Amazon.co.uk Review
Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories about how organisms relate to one another and their surrounding environments, and how these relationships have changed over time, have become as much part of the cultural landscape in the West as
The Bible. Within a few years of the 1858 publication of
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Darwin's ideas had spread like wildfire. Michael R. Rose shows how "Darwin's spectre" has crossed cultures, disciplines and time, gripping the imagination of an enormous variety of people (Karl Marx is one notable example), reaching far beyond the small and elite group of upper-middle-class academics and intellectuals that Darwin knew in mid-19th-century England.
As a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, Michael R. Rose is deeply involved in the scientific branch of the Darwin industry and is clearly fascinated by its ramifications. In a series of eminently readable essays aimed at the general reader Rose explores three themes, from "distilling the main elements", through "applications" such as agriculture and breeding, to the influence of Darwinian ideas on perceptions of the evolution of humans and our psyche. Like that other great 19th-century invention, Freudianism, Darwinism has come to be used and abused in a quite uncontrollable way that would have horrified its author. Rose does not balk at addressing these uncomfortable questions but still claims, nonetheless, that "Darwinism is helping us to understand human nature ... the hardest thing of all", and that without it we would "lose our way in a twilight of the mind". --Douglas Palmer
Synopsis
Extending the human life-span past 120 years. The "green" revolution. Evolution and human psychology. These subjects make 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". In this text, 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. 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. This text explains how evolutionary biology has been used to support both valuable applied research, particularly in agriculture, and truly frightening objectives, such as Nazi eugenics.
