Volume 47, Number 17 · November 2, 2000
In the Primordial Soup
By Tim Flannery
The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup
by Christopher Wills, by Jeffrey Bada
Perseus, 291 pp., $27.00
Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated
by Steve Jones
Random House, 377 pp., $25.95
Charles Darwin's theory of how life evolves through natural selection was first published more than 140 years ago. It's a simple, elegant hypothesis with enormous power to explain the world we live in, yet paradoxically it remains misunderstood or ignored by many nonscientists. Indeed, as Steve Jones points out in Darwin's Ghost, Charles Darwin's magnum opus, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, is rarely read today. Nevertheless, the concept of Darwinian natural selection is still exerting an ever-expanding influence in a surprisingly broad range of academic disciplines.
Review, 4539 words
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