Explaining Life Through Evolution by Prosanta Chakrabarty

Explaining Life Through Evolution Reviews

• 
  Udit Nair

  The book is an attempt to demystify evolution by setting things in perspective. There is nothing extraordinarily great in the book but yet it makes a great read because of the simplicity. Most of the points referred or discussed in the book are already known to scientist, professors and well read readers of evolution. The target audience is surely bigger than the groups mentioned above. The author wants the people from other aisles to have a look or at least try to grasp the beauty of evolution. I personally loved the part where the author busts the myth of superiority within life forms. It is actually insidious to think that humans are superior and we should not use a false notion of evolution to persuade people that they are better than other forms of life. I enjoyed the chapter "From So Simple a Beginning" which is a illustrated version/plot of Darwin's life.
  
  The most important and impactful chapter was the Sex/Gender/Sexuality. Very rarely I have seen this being discussed from the lens of the evolution. The author really manages to put points across in a lucid manner. The author goes on to assert that only homophobia/transphobia are unique to humans. All the non scientific bigotry about what's normal or accepted is actually a waste of time. Animals don't have genders like we do as its a social construct of humans. Even asking the question of why same sex sexual behavior exists in an evolutionary context assumes that "normal" is different sex- sexual behavior, and that shows ignorance about what normal sexuality is on the spectrum of evolution of life forms.
  
• 
  Inyas

  Verrijkend boek met een heldere recap van Darwin tot Aristoteles en Mendel. Het ontkrachten van creationisme en samenzweringstheorieën met wetenschappelijk onderbouwde metaforen op een ludieke manier zorgen ervoor dat dit boek leest als een trein! Must read. Kort en bondig in volgende TED :
  https://youtu.be/XyTcINLKq4c
  Time for some humility:
  "We are all hunks of water-logged flesh, hanging off of sticks of collagen and calcium, made up of teeming pockets of bacteria that are held together by strings of Blood all covered in an oily skin bag. We are frail naked apes with giant lollypop heads with exposed and vulnerable dangly bits that are so ill-equiped for life that we get tired after standing up still for ten minutes. We are thought to think we humans are perfect. The only thing we got going for us are our big brains, and we use those brains just enough to think we are better than everything else. "
• 
  Kim Williams

  A surprisingly readable and enjoyable book. It tackles many of the currently held erroneous preconceptions about evolution, including the ever popular "it's just a theory" argument. It explains that evolution is not a straight line of changing organisms but more of a very large family tree in which all life on earth is connected. A truth that humanity needs more than ever to recognize.
• 
  Dena McMurdie

  I found this book at the store and bought it because I've always been interested in biology and wanted to know how evolution works. The author is a university professor, and his ability to simplify a complex topic and make it digestible for the average person is apparent in this book.
  I learned so much from reading this book (why my Dad had a genetic condition but neither of his parents nor none of his kids did, for example). And I learned how evolution works. I've always wanted to know how (and WHY) one cell says to itself, I'm going to be different today, and then does it.
  If you want an easy-to-read overview of evolution, how it works, and where life comes from, this is an excellent read. It's perfect if you're just getting your feet wet with the topic, and the author provides many references and suggestions for diving deeper.
• 
  Patrick Tullis

  This is a great review or introduction to evolution. The pacing is good and the information isn’t overwhelming. The author also sites many primary sources and other books that allows for the reader to seek out additional information on topics of interest. Four stars because there is some “soap box” parts that undercuts the author’s stated goal of helping people understand evolution without making judgments on their personal beliefs.
  
  Pick it up if you are interested in learning about evolution.
• 
  Pat

  I read a lot of general overview books on evolution and this is one of the better ones. He teaches introductory evolutionary biology at LSU and says that the resistance to the facts seems based on students' lack of trust in science. That is, they don't really understand both the scientific method and they also don't understand things like radiocarbon dating, DNA, etc. Once students understand this background (if they ever do), then they can approach science as it really is: constantly in search of new explanations or verification of old ones. Great book.
• 
  Sajith Kumar

