The Wars Over Evolution

By Richard C. Lewontin

The Evolution–Creation Struggle

<>by Michael Ruse, Harvard University Press, 327 pp., $25.95

Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution

by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, University of Chicago Press, 332 pp. $30.00

1.

The development of evolutionary biology has induced two opposite reactions, both of which threaten its legitimacy as a natural scientific explana-tion. One, based on religious convictions, rejects the science of evolution in a fit of hostility, attempting to destroy it by challenging its sufficiency as the mechanism that explains the history of life in general and of the material nature of human beings in particular. One demand of those who hold such views is that their competing theories be taught in the schools.