Debating Darwin Book

Despite the silly title and backcover copy, this is a serious and thoughtful book that sheds light on the bits of evolutionary theory that we don't yet know. The danger with any attempt to present evolutionary theory as incomplete is that you'll be mistaken for a creationist. Sterelny is no creationist, and this is not ammunition for that battle. He merely attempts to summarize the differences in position between Richard Dawkins ("The Selfish Gene") and Stephen J. Gould ("The Panda's Thumb"), two prominent evolutionary theorists.

There are differences in emphasis (Dawkins feels adaptation to environment is what evolution must explain and so focuses on natural selection; Gould feels evolution's biggest question is why animal lineages change so little over time and so he focuses on variation more than natural selection) and outright different conjectures (can selection happen for a species as a whole or does it only happen for individuals). The most direct opposition is over "extrapolationism"--can you look at changes we see in our lifetimes and then extract to the many billions of years that life has been on our planet, through mass extinctions and ice ages and ... ?

I've realized that "evolution" isn't a complete theory by any manner of means (though because each individual hypothesis is falsifiable, it's still preferable to religious explanations) and that there are many interesting areas in which new work is being done.

The book isn't an easy read, although it's by no manner of means difficult. I had to keep flicking back to remind myself what a "gene lineage" was, what "progressive evolution" means, and so on. Sterelny does a very good job of explaining the commonalities in the men's thinking, and then going into useful detail with meaningful examples to highlight their differences. You don't need a background in biology to read this book.