Understanding evolution is hard. In this book, Kostas Kampourakis aims to help the reader not only to understand evolution but also to understand why understanding evolution is so hard. The presentation is informed by up-to-date biology as well as by state-of-the-art historical, philosophical, and psychological scholarship relevant to the teaching of evolution, which Kampourakis masterfully summarizes and even, on occasion, extends. Helpfully, the book teems in examples, diagrams, tables, and illustrations, and is fully supplied with end-of-chapter summaries, lists of further reading, and a glossary. Ambitiously planned and carefully argued, Understanding Evolution is a tour de force.

Unsurprisingly, evolution itself is the focus of chapter 1. Kampourakis begins inauspiciously with a definition of evolution as “the natural process by which new species emerge as the modified descendants of pre-existing ones” (p. 1): evolution can occur without speciation resulting. But the remainder of the chapter provides a generally unproblematic sketch of...

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