  We are said to be living in a post-truth era where truth is not deemed something absolute. People accept anything as truth which they wish it to be. Social media makes a celebrity’s truth the same for all his followers. However, these are philosophical concepts open to interpretation at many levels and ways. I don’t know how scientific concepts which are always true can be reconciled with the concept of post-truth I mentioned above. Touching an electrically live object causes a painful experience is a proposition that is true whether you believe that there is such a thing as electricity or not. But facts in natural sciences cannot be expressed in such outright terms even though a large number of researchers have studied the phenomena and are convinced of its merit. Evolution is one such fact of the development of life on this planet. Since it runs counter to the fundamental postulate of Abrahamic religions on the creation of life, there is widespread opposition to it. We have seen similar resistance in the past when the Church opposed Galileo’s heliocentric theory and know what has come out of it eventually. Till that time, evolution will continue to be resisted by believers who propose comic alternatives such as Creation or Intelligent Design. This book is intended to explain the topic of evolution ‘to anyone with an open mind to learning’. It is also meant to be a tool to aid those who themselves want to explain the topic to others. Prosanta Chakrabarty is an evolutionary biologist at Louisiana State University where he is a professor and curator. He was born in Canada and brought up in the USA.
  
  Creationists often ridicule evolution as ‘just’ a theory of the development of life. The author accepts that but adds the clarification that a theory in science is an overarching term that has stood the test of time. A theory is often interchangeably used with ‘law’. But in everyday parlance, ‘theory’ is something questionable that remains to be proven. It is this misconception which serves as a perfect opportunity for religion to teach creation and intelligent design in US schools as ‘alternatives’. Chakrabarty then explains Darwin’s ideas on what happed on earth. There is a single origin of life here. That was a huge leap forward in thinking. Natural selection is the causative mechanism to explain the diversity of all life. This idea was far ahead of its time when Darwin first introduced it. Most scientists then was of the opinion that different human races originated in distinct ways and places in the long past.
  
  The book glances upon the period when Darwin’s “Origin of Species’ first appeared. Though Darwin had postulated that species groups mutate over time, he had no idea of how it actually came about. Unknown to Darwin, the ideas of genetics were just taking shape in the garden of Gregor Mendel and anything like DNA was not even dreamed of. That is the beauty and power of Darwin’s theory. Later discoveries corroborated its hypotheses and strengthened it on the face of severe criticism on the spiritual front. The zeitgeist of the time was that offspring were a mix of their parents, which is called blending inheritance. If this was true, variation would be lost in each generation due to the indiscriminate mixing. Mendel’s experiments proved this wrong and established that genetic traits are carried to future generations in discrete form rather than continuous. But Mendel did not know how variation was maintained in the gene pool. Mistakes in copying billions of DNA pairs cause mutations and change in traits. The author also explains how different groups in a species who are separated by geographical barriers change into different species in a process called speciation. Here, isolation and time is the key formula. The gene pool of separated groups will diverge through non-adaptive forces (neutral mutations, genetic drift) and adaptive forces (natural selection) due to the different environments these populations find themselves in.
  
  A notable feature in religious revelations of the origin of life is that Man is the perfect creation of God. The Semitic religions claim that Man was created in God’s image. This book punches holes in this argument by highlighting evolutionary accretions in the human body that denigrates God’s talent as a craftsman, not to say of the blunders He has committed in ‘designing’ the human body. Several examples are given, of which the kneecap is one which is a troublesome set of tendons and ligaments where a ball-and-joint like the shoulder would have been a better design. The blood pressure in human body is more than other animals as we took to bipedalism later in the series and a higher pressure is required to pump against the force of gravity. But, only one coronary artery is there to supply blood to heart’s muscles to do the job. Several animals have more. Fish hearts are more foolproof that don’t get easily clogged with fat. As a land animal, we have the advantage of getting more oxygen directly from air than from water, but gas exchange is more difficult through lungs than with gills. Moreover, we use the same tubing for breathing as well as feeding with the attendant risk of choking.
  
