Abstract

David Young invites his readers on a journey of adventure and discovery; a journey for the mind, and an adventure in the realm of ideas. By retracing the steps of men who developed the theory of biological evolution, we see how scientists came to recognize the nature and importance of natural selection. The journey begins in the seventeenth century, when even the most accomplished naturalists knew next to nothing of biology as we understand it today. Steadily increasing knowledge and the quickening pace of research began to uncover much new evidence, and in the middle of the century Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace incorporated this evidence in a comprehensive theory of evolution. In the twentieth century biology has become steadily more specialized, so the book picks out some of the main developments that bring us to studies of evolution being carried out today.