Darwin's Spectre - Hardcover

Rose, Michael R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691012172 ISBN 13: 9780691012179

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1998

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

"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 the Inside Flap

"Darwin's Spectre will be a lightning rod among books on the great naturalist. Rose's emphatic opinions will ensure that the book will not be ignored. Other trade books have also explored Darwinism and its modern meaning, but Rose's is unique in its combination of a frankly historical placing of Darwin's ideas, its consideration of their many ramifications for modern life, and its grand conjectures about the future."--Steven M. Austad, University of Idaho; author of Why We Age

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0691012172
• ISBN 13: 9780691012179
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288