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Rating: 
Summary: priceless source for prompting thought
Review: Most of us who have a professional or casual interest in evolution and the natural world gain our knowledge from popular articles, books and perhaps the dim recesses of our undergraduate textbook memory. While Dawkins' _The Selfish Gene_ or _Darwin's Dangerous Idea_ by Dennet may lay out the bones and flesh of our modern view of the natural world with wonderous analogies and often beautiful prose it's not until opening this volume that what's missing will be noticed: a sense of history, of excitement, of challenging thought. Evolution (and its sub-branches) have been controversial, not just on religious terms (the less said about that the better) but in the normal manner of grand scientific theories attempting to explain the world in which we live. The importance of claims, counter-claims and paradigm shifts are hard to grasp without having been present, if not in person then intellecutally. _This_, with joy and a very sensitive editor's pen, is what Mark Ridly (author of the popular undergraduate text _Evolution_) has managed to give us with his selection of seminal papers in the history of evolutionary thought. The articles, ranging from Darwin through to the present day) are superbly chosen and in many cases hard for students or professionals (let along lay readers) to obtain. An absence of maths from even the most statistical of papers (which still remain cogent) will be welcomed by those not up for weeks of scribbling. The papers themselves are clear and thoughtful, their importance is always obvious and, through their arrangement, lead the reader on a merry intellectual dance of claim, counter-claim and converging streams of thought. Reading this book is an intellectual adventure; no summaries of events long past, the papers (and the accompanying short essays by Ridley) give a sense of the issues, how thoughtful the responses and creative the science. In short - this book make me re-think about what and how we know about evolution. It stimulated my research. Higher praise I cannot give. May there be many more in this wonderful series.
Rating:
Summary: priceless source for prompting thought
Review: Most of us who have a professional or casual interest in evolution and the natural world gain our knowledge from popular articles, books and perhaps the dim recesses of our undergraduate textbook memory. While Dawkins' _The Selfish Gene_ or _Darwin's Dangerous Idea_ by Dennet may lay out the bones and flesh of our modern view of the natural world with wonderous analogies and often beautiful prose it's not until opening this volume that what's missing will be noticed: a sense of history, of excitement, of challenging thought. Evolution (and its sub-branches) have been controversial, not just on religious terms (the less said about that the better) but in the normal manner of grand scientific theories attempting to explain the world in which we live. The importance of claims, counter-claims and paradigm shifts are hard to grasp without having been present, if not in person then intellecutally. _This_, with joy and a very sensitive editor's pen, is what Mark Ridly (author of the popular undergraduate text _Evolution_) has managed to give us with his selection of seminal papers in the history of evolutionary thought. The articles, ranging from Darwin through to the present day) are superbly chosen and in many cases hard for students or professionals (let along lay readers) to obtain. An absence of maths from even the most statistical of papers (which still remain cogent) will be welcomed by those not up for weeks of scribbling. The papers themselves are clear and thoughtful, their importance is always obvious and, through their arrangement, lead the reader on a merry intellectual dance of claim, counter-claim and converging streams of thought. Reading this book is an intellectual adventure; no summaries of events long past, the papers (and the accompanying short essays by Ridley) give a sense of the issues, how thoughtful the responses and creative the science. In short - this book make me re-think about what and how we know about evolution. It stimulated my research. Higher praise I cannot give. May there be many more in this wonderful series.
Rating:
Summary: Jam packed with important ideas
Review: This might be the most valuable book I have on my shelf.
Six selected pages from each of 64 classic authors. Fantastic!
The book is divided into 10 sections,
each with an introduction by the editor, Mark Ridley.
Very helpful!
There is no way a book like this can be summarized.
It would be like trying to summarize a textbook.
The table of contents tells the story best. Odd that an author would publish two very different books with identical titles.
I write here of the one that is the Oxford Reader.
Rating:
Summary: Jam packed with important ideas
Review: This might be the most valuable book I have on my shelf.
Six selected pages from each of 64 classic authors. Fantastic!
The book is divided into 10 sections,
each with an introduction by the editor, Mark Ridley.
Very helpful!
There is no way a book like this can be summarized.
It would be like trying to summarize a textbook.
The table of contents tells the story best. Odd that an author would publish two very different books with identical titles.
I write here of the one that is the Oxford Reader.
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