Editorial Reviews
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While its opponents may sneer that "it's just a theory," evolution has transcended that label to take its place as one of the most important ideas in human history. Science journalist Carl Zimmer explores its history and future in Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, a companion piece to the epic PBS series of the same name. The book, lavishly illustrated with photos of our distant cousins, anatomical diagrams, and timelines, is as beautiful as it is enlightening. While those closely following the field will find little more here than a well-written summation of the state of the art in 2001, readers who have watched the evolutionary debates from a distance will quickly catch up with the details of the principal arguments.

Zimmer's text is fresh and expansive, explaining both the minutiae of comparative anatomy and the grand scale of geological time with verve and clarity. Following the trend of turn-of-the-century evolution writers, he treats the religious beliefs of creationists with respect, while firmly insisting that the scientific evidence against their position is too compelling to ignore. Touching on biology, philosophy, theology, politics, and nearly every other field of human thought, Evolution will inspire its readers with the elegance and importance of Darwin's simple theory. --Rob Lightner

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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
E.O. Wilson defines sociobiology as "the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior," the central theoretical problem of which is the question of how behaviors that seemingly contradict the principles of natural selection, such as altruism, can develop. Sociobiology: A New Synthesis, Wilson's first attempt to outline the new field of study, was first published in 1975 and called for a fairly revolutionary update to the so-called Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology. Sociobiology as a new field of study demanded the active inclusion of sociology, the social sciences, and the humanities in evolutionary theory. Often criticized for its apparent message of "biological destiny," Sociobiology set the stage for such controversial works as Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene and Wilson's own Consilience.

Sociobiology defines such concepts as society, individual, population, communication, and regulation. It attempts to explain, biologically, why groups of animals behave the way they do when finding food or shelter, confronting enemies, or getting along with one another. Wilson seeks to explain how group selection, altruism, hierarchies, and sexual selection work in populations of animals, and to identify evolutionary trends and sociobiological characteristics of all animal groups, up to and including man. The insect sections of the books are particularly interesting, given Wilson's status as the world's most famous entomologist.

It is fair to say that as an ecological strategy eusociality has been overwhelmingly successful. It is useful to think of an insect colony as a diffuse organism, weighing anywhere from less than a gram to as much as a kilogram and possessing from about a hundred to a million or more tiny mouths.

It's when Wilson starts talking about human beings that the furor starts. Feminists have been among the strongest critics of the work, arguing that humans are not slaves to a biological destiny, forever locked in "primitive" behavior patterns without the ability to reason past our biochemical nature. Like The Origin of Species, Sociobiology has forced many biologists and social scientists to reassess their most cherished notions of how life works. --Therese Littleton
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Polity Pr; ISBN: 0745622062

Editorial Reviews
Book Description
According to evolutionary biologists, we are the minders of our genes. But, as Christopher Badcock points out in this book, it is only recently that evolutionists have realized that minders need minds, and that evolution needs psychology to fill the yawning gap between genes and behaviour.

Evolutionary Psychology assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, and concentrates on the fundamental issues raised by the application of modern Darwinism to psychology. Basic concepts of evolution are explained carefully, so that the reader has a sound grasp of them before their often controversial application to psychology is discussed. The approach is a critical one, and the author does not hide the many difficulties that evolutionary psychology raises. Examples include the strange neglect of Darwin's own writings on psychology, and the fact that no existing theory has succeeded in explaining why the human brain evolved in the first place.

The book is the first to give a non-technical account of remarkable new findings about the roles that conflicting genes play in building different parts of the brain. It is also the first to consider the consequences of this for controversies like those over nature/nurture, IQ, brain lateralization and consciousness.

Evolutionary Psychology is based on many years experience of teaching evolution and psychology to social science students, and is intended for all who wish to get to grips with the basic issues of one of the most exciting and rapidly growing areas of modern science.

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