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Evolution
Introducing the latest ideas on how life originated and diversified on earth, this new edition of a classic work provides a concise and engaging summary of modern evolutionary theory. The heavily illustrated book is intended for readers with little or no formal training in science and is an ideal introduction for students. Teachers of biology will also find the book a valuable reference text. Among the features of the second edition: * new chapters on neural evolution and gene evolution
* explanations of the latest theories on the evolution of humans
* extensive updates throughout, with emphasis on molecular evolution
* many new or updated illustrations
* comprehensive coverage, clear and concise presentation
* explanations of the latest theories on the evolution of humans
* extensive updates throughout, with emphasis on molecular evolution
* many new or updated illustrations
* comprehensive coverage, clear and concise presentation
- GenresScience
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
21 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 3, 2025
AN EXCELLENT UPDATING OF A FINE AND FRANK ‘OVERVIEW’ OF EVOLUTION
British paleontologist Colin Patterson (1933-1998) wrote in the Preface to this 1999 (posthumously published) 2nd edition his 1978 book, “When I wrote the first edition of this book I had one overriding aim, to keep it short and simple… The intervening years have certainly been the most dramatic and exhilarating in the entire history of evolutionary biology, with important developments… and with evolutionary theory being brought into the courtroom and the polling booth by creationists… I could say that the first edition of the book was written in ignorance and the second in knowledge… The knowledge in my first edition came from education and indoctrination; it was that neo-Darwinism is certainty. The knowledge in this second edition comes more from working things out for myself; it is that evolution is certainty. And part of the ignorance in the first edition concerned the difference between neo-Darwinism and evolution, whereas the ignorance of this edition is of the completeness of neo-Darwinism as an explanation of evolution.”
He says of the genetic code, “The simplicity of this arrangement is surely the most stunning knowledge ever to have come out of biology. The only instructions in the genetic code are for assembling proteins. And the extraordinary variety of life seems ultimately to be due solely to difference in amino acid sequences. Genes for ‘blue eyes’ or ‘wrinkled seed coat’ do not exist; such features are the phenotypic consequences of a genotype that specifies nothing but proteins.” (Pg. 20)
He observes, “Because a mutation may occur whenever DNA replicates, and since cell division, which involves DNA replication, is going on all the time, we accumulate mutations throughout life. Mutations are rare events, but our bodies contain so many dividing cells that every human probably carries hundreds of base pair mutations that have arisen during his or her life.” (Pg. 31-32)
He acknowledges, “Most observed mutations are harmful and recessive but it does not follow that new mutations will also be recessive, for it is very likely that the mutations observed… have appeared millions of times before in previous generations and it may be that selection has adjusted the dominant/recessive mechanism so that the mutation does the least damage, and is recessive. We do know that the dominant or recessive status of a particular gene is not fixed for all time, but can be changed by modifying genes… The fate of a new harmful mutation will certainly be influenced by whether it is dominant, recessive or incompletely dominant. The effects of a dominant mutant will be fully expressed in the next generation, a partially dominant mutation will have some immediate effect in this generation, and a recessive mutation will not be expressed at all in the heterozygotes. Its fate will also depend on how harmful it is… a dominant lethal mutation that kills all carriers early in life, before they can reproduce, will disappear immediately…” (Pg. 38-39)
He clarifies, “Experiments with the fly Drosophila have established that genetic drift can cause even slightly disadvantageous mutations to be fixed in small populations, against the pressure of selection. But the role of genetic drift in evolution is controversial, partly because of difficulties in recognizing neutral mutations or their effects. The fact that some attribute of an organism APPEARS useless is not a guarantee that it IS useless. Investigation of apparently useless features has shown that some do, after all, have survival value… it is never possible to prove that a feature has no survival value and is selectively neutral…” (Pg. 43)
He continues, “If a favorable mutation appears in one member of a population its fate… will be influenced by whether it is dominant, recessive, or incompletely dominant. But initially its fate is likely to be more subject to chance than is a harmful mutation. This is because beneficial mutations have a much narrower range than harmful mutations… In stable environments favorable mutations are likely to have only small effects, and whether they increase in frequency or disappear will be much influenced by chance.” (Pg. 45)
