When Christmas rolled around last month, and my family wanted to know what to get me, I emailed them links to PZ Myers' Updated Book List for Evolutionists. As a result, I came home with copies of Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautifu and Andrew Brown's The Darwin Wars.

Myers describes The Darwin Wars as "a study of the sociology of evolutionary biology." In reality, it is little more than a blow-by-blow account of the 'war' between Richard Lewontin and Steven Jay Gould on the one hand, and E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett on the other. It is, here and there, a lot of fun. He describes the birth of Richard Dawkins as having been attended by a pair of fairies.

The good fairy gave him good looks, intelligence, charm, and a chair at Oxford specially endowed for him. The bad fairy studied him for a while and said: `Give him a gift for metaphor.'

Elsewhere, he quotes biologist John Maynard Smith descirbing a theory as "Absolute fucking crap," and the footnote attributes this to "Personal communication, walking back from the pub."

However, I was disappointed, because I expected to learn more about evolution from the book. The fact that he focuses on a relatively small subset of the researchers working to advance evolutionary understanding would be ok, if I felt that he did a particularly good job of explaining the views of the two camps. Unfortunately, I don't. He makes it clear that Gould believed that "natural selection 'is not the exclusive means of [genetic] modification.'" But he never says what else Gould thought was going on. He makes it clear that Gould objected strongly to Wilson's program of sociobiology, without ever explaining why anyone would believe in Wilson's argument.

And, because he has elected to focus only on this corner of the subject, he is forced to leave out much of interest. The rise in the last twenty five years of evolutionary developmental biology is left out entirely, while no less than two whole chapters are devoted to memes, which amount to a throwaway thought experiment in a book by Dawkins that was subsequently taken too far.

By contrast, I was surprised by how much I learned from Sean Carroll's slim volume. Endless Forms Most Beautiful describes the basic ideas and some of the history of evolutionary developmental biology. Dr. Carroll, a pioneer in the field, spends a good deal of time describing the effects of specific genes and proteins on the process of a fertilized egg growing into an organism. In a way that is refreshing for a popular science book, Carroll never skimps on the biology. At times when another author might have resorted to a metaphor, he buckles down and teaches a course on the logic of genetic switches.

In one of the most frustrating passages in The Darwin Wars, Brown quotes a full half of a page from an important paper on kin selection. The original author, William Hamilton, has just drawn the reader in when Brown breaks out of the quotation and ended the passage with "- and so on for two paragraphs of mathematics, after which he surfaced to say...." Brown seems to feel the need to shield the reader from the meat of this important work, as though he assumes the reader is either not interested or incapable of understanding.

Carroll, on the other hand, fills his work with detailed explanations and colorful photographs. As a good teacher must, he assumes his readers are both interested and capable, and is willing to hold our hands until we've made it through to the next chapter.

Another nice thing about Carroll is that, unlike Dawkins and Gould, he does not indulge in many just-so stories. There is much to be said for these, and I recommend that everyone read The Blind Watchmaker, which amounts to a collection of them. But there is precious little science to them. In Watchmaker. Dawkins discusses mimicry in butterflies, and attempts to come up with a plausible story for explaining how natural selection could take an organism which looks 5% like a dangerous cousin or 5% like a twig and, in a series of small steps, make the resemblance nearly perfect. Carroll, on the other hand, admits that this is a "mystery," but discusses the research avenues which may lead to clues, and the specific protein groups which probably play important roles in butterfly wing construction.

Carroll was not visited by the bad fairy at birth. He uses metaphor sparingly, and at times I wished that he had let himself go a bit more, that he had explained an idea a second or third time, with a bit more flourish. He is without other writers’ willingness to paint in bold strokes, and as a consequence Andrew Brown will probably never write a book about him. But he is full of ideas, and you will finish his book feeling smarter.

All in all, The Darwin Wars is worth picking up if you already understand both Gould and Dawkins, and you're interested in learning more about the characters themselves. Endless Forms Most Beautiful, on the otherhand, should be enjoyed by any lay person interested in biology.

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