by Geerat J. Vermeij
Thomas Dunne Books, November 2010
Evolution isn’t limited to biology. It’s everywhere. Descent with modification, according to Geerat Vermeij’s thesis, organizes, explains, and predicts unconnected facts and provides a coherent framework for understanding the world. In The Evolutionary World, Vermeij takes on the skeptics—both those with valid questions and those with irrational ones—and shows how the struggle for existence leads to variety and creativity. His show-and-tell tour of the adaptive universe includes global warming, religion, Adam Smith’s theories of economics, “Darwinian homeland security,” and the future of the human species.
Fortunately for his polemic, Vermeij isn’t the straw man of creationist fantasy—joyless, ascetic, and amoral. Rather, despite—or maybe because of—the fact that he has been blind since the age of three, ...