He argues, “These two models of speciation are not mutually exclusive. The gradual model (the one favored by Darwin) might prevail in rather uniform environments, and the rapid, revolutionary one (sometimes called ‘quantum speciation’) in fluctuating or ‘patchy’ environments. Intermediates between the two models can be imagined. Examples can be found to fit each model, and each has its devotees. But the fact is that no one has actually [observed] the origin of even one new species in nature and we cannot tell if the gradual or quantum model is the dominant one. Nor can we evaluate the title of Darwin’s book (‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection’), for we do not yet know whether the dominant force in speciation is Darwin’s natural selection, or the neutral changes that will inevitably accumulate to differentiate populations that are separated.” (Pg. 98-99)
He points out, “Darwin paid special attention to what he called ‘rudimentary organs’ (now usually called ‘vestigial’ organs), structures like the teeth found in embryonic baleen whales (which are toothless as adults) or the small pelvis and thigh bone buried in the body wall of whales and some snakes. He noted all sorts of vestigial organs in humans: our rudimentary body hair, our wisdom teeth… the coccyx (or vestige of a tail) and the vermiform appendix… These vestigial organs are clearly homologous with essential working parts in related species… Darwin found these vestiges or rudiments particularly interesting because they are difficult or impossible to explain under the ‘plan of creation’ view that he was opposing, because they imply imperfection or uselessness, not the perfect match of form and function found in their homologues. Under Darwin’s view… vestigial organs are readily explained as structures that were functional in ancestral species but are not selected against. It can be argued that we know too little of the function and construction of organisms, and that a whale’s pelvis or the hair on our legs really serves some purpose, but there are vestiges at the molecular level which escape that criticism.” (Pg. 106)
He admits, “Darwin devoted two chapters of ‘The Origin of Species’ to fossils, but spent the whole of the first in saying how imperfect the geological record of life is. It seemed obvious to him that, if his theory of evolution is correct, fossils ought to provide incontrovertible proof of it because each geological stratum should contain links between the species of earlier and later strata, and… it would be possible to arrange them in ancestor-descendant sequences and so build up a precise picture of the course of evolution. This was not true in Darwin’s time and today, after many more decades of assiduous fossil-collecting, the picture still has extensive gaps.” (Pg. 106)
He asks, “are we justified … in making the leap from small scale changes like selection in peppered moths, speciation in the Galapagos … to large-scale results such as the existence of elephants and oak trees? Some evolutionists have felt unhappy about this: while accepting that the gradual accumulation of small differences, due to point mutations, gene duplications and chromosome mutations, will account for the divergence with such groups as butterflies or birds, or land vertebrates... vertebrates as a whole requires innovations that cannot be satisfactorily explained by gradual, small-scale changes. So they have supposed that major innovations arise at one step, by large-scale, favorable mutations, or ‘macromutations.’ The useful name ‘hopeful monsters’ is given to the original lucky carriers of such mutations…
“The main reason for inventing these macromutations is that some features of plants and animals can hardly be imagined as arising by gradual steps; the adaptive value of the perfected structure is easily seen but intermediate steps seem to be useless, or even harmful. For example, what use is a lens in the eye unless it works?... How can the segmentation of … an earthworm or a centipede arise bit by bit? An animal is either segmented or it is not. The usual answer to such questions is that they are due only to failures of the imagination. Rudimentary feathers would be useful to an ancestral bird if, like living birds, it was warm-blooded, for they would conserve heat by insulating it… These examples illustrate the principle of preadaptation, which explains puzzles like feathers and lungs by showing that intermediate stages in their evolution could be promoted by selection not because of their present use (flying, breathing) but for a quite different reason (heat conservation, buoyancy)… Some of the innovations requiring ‘hopeful monsters’ have yielded to explanations of this sort, but others remain unsolved and the idea of macromutations as a force in evolution persists.” (Pg. 113-114)
He says of the creationist movement, “Because creationists lack scientific research or evidence to support such theories as a young earth (10,000 years old), a world-wide flood (Noah’s), and separate ancestries for humans and apes, their common tactic is to attack evolution by hunting out debate or dissent among evolutionary biologists. When I published the first edition of this book I was hardly aware of creationism but, during the 1980s… I learned that one should think carefully about candor in argument… in case one was furnishing creationist campaigners with ammunition in the form of ‘quotable quotes,’ often taken out of context. Biologists… took creationists seriously enough in the 1980s to produce a string of books promoting evolution and showing the errors of creationist anti-science.” (Pg. 122)
This book is an excellent overview of evolution, and it is unfortunate that creationists used Patterson (e.g., by surreptitiously recording his 1981 lecture, ‘Can You Tell Me Anything About Evolution?’) in their presentations---which, as you can see from the above quotation, resulted in him being afraid to publicly express some honest ideas and doubts.
