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As much of the western scientific community reflects on the Year of Darwin festivities, with its self‐ congratulatory portrayals of the state of evolutionary theory and self‐serving revisions of its history, The Laws of Evolution gives us pause. It reminds us that evolutionary biology owes its birth to an age‐old desire to understand both the origin and diversification of organismal forms, and that the first of these themes remains largely forgotten in the Darwinian theory of evolution. How and why such a central theme had become marginalized over the last 150 years, while its once corollary – the principle of natural selection – had become elevated to the level of the official dogma is a fascinating lesson of what happens to a scientific theory when it acquires an " ism " (as in the Marx theory of capital vs. Marxism and the Darwin theory of natural selection vs. Darwinism) and a reflection of a longing that we, biologists awed by complexity of the world around us, have for a simple doctrine with near‐ universal explanatory powers. That the two principles – the principle by which developmental variation emerges and the principle by which this variation is sorted and maintained – are necessary for realistic evolutionary explanations of biological diversity and complexity has been recognized at least a half a century prior to Charles Darwin's Origin (Darwin 1859). In fact some of the major concepts that laid the foundation for Darwin's classic book – that species change over time and are related to each other by common descent, that evolution occurs through adaptation to the environment, that evolution proceeds both from simple to complex and in reverse (E. Darwin 1794; Lamarck 1809) – were driven by observations that the rules by which developmental variation emerges are often distinct from the rules by which this variation is maintained, and that both can influence historical change in a lineage. The enthusiasm with which Darwin's theory of natural selection was greeted by most of his contemporaries owes to its being viewed as a powerful complementary principle that would finally link the two well established components of evolutionary theory – phenotypic variation that provides material for natural selection and inheritance of traits modified by selection that assures evolutionary retention of favored configurations. The conflict began when Darwin, while retaining the concept of Lamarkian inheritance intact, greatly marginalized the effect of developmental variation. Because very little …

The Laws of Evolution and Derived Lawlike Principles.— Sacha Haywood . 2007. Hagenia, Oxford. 493 pp. ISBN 9780955740404. Hardcover, $57.