Introduction to evolution

Similarly, while evolution is not a perfect account of how the rich complexity of nature came to be, so far, it's the best that there is.

And this little (180 pages) book is far from perfect, but it is an excellent introduction to the subject.

If you cannot tell your meiosis from your mitosis, or your phenotpe from your genotype, then this book will set you straight.

The author does, perhaps, devote rather too much space to so-called "young world" creationism, a 19th-century Christian heresy which employs rather dodgy mathematics to deny the evidence of billions of years of the fossils.

I'd rather he had devoted more than a couple of paragraphs to theories of punctuated equilibria and saltation - "jumps" - which Darwin denied, though the fossil record appears to demonstrate it.

When Stephen Jay Gould advocated punctuated equilibria - "in which large periods of stability are followed by rapid change in a species," as the book describes it - he was attacked for being a Marxist.

The author twice quotes, with apparent approbation, Richard Dawkins's "selfish gene" theory, without apparently realising that, to ascribe motives to our genes, selfish or otherwise, is to anthropomorphise them into a sort of "God within," while denying the possibility of a God without.

KARL DALLAS