How to Read Darwin (Paperback, 1st American ed)

Charles Darwin s permanent legacy is his broad, abstract theories of evolution and natural selection, theories that he tested against an astonishing array of natural history evidence in his writing. Mark Ridley uses a question-and-answer approach to explain how Darwin carefully tackled problems, and shows here how the reader can understand Darwin s arguments by first working out which question Darwin had implicitly set himself to answer. Ridley concentrates on understanding Darwin s most important books, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, but he also examines a sample from one of Darwin s other works on the emotions, as one representative from Darwin s lesser-known works that ranged from flower pollination to coral reefs, from animal domestication to landscaping by earthworms."