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

About the Author

Michael R. Rose is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. A researcher in the biology of aging, he is known for selection experiments that made fruit flies live twice as long as normal. He is also the author of The Evolutionary Biology of Aging and a coeditor of Adaptation.

From the Back Cover

"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 ofWhy We Age

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

Reviews

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.

Ironically, Rose (Evolutionary Biology/Univ. of Calif., Irvine) invokes the image of a hovering Darwinian ghost in this altogether rational, absorbing account of the past 150 years of Darwinism. His three-part analysis first addresses the origins of the ideas we call Darwinism; next, its applications; and finally, what Darwinism may or may not contribute to our understanding of human nature. Part one places the theory of natural selection into the context of Darwin's lifeand the familiar influences of family, Malthus, and Erasmus (included are unfamiliar tales of Erasmus's prodigious feats of paternity!). The rediscovery of Mendelism at the turn of the century led to furious disputes between mutationists and biometricians who espoused Darwin's erroneous theory of blending inheritance. Rose touches on the theory of kin selection, epitomized by insect societies, and introduces a number of game theoretic principles in discussions of intraspecies male-male competition. Part two deals with the seldom discussed importance of Darwinism in animal and plant breeding; the evils of eugenics; and the implications of evolutionary biology for medicine. Rose's own research figures here: he has demonstrated that forced delays in the reproduction of a population of fruit flies over a dozen generations led to doubling the lifespanpresumably, by forcing natural selection to work harder to keep the older flies fit until they could reproduce. Part three is the most speculative, as Rose ponders questions of brain size, the origin of values and religion, and the various attempts of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology to ground human behavior in genetics and selection-driven behavioral strategies. Discussion here is limited to how people act in the contexts of marketplace economics and political ideology; missing are any references to our urges to create art or science, to love or sacrifice. No doubt opponents will argue that Rose, for all his rationality, has put a Darwinian ghost in the machine. Be that as it may, he makes an excellent case for the importance of evolutionary biology to all of science. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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.

Edition details

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