Search

Book details Mean genes: From sex to money to food: Taming our primal instincts, by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan. New York: Basic, 2012. Pp. xvii + 297. S/b $16.99. Is evolutionary theory useful in the context of our everyday lives? The newly released second edition of Mean Genes by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan is written as a Darwinian self-help book for what we all use everyday: our own minds and bodies. The authors begin with the general premise that evolutionary thought can inform all areas of scientific inquiry. In the four sections of the book that follow, they use this assumption to explain the annoying yet constant struggles that persist in our lives. The book draws rationale from evolutionary psychology and behavior to justify our attitudes toward debt, fat, drugs, risk, greed, gender, beauty, infidelity, family, and friends/foes. Each topic is framed as a problem we confront in day-to-day life, documented with evidence from published anthropological, behavioral, and psychological scientific literature as well as examples from popular culture and personal anecdotes. Though the title may be reminiscent of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976), Burnham and Phelan rely less on a strict interpretation of evolutionary theory and more on telling an entertaining narrative to describe and provide resolution for complex, multifaceted problems with which we are all intimately familiar. The first edition of Mean Genes was released over a decade ago. The second edition is supplemented by commentary at the beginning of each section as well as general reflections in a preface and at the conclusion. These additions discuss the contemporary social and cultural context of the book. For example, the preface to “Thin Wallets and Fat Bodies” includes updated 2010 statistics for incidence of obesity in the United States to document the continued relevance of their arguments since the first edition (p. 15). The companion website at www.meangenes.org offers a “Notes and cited research section” with footnotes for the sometimes vague or oblique

Tree Thinking: An Introduction to Phylogenetic Biology, by David Baum and Stacey Smith. Greenwood Village, CO: Roberts and Company Publishers, 2013. Pp. xx +476. ISBN:9781936221165. H/b $75.00.