Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives

The media could not be loaded.  This was a required read while I was completing my psych undergrad courses. Interesting read for those who like psychology! Purchased this a while back and looks like it’s brand new!

It is distressing to see yet more unnecessary arguments revolving around evolution: misunderstandings on the one hand and dogmatic insistence on the other. And it may surprise you to discover where we find the scientists and the people of religious faith.A key point, and one that it developed exceptionally well in this terrific book, is that evolution is not just about human origins, dinosaurs and fossils. The model can be usefully applied to almost every facet of existence. Living systems have a natural tendency to evolve toward ever-greater order and complexity, while "inorganic" matter tends toward increasing entropy.David Sloan Wilson has written some excellent scholarly works on evolution and this is his first book for a general audience. He is a man on a mission. Five years ago he attracted considerable praise, but also some controversy for his book  Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society  in which he attempted to bridge the gap between evolutionary theory and religion.Wilson is distinguished professor of biological sciences with a joint appointment in anthropology at Binghamton University. He has become convinced that evolution can be more widely accepted once people understand its consequences for human welfare and he now directs a campus-wide evolutionary studies program called EvoS that is being adopted by other universities.He is on record as saying that, "When evolution is presented as unthreatening, explanatory, and useful, it can be easily grasped and appreciated by most people, regardless of their religious or political beliefs."Wilson must be a natural teacher: his language is straightforward and evocative and he knows when and how to insert the compelling anecdotes. He outlines the basic principles of evolution in a way that should be easily accessible for non-experts. He then uses these evolutionary principles to explain a range of phenomena: Why do wild dogs have curly tails? Why do some beetles commit infanticide? Why do people engage in behaviors that do not seem to be adaptive, like laughing and creating art?He uses published research to try and answer many other questions. For example, is there a biological advantage to being a highly sensitive person? One answer is that under very stressful conditions, they are able to find meaning where other cannot. This brings to mind the work of Viktor Frankl who found that people who could find meaning in the face of terrible adversity were more likely to survive the concentration camps of the Holocaust.Wilson also believes that religion is a social glue that enables groups of people to interact, function and survive as coherent units.Nobody will agree with every one of his hypotheses, but they are fun and interesting reading, and his writing always stimulates and challenges. Even if you disagree with some of his conclusions, or feel that they undervalue human spiritual experience, they are well worth reading.Highly recommended.Richard G. Petty, MD, author of  Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life

David Sloan Wilson's book is a gem. In some ways, it's the best general statement of how evolutionary science would explain human life. It's written in a clear and engaging style that will appeal to general readers as well as scholars. I will use it as a reading for a general course on evolution for undergraduate students from across my university, and I anticipate that it will stimulate their interest.This book is based on Wilson's course on the idea of evolution at Binghamton University, which is the one required course for an interdisciplinary program on "Evolutionary Studies." The course and the book survey Wilson's many interests and research topics in evolutionary reasoning. The book organizes all of this into a broad evolutionary view of how human life fits into the order of nature. He shows how evolutionary thinking provides a common language through which the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities can be unified into a shared vision of liberal education.The general theme of the book is conveyed by the title. It's a book "for everyone," a book that makes evolutionary reasoning comprehensible to any human being willing to think about it. And it presents evolution as a way of making sense of our lives as fitting within the natural order of the whole. In arguing that we are "100 per cent a product of evolution," Wilson denies both religious creationism and secular creationism. The religious creationist believes that human beings are set apart from nature by their God-given traits. The secular creationist believes that human beings are set apart from nature by their capacities for rational choice and cultural learning, which create a human realm of artifice outside of nature. The religious creationist denies Darwinian evolution completely. The secular creationist accepts Darwinian evolution as explaining the ultimate causes of the living world as including the human body, while insisting that the human mind and human culture transcend Darwinian evolution. Both forms of creationism assume the idea of human beings as "transcendent selves" above the natural world.To support his claim tht Darwinian evolution explains all of human life, Wilson must defend a broad conception of evolution as including group selection as well as individual selection and cultural evolution as well as genetic evolution. He must then show how human evolution working at many levels provides the ultimate explanation for uniquely human traits such as family life, morality, politics, religion, science, and the arts (including dance, music, literature, and the visual arts).Edward O. Wilson's SOCIOBIOLOGY began the contemporary intellectual movement for applying evolutionary thinking to the social behavior of all animals, including human beings. Now, David Wilson's EVOLUTION FOR EVERYBODY surveys the main ideas in that intellectual movement while pointing ahead to new frontiers of research.

This is a book everyone should read. It is so interesting and educational. Sheds light on so many things in life.

Just what was needed!

Aardige boek met een wat storende stijl van zelfverheerlijking. De titel geeft het idee dat dit een boek is voor een zeer breed publiek, maar ik betwijfel of dat werkelijk zo is. Het lijkt me daar te academisch voor.

Schnelle Lieferung, Produkt sehr gut

I think this book is boring and the author was not achived the purpose of the theme. I really don't like