I bought this book because I'm fascinated by the idea of evolution - I mean, at first glance it appears utterly preposterous, right? So I wanted to take a closer look. I started by reading The Origin of Species (Darwin, of course). That was well worth-while but clearly his theory was wrong, for many reasons, most of which are given in the book, by Darwin himself. The key problem for Darwin was that whilst he knew there had to be some kind of inheritance of characteristics, he had no idea what the mechanism was. Genetics came to the rescue of evolutionary theories by providing such a mechanism. OK - so now I had to find out what a modern theory of evolution looked like. I read Niles Eldredge's Re-inventing Darwin, which turned out to be a book making a counter-case to ideas proposed by Dawkins. I found it pretty convincing, but then I hadn't read any Dawkins. It didn't really provide what I was looking for, anyway; the book doesn't set out a complete theory of evolution, instead it takes an academic debate into the popular science arena. Much time goes by and I end up with Gould's last collection of essays. It turns out that he was strongly opposed to many of Dawkins' ideas, too - but that book only gave a sketch of a theory, in two essays. Time to actually read some Dawkins, then and give the guy a fair hearing. I picked up his most famous book and found that I'd made another blunder; The Selfish Gene is about the evolution of altruism! Basically it's about animal behaviour. Fer goodness' sake; I might have to start reading the blurb before I buy books on evolution!

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