This book is a collection of essays derived from the 1995 Darwin College Lectures. All but one have the word “evolution” in their titles and this theme is intended to unify contributions from fields as diverse as cellular development, urban decline, English literature and cosmology. Sadly, the interpretations placed on the concept of evolution are as diverse as the topics dealt with and have little in common beyond a process of change and diversification. Some of the suggestions that these processes share a common mechanism are fanciful to say the least and demonstrate as clearly as any book I have read the dangers of argument by analogy.

That is not to say that the individual contributions, viewed in isolation, lack intrinsic merit. Indeed the essays on The Evolution of Cellular Development by Lewis Wolpert and on The Evolution of the Universe by Martin Rees are each highly stimulating expositions of their respective fields. But - and I make no apology for labouring the point - the processes by which cells differentiate into distinctive tissues and the homogeneous ball of matter that originated in the Big Bang differentiated into various types of subatomic particle have virtually nothing in common.

In an essay on The Evolution of the Novel, Gillian Beer freely admits that she does not believe that the novel evolved and instead discusses how novelists have handled evolutionary themes in their works. An essay on The Evolution of London by Richard Rogers is a perceptive and powerful analysis of the city’s problems, but has absolutely no bearing on the concepts that account for biological evolution.

In an essay on the evolution of science, Freeman Dyson draws some highly unsatisfactory analogies. One of these is between speciation in the biological world and phase transitions such as the freezing of water from liquid to solid or “symmetry breaking” in the early stages of the formation of the universe. A second is between symbiosis, specifically that between two prokaryotic cells that produced the first eukaryotes, and astronomical phenomena such as the interaction of stars in binary systems. Not only is the theoretical foundation of such analogies extremely shaky, and inadequately explained here, but also it is far from clear how they lead to any sort of useful, even less predictive, insight into either set of phenomena.

Other essays include The Evolution of Guns and Germs by Jared Diamond (see review of Guns, Germs And Steel in the June 1998 Newsletter for a detailed analysis of Diamond’s views), Boyle’s Law to Darwin’s Revolution by Stephen Jay Gould and The Evolution of Society by Tom Ingold. In his essay, Ingold argues that to apply the term evolution to the process of organic adaptation described in The Origin of Species is a misnomer and that true evolution is characterised by a progressive unfolding of organised complexity such as individual development or social and cultural change. Whether the fact that the common usage that has developed over the past century does not reflect semantic purity is actually a constraint on the understanding of the evolutionary process is far from clear, although Ingold apparently thinks that it is.

The theme that adaptation is the core process that Darwin sought to explain is pursued by Stephen Jay Gould. He demonstrates the continuity of a distinctively British preoccupation with adaptation from the work of Robert Boyle in the mid seventeenth century through the natural philosophy of William Paley to the meticulous observations recorded by Darwin himself. This contrasts with, for example, a focus on classification in the natural history of Louis Agassiz and some other continental naturalists.

So, when Andrew Fabian says in his introduction that “the concept of evolution … is a central theme that cannot be ignored”, I beg to differ. There are many fundamentally different concepts addressed in this book and the fact that they can all be called evolution is a source more of confusion than of coherence. But do not let that put you off reading it.

Robert Peel