Free evolutionary biology book excerpts via the NCSE
17Jun. 10
Cross-posted from Homologous Legs
The NCSE, that wonderful US organisation that fights to keep evolutionary biology taught properly in American public schools, has, since 2009, been giving away excerpts from various books about evolution on Facebook and their homepage. Robert Luhn, the NCSE’s Director of Communications, recently emailed me (and a whole lot of other people) to let me know that even though the original links to the excerpts are long buried in the site, they can still be downloaded — which is really good news, because it means you (myself included, actually) can all now get a substantial taste of the large number of excellent books about evolution out there.
Here’s the complete list of excerpts (they immediately download as PDFs), with links to Amazon so you can purchase the complete books if you like what you read. I would personally recommend Daniel Loxton’s “Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be” if you want something to donate to a local library — it’s a great children’s book that explains evolutionary concepts extremely well.
- Charles Darwin’s On the Origin Of Species: A Graphic Adaptation, by Michael Keller (Amazon)
- The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution, by Carl Zimmer (Amazon)
- Evolution, Second Edition, by Douglas J. Futuyma (Amazon)
- Evidence of Evolution, by Susan Middleton and Mary Ellen Hannibal (Amazon)
- Evolution: The story of life, by Douglas Palmer (Amazon)
- Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be, by Daniel Loxton (Amazon)
- Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, by Daniel Radosh (Amazon)
- Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction, 2nd edition, by Eugenie C. Scott (Amazon)
- Also available via the NCSE, even though it’s not specifically about evolutionary biology and/or creationism, is an excerpt from Massimo Pigliucci’s “Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk” (Amazon).
Happy reading, everyone! Let me know if there’s any particular excerpt that grabs your eye/mind — it’s always interesting to hear what people think are engaging reads.
