This book follows the development of evolutionary science over the past two hundred years. It highlights the fact that life endures even though all organisms and species are transitory or ephemeral. It goes on to explain that the extinction and evolution of species—interconnected in the web of life as “eternal ephemera”—are key concerns of evolutionary biology. The book begins in France with the naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who in 1801 first framed the overarching question about the emergence of new species. It moves on to the Italian geologist Giambattista Brocchi who brought in ideas fr ... More

This book follows the development of evolutionary science over the past two hundred years. It highlights the fact that life endures even though all organisms and species are transitory or ephemeral. It goes on to explain that the extinction and evolution of species—interconnected in the web of life as “eternal ephemera”—are key concerns of evolutionary biology. The book begins in France with the naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who in 1801 first framed the overarching question about the emergence of new species. It moves on to the Italian geologist Giambattista Brocchi who brought in ideas from geology and paleontology to expand the question. It details how, in 1825, at the University of Edinburgh, Robert Grant and Robert Jameson introduced the astounding ideas formulated by Lamarck and Brocchi to a young medical student named Charles Darwin and follows Darwin as he sets out on his voyage on the Beagle in 1831. The book revisits Darwin's early insights into evolution in South America and his later synthesis of his knowledge into the theory of the origin of species. It then considers the ideas of more recent evolutionary thinkers, such as George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as Niles Eldredge and Steven Jay Gould, who developed the concept of punctuated equilibria. The book provides many insights into evolutionary biology, and celebrates the organic, vital relationship between scientific thinking and its subjects.