Darwin for Godless Materialists

The fight that liberals in the US have to fight against the stupidities of creationism means that most books on evolution that are published in the US have to spend a lot of their time debunking creationism and explaining the plausibility of the theory of evolution. A reader like me, whose world-view does not depend on voices from the sky heard by people long dead, gets a little impatient. Hence the search for books that take the fact of evolution as generally accepted in the beginning itself and spend their time discussing its mechanisms and implications—fascinating matters about which there is still a lot to learn. My favourites among the books that do this are Ernst Mayr's What Evolution Is and John Maynard Smith's The Theory of Evolution.

Both authors are accomplished biologists. Mayr has made important contributions to classification and theories of species formation. Maynard Smith is a population geneticist who pioneered the application of game theory to evolution and came up with the concept of an 'evolutionarily stable strategy' which has since then been used by economists too. Maynard Smith was initially trained as an engineer but later switched to zoology because he decided that "aeroplanes were noisy and old-fashioned".

The two books complement each other very well. Mayr's is more introductory, giving you the broad picture. Maynard Smith goes into more detail about the population genetics and molecular biology involved. Mayr's vision is that of a field zoologist. He talks about the influence of the environment and macro-evolution. Maynard Smith's tells us the story of the 'selfish gene' with more rigour than Dawkins' famous book.

In short, two books that must be on the table of everyone who wonders how the "endless forms most beautiful" of living nature come about.