  The author has not been successful in achieving his objective of making evolution easily understandable to lay readers. But he has made it a guidebook of Wokeism by unnecessary tirades against supposed social injustices that are irrelevant in a book on evolution. In an instance of extremely perverted sensitivity, Chakrabarty advocates that humans don’t need genders. This is not due to any scientific or survival imperative, but due to some individuals in the LGBTQ community show deviant behaviour from their assigned genders. He then picks bones at the scientific community which usually represents a white man on the node to represent all humanity in the tree of life. He argues that representation matters and seeing the same subgroup represented as the ideal human is damaging. He doesn’t mention what it damages – probably wokeism, extreme liberalism or leftism? What in fact is the harm done if a person drawing the tree of life put the image of a person who looks familiar (or similar) to him? If evolution was discovered by African scholars, a black man would have appeared there and the world would have accepted that too. The author brings in Donald Trump into this book by quoting one of his speeches confusing viruses and their supposed vulnerability to antibiotics. Even Narendra Modi is there at the receiving end of the author’s barbs because he and his party are accused to be promoting ‘eugenic-themed pseudo-science’. He then calls Henry Ford ‘Hitler’s Hero’. He even manages to include Hindutva and Dalit-Brahmin hierarchy in this book. This is good political propaganda but a poor scientific treatise. He is more kind to the creationists than the political right.
  
  The book is a total disappointment as it is ill-focused on all important topics and dwells too long on side-issues. Each chapter is practically independent of each other and hence the entire ensemble lacks coherence. Here you see the individual VIBGYOR colours but not the composite white light. Concepts are explained by illustrations that are complex, intimidating, not self-evident and probably created by a person who finds evolution confusing to himself. Each of them includes a half-page caption to make it appear intelligible. The book incorporates an irrelevant comic strip on Darwin’s life that is totally redundant with nothing new or interesting. Some illustrations printed in monochrome with detailed captions are repeated as colour plates with the exact same captions. Altogether, this is a miserably failed attempt to explain the subject in a meaningful way. Obviously, the author has wasted much time in this effort and the readers are advised not to repeat the same folly.
  
  The book is not recommended.
  
• 
  Sergio Segura

  A well-written, well-illustrated book that serves as a comprehensive intro to evolutionary biology or an excellent supplement for teachers of evolutionary biology. It's a gold mine of good quotes. Personally, I enjoyed the early-on jabs at a certain slobbering, lobster-obsessed pseud.
• 
  Vinay Bysani

  This is an easy to read science book. Author being a ichthyologist, has a lot to offer in explaining how we evolved from fishes. He also ensures he addresses the myths about evolution. The book brings up very interesting food for thought like why we have 5 fingers instead of 8, and why sharks would not make it well on land, and how bipedalism is not a great idea after all. We have this notion that all of evolution lead to humans and we are as perfect as we can be. However, coming from a biology professor, he explains how this is not at all true. And in fact we have so many misgivings biologically, and how few families of fishes evolved superior biological than humans. There is a lot to learn on tree of life, ancestor to descendent relationships. The chapters are small-ish and are easy to grasp.
  
• 
  Lewis Woolston

  This author was inspired by a recent piece of legislation in his home state of Louisiana that ordered the teaching of creationism in state schools. Firstly, good on him for fighting back against the knuckle-draggers of the the religious right. We need more of this courage.
  However....
  This is not a great book. It lacks the precise, almost surgical, logic and vision of Dawkins at his best. The way Dawkins would explain a difficult concept in a way that not only made you understand but made you feel smarter for having read it.
  This guy just lacks that magic touch that Dawkins has.
  This is probably better aimed at a high school age readership.
• 
  Paul Hummel

  Light writing style but informative
  
  My wife is into Intelligent Design theory and I was hoping for some harder info and data for rebuttal. When examples would be given, I couldn't find citations and references to studies and papers.
  I.e, gill > larynx or mice populations divided by a river. Was the latter a hypothetical example?
  Overall I enjoyed the book.
• 
  Juv

  I read this book to understand the basics of evolution because I found textbooks hard to read at first so I started this casual read and it did help me to understand some basics. later I started reading my textbook along with the book, it is a good book to start.
• 
  Kashish Mehta

  Good but didn’t finish it it’s like a post sapient read
• 
  Foggygirl

  An ok read but fairly simplistic.
• 
  M

  The greatest popular science book on evolution I've ever read. A must read for intro biology classes.
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  Raffi O’Keefe

  This book was so intresting and funny