Making Sense of Evolution explores contemporary evolutionary biology, focusing on the
elements of theories—selection, adaptation, and species—that are complex and open to
multiple possible interpretations, many of which are incompatible with one another and with
other accepted practices in the discipline. Particular experimental methods, for example,
may demand one understanding of “selection,” while the application of the same concept to
another area of evolutionary biology could necessitate a very different definition …

Ten years ago the evolutionary biologist Brian Charlesworth claimed thatmost evolutionary
geneticists would agree that the major problems of the field have been solved. What
remained was simply'debate about the relative importance of different processes in patterns
of evolutionary change'(The Good Fairy Godmother of Evolutionary Genetics, Current
Biology, 6, 1996, p. 220). Recent work on morphological stasis through evolutionary history
seems to indicate that even these meagre remains are disappearing (Estes, S. and SJ …