I received this email today:
Hi, I have a younger cousin who ran with a protestant fundamentalist crowd early in high school and as result started turning her nose at the notion of evolution, I thought she was a lost cause but now in her senior year she as mellowed (probably due to the mellowing of her crush on the fundie boy that drew her to this crowd in the first place) and I'd like to give her a book for Christmas that would relax whatever reflexive hang-ups she has acquired to studying evolution and biology. Since she's planning on going into engineering and has a real interest in the subject I wanted to get her a popular science text that highlights the design and engineering aspects of evolutionary adaptations. I remember The Blind Watchmaker delving into this stuff but I don't want any of Dawkins's jabs at religion to rub her the wrong the way. Know any other book that might work, not something too high-level but something that more specifically focuses on engineering parallels than just discussing evolution. Thanks for any suggestions.
The intersection between not high-level and focusing on engineering kind of made me scratch my head a bit. I went with these three in the response: Adaptation and Natural Selection, The Selfish Gene and The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. I know that the correspondent stipulated that the work not be high level, but I think you can get a lot out of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection without following all the details of how R.A. Fisher derives his formalisms; much of the math is accessible to an advanced high school student. Do readers have better suggests with the constraints imposed above? I'm actually curious for myself in terms of what texts might be best in spreading the Adaptive News.
Note: It might actually be good for engineers to see how evolution is constrained by contingent conditions (e.g., phylogenetic or developmental constraint) in many cases.
Yikes, you're suggesting Fisher? I think he should start her off with some good popular-science level stuff before throwing her anything that mathematical and that old.
I did a quick peruse of the past-books list on our Popular Science Book Club site. The Gecko's Foot (bio-inspired engineering) by Peter Forbes might be good.
rosie, i reviewed forbes' book for science & spirit...and i don't know if it is engaging enough. of course, i did recommend the notoriously dense fisher...but the payoff for understanding him is pretty high. in any case, yeah, the math in fisher isn't palatable for many people, but if she wants to be an engineer she shouldn't really be phased by anything in it. you don't need to internalize all the derivations anyway to get the logic.
"The Theory of Evolution" (1993 edition) by John Maynard Smith. I recommend this to anyone seeking a comprehensive overview of the neo-Darwinian synthesis.
I second Maynard Smith. He actually was an engineer before he was a biologist. Very clear and forceful.
With her background I wouldn't give her anything that had the words "evolution", "Darwin" or "Dawkins" on the cover, as these would probably just produce the opposite reaction to what you intend. Also, I wouldn't give them anything to do with engineering - if they are really interested in the subject then they have probably already read it - and anyhow, they will be getting quite enough of that fairly soon.
What you need is a good, exciting read that also happens to introduce the reader to some of the of the key ideas and players of modern biology. Something like "The Double Helix". Maybe a book by Carl Zimmer?
Your aim should be to try to undermine her doubts, not demolish them all in one go.
tristam, evolution for everyone might do the trick in that case.
I wouldn't recommend GTNS for newcomers to the subject, if only because they might get as far as the 'eugenic' chapters!
Apart from really introductory works like Zimmer's (I mean no disrespect), how about 'Adaptation', edited by Michael R. Rose and George V. Lauder? For a wavering fundamentalist, this has the advantage of setting natural selection in the context of the traditional Argument from Design.
A lot of Gould's stuff highlights the importance of structural constraints on evolution, but does so on a way understandable to the lay-person. How about "Ever Since Darwin"?
I'd highly recommend Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI by David Fogel. It's about the authors development of a high-level Checkers-playing program using neural networks and evolutionary algorithms. The early chapters include wonderfully clear and concise explanations of evolution and neural network theory at a level that a smart but naive reader can grasp easily.
I think a key in introducing evolution to an engineer is to first present it as a search/optimization algorithm in a very general sense, rather than with all the messy trappings of biology. Boiled down to an cyclical parallel search algorithm, evolution can be grasped at an intuitive level before having to wrestle with organic chemistry or molecular biology. For example, Fogel shows how to use evolutionary algorithms to solve the Traveling Salesman problem. Once the engineering mind has wrapped itself around the basic concepts from an engineering point of view, then I'd have them read some of the more biologically-oriented books from this thread.
I would also recommend Stephen Jay Gould's writing.
"The Mismeasure of Man" or "The Richness of Life" would be good starting points and his writing is superb; clear and understandable.
Also he is never snide or derogatory; just factual and direct.
He would have made a great engineer :o)
Once I had read Gould I was enthralled enough to now have all his popular books and a few of his technical ones.
whoa, bizarro universe. everything...is...inverted...
For a high school senior, I'd recommend Sean Carroll's Making of the Fittest. He hits everything from an evo-devo angle and his examples feature the effects of common selection on diverse lineages -- just the sort of thing that is really persuasive against creationism without pushing the human angle first.
Also, if she's interested at all in ecology and extinction, I would suggest Ghosts of Evolution by Connie Barlow. It's all about mutualisms between extinct megafauna and plants that still survive today. It's a little repetitive and a little basic for most of the readers here, but it's a good high-school-level book for someone just getting interested in evolutionary biology.
If you want a popular science book, Andrew Parker's 'Seven Deadly Colours' might be good. It's about the colours of animals and each chapter focuses on how a specific type of colour is produced (eg: pigments, structural colours, fluorescence, etc). So it talks about the engineering aspects of colour production but there's also a fair bit of info on the evolution of vision, camouflage and mimicry as well.
Razib: you do remember the contents of the last chapters of Fisher's book, right? Do you really want to project that aspect of early evolutionary research to a young christian type? (Reading the main gnxp website might have desensitized most of us to it, but normal folks do find these things offensive).
Gould's popular writings are good, and Full House is a must-read. The Selfish Gene might brush some people the wrong way due to the central argument, but the book is really good at conveying the message of how evolution works (i.e. by promoting gene replication). I haven't read JMS' book, but everyone who has says it's excellent
Note: there is one (not-so-)technical paper that you should point her to (and read it yourself if you haven't done so already , and read again if you have): R. Lewontin, "The Units of Selection", 1970 (Google Scholar FTW). It explains the damn thing (evolution by natural selection) concisely and precisely, doing away with a few common misconceptions (e.g. no, you don't need a malthusian restriction for natural selection to act).
If you want engineering parallels to evolution, may suggest the most direct parellels: genetic programming and evolutionary algorithms: evolving hardware.
http://www.damninteresting.com/index.php?s=evolutionary+algorithm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming
One of George William's popular books, perhaps The Pony Fish's Glow might be good. David Sloan Wilson's Evolution for Everyone is also very good, if she can get past Evolution in the title. I've witnessed the material in DSW convert people who were adverse to evolution for religious reasons into people open to it (see http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1… for more info).