British paleontologist Colin Patterson (1933-1998) wrote in the Preface to this 1999 (posthumously published) 2nd edition his 1978 book, “When I wrote the first edition of this book I had one overriding aim, to keep it short and simple… The intervening years have certainly been the most dramatic and exhilarating in the entire history of evolutionary biology, with important developments… and with evolutionary theory being brought into the courtroom and the polling booth by creationists… I could say that the first edition of the book was written in ignorance and the second in knowledge… The knowledge in my first edition came from education and indoctrination; it was that neo-Darwinism is certainty. The knowledge in this second edition comes more from working things out for myself; it is that evolution is certainty. And part of the ignorance in the first edition concerned the difference between neo-Darwinism and evolution, whereas the ignorance of this edition is of the completeness of neo-Darwinism as an explanation of evolution.”
He says of the genetic code, “The simplicity of this arrangement is surely the most stunning knowledge ever to have come out of biology. The only instructions in the genetic code are for assembling proteins. And the extraordinary variety of life seems ultimately to be due solely to difference in amino acid sequences. Genes for ‘blue eyes’ or ‘wrinkled seed coat’ do not exist; such features are the phenotypic consequences of a genotype that specifies nothing but proteins.” (Pg. 20)
He observes, “Because a mutation may occur whenever DNA replicates, and since cell division, which involves DNA replication, is going on all the time, we accumulate mutations throughout life. Mutations are rare events, but our bodies contain so many dividing cells that every human probably carries hundreds of base pair mutations that have arisen during his or her life.” (Pg. 31-32)
He acknowledges, “Most observed mutations are harmful and recessive but it does not follow that new mutations will also be recessive, for it is very likely that the mutations observed… have appeared millions of times before in previous generations and it may be that selection has adjusted the dominant/recessive mechanism so that the mutation does the least damage, and is recessive. We do know that the dominant or recessive status of a particular gene is not fixed for all time, but can be changed by modifying genes… The fate of a new harmful mutation will certainly be influenced by whether it is dominant, recessive or incompletely dominant. The effects of a dominant mutant will be fully expressed in the next generation, a partially dominant mutation will have some immediate effect in this generation, and a recessive mutation will not be expressed at all in the heterozygotes. Its fate will also depend on how harmful it is… a dominant lethal mutation that kills all carriers early in life, before they can reproduce, will disappear immediately…” (Pg. 38-39)
He clarifies, “Experiments with the fly Drosophila have established that genetic drift can cause even slightly disadvantageous mutations to be fixed in small populations, against the pressure of selection. But the role of genetic drift in evolution is controversial, partly because of difficulties in recognizing neutral mutations or their effects. The fact that some attribute of an organism APPEARS useless is not a guarantee that it IS useless. Investigation of apparently useless features has shown that some do, after all, have survival value… it is never possible to prove that a feature has no survival value and is selectively neutral…” (Pg. 43)
He continues, “If a favorable mutation appears in one member of a population its fate… will be influenced by whether it is dominant, recessive, or incompletely dominant. But initially its fate is likely to be more subject to chance than is a harmful mutation. This is because beneficial mutations have a much narrower range than harmful mutations… In stable environments favorable mutations are likely to have only small effects, and whether they increase in frequency or disappear will be much influenced by chance.” (Pg. 45)
He argues, “These two models of speciation are not mutually exclusive. The gradual model (the one favored by Darwin) might prevail in rather uniform environments, and the rapid, revolutionary one (sometimes called ‘quantum speciation’) in fluctuating or ‘patchy’ environments. Intermediates between the two models can be imagined. Examples can be found to fit each model, and each has its devotees. But the fact is that no one has actually [observed] the origin of even one new species in nature and we cannot tell if the gradual or quantum model is the dominant one. Nor can we evaluate the title of Darwin’s book (‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection’), for we do not yet know whether the dominant force in speciation is Darwin’s natural selection, or the neutral changes that will inevitably accumulate to differentiate populations that are separated.” (Pg. 98-99)
He points out, “Darwin paid special attention to what he called ‘rudimentary organs’ (now usually called ‘vestigial’ organs), structures like the teeth found in embryonic baleen whales (which are toothless as adults) or the small pelvis and thigh bone buried in the body wall of whales and some snakes. He noted all sorts of vestigial organs in humans: our rudimentary body hair, our wisdom teeth… the coccyx (or vestige of a tail) and the vermiform appendix… These vestigial organs are clearly homologous with essential working parts in related species… Darwin found these vestiges or rudiments particularly interesting because they are difficult or impossible to explain under the ‘plan of creation’ view that he was opposing, because they imply imperfection or uselessness, not the perfect match of form and function found in their homologues. Under Darwin’s view… vestigial organs are readily explained as structures that were functional in ancestral species but are not selected against. It can be argued that we know too little of the function and construction of organisms, and that a whale’s pelvis or the hair on our legs really serves some purpose, but there are vestiges at the molecular level which escape that criticism.” (Pg. 106)
