The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

What Hacker News says

1. skaMay 2017
   It's a really good example of what happens when you don't have a good editor (or don't let them do their work).

   It contains an interesting overview of some of the ideas and work done in cellular automata, made significantly worse by the authors seemingly pathological need to lay claim to work that was not his, and inflate the importance of work that was. It's entirely reasonable to decide you can't get past the tone and sheer tonnage of blather to dig for the good stuff hidden inside. As you note, it's also not very rigorous (and sometimes worse) but that's mostly forgivable in a lay text like this, and would be entirely addressed if it had a good set of citations.

   It's interesting to contrast this with another book that came out around the same time, Stephen J. Gould's "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory". They are of similar size and scope, but Gould does a much better job of presenting some of his own ideas in the larger context, and giving both credit and useful pointers into that context.

   As far as ANKS goes, I've always thought that there was probably a very nice 250 page book hidden inside it. It's just well hidden.

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2. colin_mccabeSep 2014
   Stephen Jay Gould published a lot of books about evolution. "Evolution and Extinction" is a nice light read to get started (just to pick a random book of his). "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" is a more formal book where he pulls together a lot of the ideas from the other books and from his research.

   He develops a lot of ideas in "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory"... basically:

   * Organisms are constrained by their evolutionary history... it's "easier" for them to develop in some directions than others. For example, the vertebrate body plans is extremely ancient and there are a lot of genes that do exactly the same job in mice and men, or even in more distantly related ancestors. Embryology and the field of Evolutionary development ("evodevo") has made a lot of this more concrete recently. Similarly, there is evidence that organisms draw on their evolutionary history as a "library" of possible responses to new stimuli.

   * Punctuated equilibrium: the fossil record shows millions of years of little to no change, followed by sudden mass extinctions that set the stage for another equilibrium period.

   * Sexual selection: if females are looking for some feature, males evolve to have that feature, even if it has no actual use or is harmful to the species. And vice versa. The peacock's tail is the classic example.

   * More controversially, Gould argues in favor of hierarchical selection, the idea that natural selection can act on groups or species as well as individuals. This is something that Dawkins vigorously denies, preferring to view the individual gene as the sole unit of evolution.

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3. jasomillNov 2013
   That'd be an incredibly wasteful and extravagant way to simulate the paper book UI, especially given that paper books have wildly different form factors. Do you really want to lug around a device the size of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory† to read a comic book?

   † 1464 pages, weighs more than 11 Kindle Paperwhites in hardcover

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