I started out really wanting to like this book, and I ended up finishing it still wanting to like it, but things went astray somewhere in between. In essence, I think that everyone involved has tried just a bit too hard to produce this book, and they have over-done it in a way that makes the whole seem less than the sum of the parts. Evolution: Making Sense of Life is an interesting collaboration between a well-known science writer and an academic biologist. Carl Zimmer is an award-winning writer on evolution, with several books for the masses under his belt, whereas Douglas Emlen is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Montana (in the United States).

According to Emlen's professional homepage, the collaboration had one main goal: a revolutionary new textbook designed from the start to be an enjoyable and engaging read. Evolution reflects our shared vision for what modern textbooks can be: exciting, relevant, concept-oriented, and gorgeously illustrated; a reading adventure designed to grab the imagination of students, showing them exactly why it is that evolution makes such brilliant sense of life. This goal is an important concept for me, because my earliest book reviews (in the early 1990s) concerned themselves very much with the search for a textbook that presented systematics as an interesting science rather than solely as one component of academic intellectual activity.

A new evolution textbook for biology majors. “Two master craftsmen in the art of scientific communication have combined to produce an excellent basic text on. This book and not others about evolution by Carl Zimmer. Embed identifying information into the PDF. Making sense of life, by Carl Zimmer & Douglas J. Sangam Last Episode Written Update Of Kasam.

I failed to find any such thing at the time. So, Zimmer and Emlen have their hearts in the right place, as far as I am concerned. My concern is that they may have missed their goal simply by trying too hard. The writing in the book itself is smooth and engaging, which is perhaps the book's greatest strength. A textbook can consist of “a page of dry text defining some obscure term in biology” (to quote a book review that I once read), but Zimmer and Emlen have succeeded in going well beyond this. There is, sadly, no way to make a textbook read like a novel, but making it readable is itself a meaningful goal in science. The book is organized in an innovative way, starting with the science and philosophy of evolution, then proceeding through fossils, phylogenetics, genotypes, phenotypes, selection, adaptation, microevolution, macroevolution, and behavior, and ending with human evolution and medicine.

I have seen few books that try to create an interesting storyline throughout, and yet this one does. The objective has not been to present evolutionary studies but rather to make studying evolution interesting. This is a laudable goal, and it has been amply achieved. The content is as current as you could expect, but obviously only until last year, and only from the authors' perspective. This does create a few problems, arising from the fact that the book leads you to expect an unreasonable degree of currency. For example, topics such as junk DNA, or phylogenetic networks versus trees, get mentioned, but not in a way that will allow the book to remain contemporaneous. It is true that one way to engage the interest of students is by presenting last week's news rather than last year's, but I doubt that a textbook could ever do this.

Currency should be the preserve of the students' interactions with their instructors, not their authors. Moreover, Zimmer and Emlen wished to create a “reading adventure” but, instead of being an introductory story, it is more like The Lord of the Rings, an epic saga in the Scandinavian tradition. This is hardly surprising, because the more you look at something in biology the more complex it turns out to be. Evolution, as the over-arching conceptual framework for all of the biological sciences, is thus inevitably the most complex idea (or set of ideas) to fully grasp. However, I am not sure that this is what a textbook should be trying to do, as even I found the book rather over-whelming. That is, while trying to present the message “evolution is all-encompassing,” the authors end up saying “evolution is over-whelming.” Trying to keep track of all of the information was like trying to keep track of all the Russian names in a Tolstoy novel.

Perhaps it works better as a textbook, which is read a bit at a time over the several months of a semester, but even then this might not quite work. There are 18 chapters, ranging from 18–52 pages, although most are in the 32–40 page range. Since semesters often have 12–13 weeks of classes (plus tests, etc.), the question for an instructor becomes which chapters to leave out, or which to combine into a single session. A perusal of the web for courses that have already adopted the book (which came out in August 2012, even though the copyright date is 2013) indicates that the most popular ones to skip are the final four, on partnerships, behavior, humans, and medicine, and the first couple of chapters are most often combined.