The God Delusion feels like it was lifted almost verbatim from The Root of All Evil?, the Dawkins documentary about monotheistic religion that aired on the UK’s Channel Four just before 2006’s Celebrity Big Brother. Sensationalist, emotional, and packing a real gut appeal in a post 9/11 society, it was great television that translated into a great page-turner; exactly the sort of thing that you hope for when making impulse buys at aeroport bookstores. A good book? No; it was a Channel Four documentary committed to the page. A good read? Definitely.
But Evolution for Everyone seems to have been lifted from Wilson’s undergraduate university courses. It’s full of useful, pertinent references to academic studies and of suggestions about where to turn for further information; an open door for people who sign up to fulfill a pre-req and then find themselves more interested than they expected. He sounds like the sort of avuncular, generous professor who isn’t afraid to share personal anecdotes with the class - the sort who’ll go off on a twenty minute tangent, and then make up for it with five minutes of sparkling lucidity.
The problem is that Wilson isn’t speaking or interacting with us in Evolution for Everyone. When he goes on the written anecdotal tangents, the prose devolves into thickets where his point can go into hiding for pages. This culminates in the almost completely immaterial story of how he became the person he is in the second last chapter, at which point I couldn’t figure out why the book hadn’t ended yet.
So I recommend Evolution for Everyone to people looking for a surrogate undergrad course about evolution and society, but I don’t recommend it as a God Delusion-ish substitute for television. And people who have a harder time tolerating lecture-hall tangents will probably prefer Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, a much tighter book that covers some of the same ground as Evolution for Everyone.
Evolution for Everyone is published by Delta Trade Paperbacks, and it's available in Canada from Random House .
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