Splat

Starboy,

My comments were more flip than you deserved. Sorry about that.

My point was that, unlike fasion, good theories stay with us as long as they do a good job of explaining what we observe in the world; and unlike religions, we can't just pick and choose the theories that we like the best.

As tronvillain pointed out, Origin of Species has held up remarkably well, at least in its basic idea and broad outline. I second his suggestion about Darwin's Ghost--it's an excellent read. Origin of Species itself is remarkably accessible, though it's a real snoozer in places. It might be interesting for you to read the two books in parallel, since Darwin's Ghost follows OoS's structure, chapter by chapter.

Another great book is David Quammen's Song of the Dodo. It tells the story of Darwin and Wallace, and carries it forward to conservation biology. It's beautifully written, and funny as hell in places.

As for the Modern Synthesis (aka the Evolutionary Synthesis), try Ernst Mayr's This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World. As I recall, he describes it well (Mayr was one of the scientists involved in the MS and is utterly brilliant).

Again, sorry for getting this off on the wrong foot. Glad we've found the right one.

Starboy

No problem Splat. I come from a physics background. Physics has had some pretty good theories, and I think that is because for the most part it tries not to be a slave to fashion, no matter how good those fashions may be. How else could you explain Quantum Mechanics? Change doesn’t always lead to improvement, but try improving without it!

I have a long reading list here, thanks to everyone for the suggestions.

Starboy

Oolon Colluphid

Erm, I’m not sure how to take that. AFAIK (sorry, subculture , means ‘as far as I know’ ) no ‘evolutionists’ are ‘Darwin robots’. It ain’t a cult. Many if not most biologists do just fine without having ever read Origin.

Oh dear. Try any biology textbook, and every relevant peer-reviewed paper from the last forty years, in Nature, Science, Genetics, Evolution, and a whole host of others. The ‘modern synthesis’, which isn’t all that modern any more, was the uniting of Mendelian genetics with Darwin’s natural selection, and underscored by Watson & Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA. Which was in the 1950s.

Try the undergrad textbooks: Douglas Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology or Peter Skelton’s Evolution.

The ‘Modern Synthesis’, which is continually being refined further, is modern evolutionary biology. Nobody sets much store in what Darwin, writing 150 years ago, thought, except wrt (with respect to) the history of the ideas. Hence, it’s not fashion -- changing on a whim; nor is it religion -- blindly following old writings. Evolutionary biology is science. The reason textbooks go out of date is that Darwin is not the be-all and end-all of biology.

Yes. Read it.

Dawkins is nowadays a science populariser, though he was originally an ethologist under Tinbergen (studied digger wasps, IIRC). His theoretical books are Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. Some other people to investigate wrt evolutionary theory are Maynard Smith (eg integrating games theory), Ernst Mayr (on most things! <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> ), Stephen Jay Gould (Ontogeny and Phylogeny, punctuated equilibrium, and his new magnum opus the name of which I forget), Daniel Dennett (who is entirely theoretical, being a philosopher ), and many others.

It’s also important to realise that most findings have theoretical implications: in fact, testing of particular bits of a hypothesis is why most research is undertaken! Check out just about any biology-related paper in Nature every week!

Also note that evolutionary biology is on a secure mathematical basis with things like the Hardy-Weinberg equations; work is also going on integrating eg complexity / chaos theory, memetics (try Blackmore for an intro), abiogenesis, exobiology / biology of extreme environments, palaeoecology, palaeogenetics / ‘evo-devo’, endosymbiosis (eg Margulis), and of course sociobiology (try Alcock’s The Triumph of Sociobiology).

Nope, you are just talking outside your area of knowledge! The whole of biology didn’t end with Darwin. It started with him. And has developed theoretically ever since.

Cheers, Oolon