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'Why Evolution Is True,' by Jerry A. Coyne

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, February 11, 2009
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Why Evolution Is True

By Jerry A. Coyne

(Viking; 304 pages; $27.95)

Praise be the plucky Tiktaalik roseae, the "transitional form" that hauled itself out of the water 375 million years ago to bridge the span between fish and amphibians, whose descendants would, through the great biological engine known as natural selection, eventually produce bipedal locomotion, the opposable thumb and hydrogen fusion.

All hail Ambulocetus, the "walking whale" of 50 million years ago, which demonstrated that the current could go both ways by walking back into the water and turning into the baleen behemoths of today.

These are just two of the fascinating creatures profiled by Jerry A. Coyne of the University of Chicago's ecology and evolution department. Coyne sets out with a rather unscientific aim: the explanation of evolution and natural selection in terms that anyone with an elementary school reading ability can understand - which he spends the rest of the book backing up in quite a scientific way.

The arguments for creationism and intelligent design (ID) are deftly pinpointed, illuminated and exploded: "It doesn't seem so intelligent to design millions of species that are destined to go extinct, and then replace them with other, similar species, most of which will also vanish. ID supporters have never addressed this difficulty."

Beyond taking readers through the fundamentals of fossilization and archaeology, the author explains the building blocks of his discipline, such as speciation, common ancestry, genetic drift and the like.

Coyne never takes it on faith that evolution exists; his book is a constant proving of exactly how and why it can exist. While admitting that his own species focus is fruit flies, he never shies away from bigger (or older, or less or more complex) creatures outside his area of expertise, always returning to his primary point that evolutionary theory is an empirical, provable method of debunking the creation myth.

Besides explaining the human penchant for seafood, his description of how we evolved from ocean creatures is among the book's most fascinating offerings. He illustrates how successive embryonic formations demonstrate the genetic coding of long-distant species from which we are descended, and which sometimes bequeath us vestigial genes, traits and body parts. Nowhere is the author's language opaque or postgraduate; he seems to be genuinely concerned with showing how evolution works and why it's so important.

Moreover, the joy he takes in his work is evident on every page, whether he's offering a bone-by-bone analysis of how dinosaurs evolved into birds or describing how docile Japanese honeybees have come up with their particularly incendiary defense against marauding giant hornets. It's easy to see why the publisher went with this one on the anniversary of "On the Origin of Species"; Coyne seems to be one of Darwin's most dedicated yet down-to-earth cheerleaders.