makes little sense. Note too that on page 34 Morris refers to the extinction of the dinosaurs as taking place 65 million years ago, which of course is the standard take, but on page 124 he unaccountably states that the "collision with an asteroid" took place 70 million years ago. Actually he writes, "70 millions years ago," which, I just noticed, is another typo! There is also entirely too much repetition in the book, as though the chapters were independently conceived and meant to be published separately and then not properly edited. For example on page 204 Morris repeats the same ideas, and even some of the same wording, that appears on page 123. Chapter 8, "The Evidence," in particular contains a lot of unnecessary repetition. Finally there is a most annoying error on page 175 in Morris's discussion of the Watson selection task. As written the instructions are incomplete and must leave readers scratching their heads about what is given as the correct answer. He writes: "Suppose you are shown the four cards marked with the following symbols: D F 3 7 You are then asked which two cards you must turn over to see if any of the cards violate the following rule: If the letter D is on one side, then there will be a numeral 3 on the other. Which two cards do you turn over?" Morris's answer, cards, D and 7 is partially correct, but what about the card with the F? According to the directions it also has to be turned over (to see if there's a D there) making it three cards that must be turned over, not two. This error resulted because Morris left out the following proviso, namely that the cards always have a letter on one side and a number on the other. This is an excellent idea for a book, but I don't think Richard Morris realized its potential.
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