He admits, “Darwin devoted two chapters of ‘The Origin of Species’ to fossils, but spent the whole of the first in saying how imperfect the geological record of life is. It seemed obvious to him that, if his theory of evolution is correct, fossils ought to provide incontrovertible proof of it because each geological stratum should contain links between the species of earlier and later strata, and… it would be possible to arrange them in ancestor-descendant sequences and so build up a precise picture of the course of evolution. This was not true in Darwin’s time and today, after many more decades of assiduous fossil-collecting, the picture still has extensive gaps.” (Pg. 106)
He asks, “are we justified … in making the leap from small scale changes like selection in peppered moths, speciation in the Galapagos … to large-scale results such as the existence of elephants and oak trees? Some evolutionists have felt unhappy about this: while accepting that the gradual accumulation of small differences, due to point mutations, gene duplications and chromosome mutations, will account for the divergence with such groups as butterflies or birds, or land vertebrates... vertebrates as a whole requires innovations that cannot be satisfactorily explained by gradual, small-scale changes. So they have supposed that major innovations arise at one step, by large-scale, favorable mutations, or ‘macromutations.’ The useful name ‘hopeful monsters’ is given to the original lucky carriers of such mutations…
“The main reason for inventing these macromutations is that some features of plants and animals can hardly be imagined as arising by gradual steps; the adaptive value of the perfected structure is easily seen but intermediate steps seem to be useless, or even harmful. For example, what use is a lens in the eye unless it works?... How can the segmentation of … an earthworm or a centipede arise bit by bit? An animal is either segmented or it is not. The usual answer to such questions is that they are due only to failures of the imagination. Rudimentary feathers would be useful to an ancestral bird if, like living birds, it was warm-blooded, for they would conserve heat by insulating it… These examples illustrate the principle of preadaptation, which explains puzzles like feathers and lungs by showing that intermediate stages in their evolution could be promoted by selection not because of their present use (flying, breathing) but for a quite different reason (heat conservation, buoyancy)… Some of the innovations requiring ‘hopeful monsters’ have yielded to explanations of this sort, but others remain unsolved and the idea of macromutations as a force in evolution persists.” (Pg. 113-114)
He says of the creationist movement, “Because creationists lack scientific research or evidence to support such theories as a young earth (10,000 years old), a world-wide flood (Noah’s), and separate ancestries for humans and apes, their common tactic is to attack evolution by hunting out debate or dissent among evolutionary biologists. When I published the first edition of this book I was hardly aware of creationism but, during the 1980s… I learned that one should think carefully about candor in argument… in case one was furnishing creationist campaigners with ammunition in the form of ‘quotable quotes,’ often taken out of context. Biologists… took creationists seriously enough in the 1980s to produce a string of books promoting evolution and showing the errors of creationist anti-science.” (Pg. 122)
This book is an excellent overview of evolution, and it is unfortunate that creationists used Patterson (e.g., by surreptitiously recording his 1981 lecture, ‘Can You Tell Me Anything About Evolution?’) in their presentations---which, as you can see from the above quotation, resulted in him being afraid to publicly express some honest ideas and doubts.
November 10, 2008
If Greg Krukonis's Evolution for Dummies is a perfect first introduction to evolution, the late Colin Patterson's Evolution is the perfect second introduction! It provides more details about genetic evolution. I was interested mainly in the mechanics of mutation and selection at the level of the DNA, and this book did not disappoint. Its explanations are clear and compact, unburdened by a lot of detail and yet meaty enough to make you feel like you (finally) understand genetics. This is not bedtime reading, but the book is eminently readable. There are lots of diagrams and pictures to help you along the way. There is also a great annotated bibliography, so now I have a pretty good idea of what my next reading options. Chapter 14 "Proof and disproof; science and politics" is philosophically naive (although still readable and enjoyable); but clearly this is a book about evolution, not the philosophy of science, so I didn't expect much from this chapter anyway.
November 10, 2009
Great introduction to evolutionary biology from a palaeontologist. Easy to follow but with enough technicalities to keep those with a more formal background interested.
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December 29, 2014Note to self: 2nd edition highly recommended
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews