WEIT joins Oxford’s “Landmark Science” series

April 25, 2016 • 12:30 pm

I haven’t rewritten WEIT, and, sadly, didn’t have time to write a new foreword to the book, but it’s just joined the Oxford University Press’s “Landmark Science” Series, acquiring a spiffy new cover (the design of all the covers is similar):

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Here’s a complete list:

Daniel Nettle: Personality
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
Dawkins: The Extended Phenotype
Dawkins (ed.): The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing
Roger Penrose: The Emperor’s New Mind
Addy Pross: What is Life?
Nick Lane: Oxygen
James Lovelock: Gaia
Michio Kaku: Hyperspace
Jerry Coyne: WEIT

Here’s Nick Lane’s Oxygen for comparison:

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And The Selfish Gene, which is in its 40th Anniversary edition and so gets a special black cover:

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51 thoughts on “WEIT joins Oxford’s “Landmark Science” series”

      1. It was an audacious hypothesis which provoked some new thinking. Unfortunately, our understanding of evolution, not to mention the evidence, says it is wrong, except perhaps in its weakest (coevolution) forms.

      2. Lovelock’s Gaia, or hypothesis of the actively self-regulating Earth, audaciously harped back to the 17th century. The work was most useful because it dramatically revealed how easy it is to get educated people to lap up woo.

          1. Wallace had a number of strange views including the divine creation of the human brsin (everything else evolved!). He was a spiritualist and an anti-vaxxer. He was ahead of his time in understanding an ecology as a functional unit, so yes he did believe in some early form of Gaia, though perhaps not on a planetary scale.

          2. Wallace didn’t let his spiritual views interfere much with his fierce defense of mechanistic materialialism in biology, outside of the human mind, and was in fact a stronger selectionist than Darwin himself. He considered man’s brain too ‘perfected’ and versatile beyond the needs of mere survival to be explained by mere natural selection. When the same claim is made for Olympic-level performances in artistic gymnastics, this line of argument does not seem so powerful.

      4. It was for me an interesting read after my zoology degree which consisted of lots of ecology. The book made me think bigger thoughts than what I was accustomed to from four years of heavy ecology study. Its broad view and its characterization of the entire biosphere as one interconnected ecosystem made it a book worth reading about 25 years ago.

        I find that with many books, the context of the time and place of me reading them has a large effect on my opinion and what I take away from them.

    2. Better than my score – 4.
      OTOH, my copy of Gaia is autographed by Lovelock.

  7. What an illustrious list. Congratulations!

    The only book I had major issues with was Penrose’s New Mind. It devolves into how QM can explain consciousness based on microtubules or something. Awful, new age stuff.

    1. I agree with you about Penrose’s conclusions, but there is an awful lot of good stuff as well.

      1. True. All the physics stuff is excellent and that is about 80% of the book. That makes the disastrous consciousness stuff more jarring.

        1. The logic stuff is also wrong. Feferman is probably the clearest version of this: the limitative results do not apply because there is no expectation that a machine be infallible. (He knows this and even remembers that Turing explained this beforehand, but doesn’t draw the conclusion.

    1. It’s an excellent review of abiogenesis and among other concepts in the field. I enjoyed greatly the discussion on how abiogenesis and evolution are really one continuous field of study rather than separate. Thoroughly recommend.

      1. I second that. A superb book, having as its key idea “natural selection = kinetic selection.”

        I wonder if the creationists ever ponder two facts: (1) the most common organic building blocks of life just happen to be created in Miller-Urey types of experiments, and (2) they are also thermodynamically stable, and hence endure, which means they build up in concentration over time.

        That, plus Pross’ key idea that products which form quickly (that is, whose reactions of formation have low activation energies) come to predominate (selection as a universal principle!) leads to a situation in which life becomes more or less inevitable. Systems chemistry is involved, and Pross explains it much better than I do. Very highly recommended.

        1. Meyer “addressed” that in the recent debate with Krauss, etc. He claims the Urey experiment (or rather genetic algorithms) require “mind”, and hence shows nothing about a “mind independent” origin of life or speciation. This has to take the cake for misunderstanding experimentation, but there you go.

          1. I guess Jebus zapped the chemicals with the lightning just so…

            The one thing that unites all creationists, regardless of which particular stripe, is that they do not understand natural selection.

  21. Congratulations, Jerry. It’s a real coup to be joining that estimable series, an acknowledgement that places you in the literary company of a rarified pantheon (if you will). Much deserved.

  23. That’s quite an honor. Congratulations. And your cover sports my favorite bird, a slightly spiffed-up iridescent Resplendant Quetzal!

  30. Congratulations. It is always nice to be recognized. And although I think Penrose’s book is largely mistaken, it is nice to be in such august company as him and Dawkins, etc.

  31. I’m on the road (Nova Scotia) and my contacts with the rest of the world are through a really bad internet connection so —
    Congratulations on a book so well done it has now officially become a classic.

    Snow flurries tonight in Halifax (26 April).

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