Press: Upper Saddle River, NJ. US $39.44 hb.

Evolution: a view from the 21st century, written by an eminent microbiologist-bacterial molecular geneticist, is an ambitious book. It has something novel and highly interesting to say about evolution and it deserves to be widely read. Nevertheless, I have found doing this review a difficult exercise. In the interest of “full disclosure”, I should say that the author, Jim Shapiro, is a friend with whom I have previously discussed these ideas. (I had not, however, known about the book until it was published.) Friends, however, do not always agree and he and I have differed about some of his ideas. Nor have those disagreements been dispelled by my reading the book. In particular, I think that there is an alternative interpretation of some of the phenomena presented and cited here as providing support for the central thesis. In addition, I regard one core proposition, though only explicitly stated at the end and then partially hedged, as, simply, wrong. Hence, while I strongly recommend the book and hope that it is widely read and discussed, I cannot equivalently endorse its big idea or, at least, not all of it. In this review, I will first describe the contents of the book and its central thesis and will then try to explain where the problems, in my opinion, reside