Human evolution is not an evolution of progress and greater and greater perfection. The evolutionary tree is not a linear inevitable trajectory, but rather a tangled bush of fits and starts and dead ends and loss and happenstance. Nothing in it demands that we be special as a species.

I did learn about evolution and the fossil record and blah blah. So I guess the book did its job; I'm glad I read it. Only the language was weirdly inaccessible considering Gee is a journalist. He sounds like an academic trying to write for the pleebs but not quite getting it. A lot of his sentences are long and weirdly constructed. I had to read a whole bunch of sentences a few times over to try and figure out what he was trying to say. His humour took away from his message, for me. The book could have ended about halfway though. I liked the beginning, about our incredibly sparse fossil record and why phrases like "the missing link" need to be removed from our journalistic lexicon. But then he goes on for a while about how we can't make assumptions about how we evolved certain traits like standing erect but then continues on about how we may have evolved certain traits like standing erect. I liked the bit too where he talked about all the ways that humans are similar to other animals - our evolution wasn't strange or better, just different - but that could have been cut down a whole lot.

If you already like his writing, read it. If you want to learn some about how humans aren't at the top of the evolutionary ladder, read it. But you can probably put it down after the first few chapters. ( )

Henry Gee provides a clearly written, popular science book that puts evolution in general, and human evolution in particular, in perspective. The book also provides the reader with an understanding of science in general, and specifically the spotty nature of the fossil record and what information can and cannot be gleaned from it. I found the occassional dry humour entertaining. This is a book for the interested lay person, packed with relevant and important information, but not stuffed with excessive details or even indepth commentary. The Accidental Species is a book that provides food for thought and encourages (or provokes, as the case may be) discussion.

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