Reviews for The biotic message

The average rating for The biotic message based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-09-05 00:00:00 Nolan Cochran Note that a better title of this book should be Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology, since it's focused on evolutionary biology. There're philosophical issues associated with molecular biology, systems biology, and physiology as well, but they're not covered here. This book introduces us to philosophical issues associated with evolutionary biology, and is not aimed to develop Sober's own thesis. Elliot Sober formulated some very elegant arguments about interpretation of probability, what it means for something to be individuals, and criticisms of Hume, Popper, and some moral subjectivist arguments. Some of his comments on sociobiology are very instructive. Some topics covered are instructive to other fields of study as well, such as interpretation of probability, likelihood principle, falsifiability, and individuality, but there're more topics that are specific for evolutionary biology, such as unit of selection and adaptationism. I'm also pleased to see that he's not an ideologue; he did evaluate arguments for conclusions he agrees with critically and formulated elegant criticisms of some of those arguments. I find chapters 2 and 7 the most interesting, because of the significance of creationism and sociobiology in today's cultural war, which deeply puzzles me as a moderate. I didn't give this book 5 stars not because this book is not that well written, but because some of the topics discussed sound really boring to me since evolution biology is not my field, but those topics can be very important to evolution biologists.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-29 00:00:00 Roy Metcalf I enjoyed it overall, even though the edition I own is set with a too small point-size and too much text in one page, offering a bad reading experience. (Think of it as a 220 x 1.5 = 330 page book.) Add to this the fact that the content sometimes gets too technical and dry, and it verges on a boring textbook. I found it interesting that in a 7-page section titled "Models of Cultural Evolution" where he elaborates on many theories/models by various people, he only mentions Dawkins and memetics once, in parantheses, without any explanation.