The most recommended books about natural selection

This husband-wife team uses Darwinian natural selectionist thinking to account for the most important features of homicide throughout the world. A basic principle of Darwinian theory is known as kin selection, which means that people favor kin over nonkin and close kin over distant kin. In this regard, the authors show, for example, that people are much more likely to kill unrelated acquaintances and strangers than genetic kin, and that child homicide is perpetrated much more often by stepparents than by natural parents. The authors also show that there is a huge sex difference in rates of killing. Throughout the world the vast majority of killing is done by men. This is because men are competing with other men for the status and resources needed to secure mates for reproduction.

More than thirty years ago, when I was conducting research on the psychology of altruism and moral development, a biologist recommended that I read The Selfish Gene. 

Reading Dawkins’ book caused me to change my theoretical orientation completely.  It enabled me to see that if I wanted to understand altruism and morality, I needed to understand how the genes that guide the construction of the mental mechanisms that cause us to help others evolved. 

Although the title of the book implies that we are selfish by nature, the contents explain how selfish genes can guide the development of unselfish animals.  

The gene’s-eye view of evolution emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Arguing that biologists are better off thinking about evolution in terms of genes rather than organisms was controversial, but still quickly gained popularity. An important reason for this was that it helped make sense of old, long-standing problems in the field. Two of those were sexual selection (how extravagant traits like the peacocks tail can evolve) and altruism (like the sterile worker ant devoting its life to the queen). In The Ant and the Peacock, Helena Cronin shows how the gene’s-eye view provides a powerful way to solve these puzzles. 

This short, clearly written book offers a penetrating analysis of the foundations of evolutionary biology. Godfrey-Smith develops a novel conceptual framework for understanding evolution based on the concept of a “Darwinian population,” which refers to any collection of entities capable of evolving by natural selection, and a “Darwinian individual,” which is a member of such a population. He uses this framework to shed light on topics including reproduction, symbiosis, culture, and transitions between levels of organization. The book is a perfect illustration of why science sometimes needs philosophy.

That’s right: that Charles Darwin, the author of The Origin of the Species. Seventeen years before that ground-shaking book, he wrote what marine scientists tell me remains the definitive work on the structure of coral reefs. Forget the famous Punch caricature of the gray-haired man trailing a long beard and a chimpanzee and think of the youthful naturalist daring crashing waves to vault to the edge of a South Pacific fringe reef. In places his accounts read like True Adventures for Boys.   

This ambitious book, written by a distinguished philosopher, is a contribution to what might be called the “epistemology of evolutionary biology.” Sober starts by offering a general analysis of the concept of evidence based on probability theory, then applies this analysis to issues in the theory of evolution. He explains why the evidence favours evolution over the hypothesis of “intelligent design,” then tackles the thorny methodological problem of how to infer evolutionary history from observations on contemporary species. Though difficult, the book is clearly written and repays close study.

The ideas in this book are exciting, interesting, and thought-provoking. It is clearly written with great enthusiasm. It presents fresh, novel perspectives.

The author is very well-informed and brings in historical and other facts that make the essays exceptionally fun and interesting. I learned a good deal, and my creativity was enhanced by the new perspectives and ideas. The essays are on evolution and natural history.

Given my interests in nature and nurture, what I find especially fascinating is “the nature of nurture”. By this I mean how Darwinian natural selection has shaped the way our species rears its children and the effects such care has on them.

This book by a world-famous anthropologist beautifully, informative, and insightfully reveals how evolution has made us who we are as parents, people capable of unconditional love but by no means always dispensing it, sometimes the exact opposite—and why that is the case.

My father bought this book for me because I write on marriage and relationships.

I was skeptical that a book about the mating habits of birds had much relevance to my own work, yet I found Prum’s arguments about the connections between birds and humans compelling. According to Prum, female mate selection led to changes in the physical attributes and behaviors of birds and these changes can provide insights into the evolution of human sexuality as well.

As a scholar of marriage, I am very familiar with the argument that men choose partners based on physical attributes while women choose partners for economic and social reasons. Consequently, it was refreshing to hear that this difference may be more environmental that innate.

Prum suggests that for much of human evolutionary history, it was female preferences that mattered and that these preferences were so strong, they actually changed male bodies. According to… show more.

If you want to understand evolution, it certainly helps to know how and where the theory of evolution originated. This picture book rendition of Darwin’s classic work – the foundational text of all modern biology – explains Darwin’s explorations, the process of natural selection, and the common descent of all living things. The direct quotes from Darwin’s own writings are a nice touch, as are the charming illustrations. It doesn’t hurt that the writer/illustrator is a molecular biologist.