Review: Islands in the Cosmos by Dale A. Russell

THE origin and evolution of life is probably the greatest story one can tell. In Islands in the Cosmos, Dale A. Russell does an OK job telling it, despite the fact that it is only meant to be the backdrop to the book’s bigger thesis. Russell’s real agenda is to argue that life becomes progressively fitter and more competitive as time goes on, and that evolution is therefore more predictable (or less contingent) than Stephen Jay Gould and company would have us believe. This is an important debate in evolutionary biology and Russell does well to raise it for…