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What Evolution Is
by Ernst Mayr

'Evolution' is a general word that implies change. In the case of animals (including man), plants and bacteria, evolution means that they are constantly changing. In this book, Mayr is able to show what evolution means and how it has shaped the organisms on this planet.

Mayr starts off by showing how people came to the idea of evolution. He then covers the early ideas about evolution that believe that animals evolve in order to become 'higher' beings and to achieve perfection.

The real breakthrough was to come when Charles Darwin was to propose his theory of evolution that he called 'natural selection'. This was a turning point as it had never been considered before by thinkers before Darwin. As the idea gained ground and the evidence for it mounted, it was finally accepted by scientists. The advances in genetics and molecular biology have continued to show that Darwin's evolutionary theory was essentially correct.

Mayr then goes on to cover some aspects of evolutionary theory that may be confusing to laymen. He shows that 'Darwinism' works on the level of the individual: each individual is the target for natural selection, not the gene or the species. He emphasises this by working through the idea and showing how 'species evolution' (where one species takes over a region from another) comes about because the individuals of one species out-compete those of the other.

He also shows that both chance and selection work hand-in-hand on Darwinism; chance comes into play the moment an individual is formed (via the shuffling of genes from the parents) and then selection as the individual must compete to live. He shows that those who think the evolution works by 'chance' alone to be wrong.

He also covers what a species is and shows the difficulties people and scientist can encounter if they are not careful enough to distinguish just what a species. He also goes on to show how new species can arise, usually by a small colony that has become separated by the main group.

Finally, he covers the evolution of man, which he says is still spotty due to the lack of enough fossils to show the evolutionary development of man. He lists out some of the problems that evolution still has to explain like why some species remain static while others evolve at fast rates, and the debates over how birds developed from dinosaurs.

But such problems do not invalidate Darwin's idea of evolution. Mayr is quite confident that with further developments in molecular biology, with the unearthing of more fossil evidence and with more new species being discovered and classified, such questions can be answered and they will show that Darwinism is correct.

This is a recommended book to read if you want to know just what evolution is and to get a summary of the current state of evolutionary studies.

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What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr

What Evolution Is
by Ernst Mayr