A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination

by Marek Kohn (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.25

  'A marvellous book.' New Scientist 'A real triumph.' Guardian A Reason for Everything is a brilliant and surprising fusion of science and biography. It is a very human book about the Englishness of evolutionary theory and the lives and personalities - often eccentric and controversial - of those who made it. 'Marek Kohn has written yet another brilliant book about great debates in science.' Neal Ascherson, Observer 'A well-written and carefully researched account of some of the main British players in the world of evolution. Every evolutionist should read it.' Steve Jones, Nature 'An educative and fascinating tale ...Kohn is a wonderful writer.' A. C. Grayling, Literary Review

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $3.25

  A Reason for Everything is about Britain and natural history, butterflies and snails, impassioned beliefs, and ideological struggles. The book begins with Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered the idea of natural selection for himself in 1858, while his own life hung in a precarious, malarial balance - and closes with a portrait of Richard Dawkins, Britain's most prominent living advocate of natural selection. Charting the lives of some of the major thinkers in the years between, including Ronald Aylmer Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, John Maynard Smith and Bill Hamilton, A Reason for Everything is an elegant and sophisticated account of Darwinism's progression from the nineteenth-century to the present.