The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution

1. The fundamentals of evolution: Darwin and Modern Synthesis

In this chapter and the next, I set out to provide a brief summary of the state of evolutionary biology before the advent of comparative genomics in 1995. Clearly, the task of distilling a century and a half of evolutionary thought and research into two brief, nearly nontechnical chapters is daunting, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, I believe that we can start by asking ourselves a straightforward question: What is the take-home message from all those decades of scholarship? We can garner a concise and sensible synopsis of the pregenomic evolutionary synthesis even while inevitably omitting most of the specifics.

I have attempted to combine history and logic in these first two chapters, ...