A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination

Abstract

A Reason for Everything is about Britain and natural history, butterflies and snails, impassioned beliefs, and ideological struggles. The book begins with Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered the idea of natural selection for himself in 1858, while his own life hung in a precarious, malarial balance - and closes with a portrait of Richard Dawkins, Britain's most prominent living advocate of natural selection. Charting the lives of some of the major thinkers in the years between, including Ronald Aylmer Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, John Maynard Smith and Bill Hamilton, A Reason for Everything is an elegant and sophisticated account of Darwinism's progression from the nineteenth-century to the present.

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