THE origin and evolution of life is probably the greatest story one can tell. In Islands in the Cosmos, does an OK job telling it, despite the fact that it is only meant to be the backdrop to the book鈥檚 bigger thesis. Russell鈥檚 real agenda is to argue that life becomes progressively fitter and more competitive as time goes on, and that evolution is therefore more predictable (or less contingent) than Stephen Jay Gould and company would have us believe. This is an important debate in evolutionary biology and Russell does well to raise it for discussion. But unfortunately it gets lost in his somewhat plodding one-bloody-thing-after-another account of the history of life, and the whole project comes across as somewhat ill-conceived. It is also not clear what the book鈥檚 title means, nor why it is subtitled 鈥渢he evolution of life on land鈥� when Russell spends so much time writing about marine life.
Indiana University Press