Product Description

Extending the human life-span past 120 years. The "green" revolution. Evolution and human psychology. These subjects make today's newspaper headlines. Yet much of the science underlying these topics stems from a book published nearly 140 years ago--Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Far from an antique idea restricted to the nineteenth century, the theory of evolution is one of the most potent concepts in all of modern science.

In Darwin's Spectre, Michael Rose provides the general reader with an introduction to the theory of evolution: its beginning with Darwin, its key concepts, and how it may affect us in the future. First comes a brief biographical sketch of Darwin. Next, Rose gives a primer on the three most important concepts in evolutionary theory--variation, selection, and adaptation. With a firm grasp of these concepts, the reader is ready to look at modern applications of evolutionary theory. Discussing agriculture, Rose shows how even before Darwin farmers and ranchers unknowingly experimented with evolution. Medical research, however, has ignored Darwin's lessons until recently, with potentially grave consequences. Finally, evolution supplies important new vantage points on human nature. If humans weren't created by deities, then our nature may be determined more by evolution than we have understood. Or it may not be. In this question, as in many others, the Darwinian perspective is one of the most important for understanding human affairs in the modern world.

Darwin's Spectre explains how evolutionary biology has been used to support both valuable applied research, particularly in agriculture, and truly frightening objectives, such as Nazi eugenics. Darwin's legacy has been a comfort and a scourge. But it has never been irrelevant.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #892543 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Amazon.com
"A spectre is haunting the modern world," writes evolutionary biologist Michael Rose in a sly echo of Karl Marx, "Darwin's spectre, Darwinism." Ancient as scientific theories go, Charles Darwin's 19th-century ideas about speciation, adaptation, and natural selection continue to inform modern science and to shape our understanding of the world; as Rose demonstrates, Darwinism retains its intellectual force today, although it has been put to bad use politically (as, for instance, a justification for racism, the dismantling of welfare, and the imposition of authoritarian social controls). Rose discusses the growth of Darwin's thought through three major issues: the nature of heredity, the operation of natural selection, and the pattern of evolution. Darwin helped solve a vexing puzzle of his day, namely how different species emerge; he also helped explain why, in an apparent lack of natural economy, there should be so many species of animal and plant life to begin with. For all Darwinism's intellectual power, Rose notes, most theories of human nature continue to be resolutely non-Darwinian. Rose's discussion is lucid and accessible to nonspecialists, and it makes for an eminently readable essay in the history of science. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
Rose, professor of evolutionary biology at UC-Irvine, sets out to illuminate the basic principles of Darwin's theory of evolution and then to show how those building blocks inform contemporary science. Darwin's ideas?and those that followed Darwin himself under the rubric of Darwinism?have indeed shaped many facets of our world. By attempting to cover so much ground, however, Rose's text is superficial even while it is admirably lucid. The brief opening chapter on Darwin himself, for example, barely scratches the surface of the man and his world. Similarly, the next three chapters gloss over the basics of evolutionary biology. Part two of the book, "Applications of Darwinism," focuses just as superficially on agriculture, medicine and the eugenics movement. The book's third part, professing to use the principles of Darwinism to understand the basics of human behavior, touches upon evolutionary psychology, human philosophy and political science, as well as upon the intersection of religion and science. Almost any one of Rose's chapters could have been expanded into a valuable, full-length monograph, but collected together as they are in such thin form, they coalesce into an unsatisfying primer.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Rose is a well-known science writer who has testified in court cases concerning the teaching of creationism in public schools. Here he concisely outlines the elements of evolutionary theory and then examines its contemporary applications in agriculture, where it is manifested in genetically engineered crops and animals, and in the new and developing field of "Darwinian medicine," which is transforming our understanding of pathogens and how to treat certain diseases. (LJ 11/15/98)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Solid survey, starts with life of Darwin
It is really an introduction to the consequences of Darwinian evolutionary biology in the modern world. But to get there the first 1/3 is a rather nice simple biographical sketch of Darwin and his times. One particularly good accent was on the Platonic essentialism that marked much of the historical thinking about biology up to Darwin's time. As such this part of the book would be a good first read for a high school student on Darwin.

The second half is his desire to convince people that Darwinian thinking is crucial for a good understanding of not just the natural biological world but for greater issues like sociobio to medicine. As such is a good general survey of an extremely polarized subject material without getting bogged down in the debate itself.