It’s very nearly 150 years since Darwin’s seminal On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published. Yet his theory (widely recognised as the second most successful theory in science after quantum physics) is still subject to intense and at times acrimonious debate. According to a recent United States poll, 47 per cent of Americans accept the Biblical account of creation as factually true. Well, it only took Rome 350 years to come to terms with Gallileo, so one shouldn’t be too impatient . . .

Meanwhile, Darwin is very much a publisher’s paradise. Not only are the new discoveries in areas as disparate as animal and human behaviour, the history of life on earth, and medicine of perennial fascination, but the continuing attempts to undermine Darwin provide a basis for controversy that is always good news for publishers.

Richard Dawkins’s evocatively titled River Out of Eden is in the now familiar vein of short, pithily written books to which we have become accustomed. The river in question is the river of DNA (the genetic material that makes up our genes): it links each of us by a continuous chain back to the very origins of life on earth some 4,500 million years ago. Aside from dealing with the basic principles of genetics and the processes of evolution, Dawkins takes an opportunity to deal with some of the counter-arguments that have been levelled at contemporary Darwinism. Using particular examples, he demonstrates that most of these are the consequence of wilful misunderstanding or woeful ignorance.

The classic example of the genre is that evolution cannot be true because half an eye isn’t of any use, so it’s impossible to get from no eye to a fully functional eye. “What always impresses me whenever I hear this kind of argument,” writes Dawkins, “is the confidence with which it is asserted. How . . . can you be so sure that the . . . eye . . . wouldn’t work unless every part of it was perfect and in place?” In fact, eyes have evolved independently at least 40 times in the animal kingdom, and we can see all shades of intermediates from simple pinholes to the complex multifaceted eyes of insects.

Natalie Angier provides us with some of the natural history to fill in these gaps. A professional writer rather than a biologist, she has contributed a regular column to the New York Times for several years. The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views on the Nature of Life gathers together 40 of these short punchy pieces, with a focus on modern biology, natural history and human behaviour. Written with the stylishness of the professional essayist, these pieces provide very readable vignettes of topics that range from DNA and molecular biology to female choice (“an Eve-volutionary force”), and Margie Profett’s much talked-about new theory for the evolution of menstruation (to clear the reproductive system of bacteria and viral debris introduced by male sperm).

Being Human provides the husband-and-wife Gribbins (Mary, a teacher; John a physicist turned journalist) an opportunity to provide us with a thumb-nail sketch of human history and human behaviour. Aside from a potted guide to the role that climate and (maybe) comet impacts have played in the story of earthly life and extinctions, there are excellent summaries of human evolutionary history and Darwinian theory, as well as a particularly clearheaded attempt to breathe some common sense into the human sociobiology debate.

The grand finale, however, belongs to the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, a rumbustious defence of Darwinism. Dennett’s humorous (if at times overlong) rampage through the background to Darwinian biology and its contemporary significance is a tour de force. Frustrated by the extraordinary ignorance of some of the critics of modern Darwinism, he spares no punches. “To put it bluntly but fairly,” he observes, “anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is . . . inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.”

Dennett is always at his best when in pursuit of sloppy thinking. The centrepiece of this book is a demolition of Steven Jay Gould’s much-quoted spandrels argument. Gould and his colleague Richard Lewontin had argued that these architectural features of Venice’s San Marco church are a precise analogy to the many cases in which evolutionary biologists infer adaptations: in fact, they insisted, spandrels are merely unavoidable by-products of architectural form, and so it is with many so-called biological “adaptations”. Dennett shows that this simply isn’t true: the architectural problem could have been (and often was) solved in a number of equally satisfactory ways, but the particular shape used in San Marco is ideal for mounting mosaics. His verdict on Gould: alpha for effort, but delta-minus for factual accuracy. He is equally unsympathetic with Gould and Eldredge’s notion of punctuated equilibria (their suggestion that evolution goes in fits and starts), demonstrating with a delightful quote from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species that Darwin himself anticipated their very point.

Critics who assert that Darwinism is reductionist get equally short shrift. Dennett points out that these critics confuse genetic determinism (or Mendelism) with the Darwinian processes of natural selection (a point that Dawkins has also been at some pains to emphasise). Learning, as Dennett points out, is a Darwinian process. Claims that Darwinian explanations are reductionist are not only untrue, they are simply ignorant: the presence of a gene is explained not by chemistry (as a reductionist account would require) but by the emergent properties (the holist’s watchword) of the bearer’s sex and behaviour in a population context. Like most evolutionary biologists, Dennett is exasperated by critics’ obdurate refusal to acknowledge the weight of evidence (and some of these critics are scientists, for goodness’ sake!).

The support that Teilhard de Chardin’s loopy evolutionary theories continue to command is, he observes, “testimony to the depth of loathing of Darwin’s dangerous idea, a loathing so great that it will excuse any illogicality and tolerate any opacity in what purports to be an argument, if its bottom line promises relief from the oppressions of Darwinism. ”

Niles Eldredge (Reinventing Darwin: the great evolutionary debate) and Brian Goodwin (How the Leopard Changed its Spots) share some reservations about Darwinism, without wanting to dismiss it entirely. In their view, other factors besides natural selection are responsible for the way species look and evolve. Eldredge (a palaeontologist) sees large-scale patterns in evolution that he thinks cannot be explained by natural selection acting in a gradualist manner. As Dennett might have observed: nobody ever claimed that evolution is gradual (least of all Darwin), so what’s all the fuss about? The gradualism that Eldredge wants to identify with Darwinism can only occur under neutral selection - in other words, just when traditional Darwinian theory doesnt apply. Meanwhile, in order to have a controversial peg off which to hang his book, Eldredge is forced to maintain the guise of the outsider whose brilliant ideas have been ignored. It seems a pity to have spoiled what is otherwise a good book by reinventing Eldredge unnecessarily.

Brian Goodwin (a developmental biologist) suffers from a similar kind of myopia. He writes just the kind of book that leaves evolutionary biologists holding their heads in despair. Darwinism cannot be the whole story, he asserts, because developmental processes constrain the shapes that organisms can adopt (shades of Gould’s spandrels again). The trouble is that Darwinians have never thought that it was otherwise. Goodwin inevitably resorts to the example of the eye. (Why is it always the damned eye? It’s nothing like as complex as the brain.) His argument is that eyes tend to have a certain form because of the design constraints of the material from which they are constructed, hence natural selection cannot be a complete account of eyes. But this is to miss the essential Darwinian point. As Dennett remarks, the fact that eyes can be constructed does not make them inevitable: they are there only because they have been selected for (and that is all Darwin ever said). Darwinism is not (and never was) an explanation for how bodies are built: it’s an explanation for why we are not now all clones of the original virus-like life form. In this at times hard-going book, Goodwin repeatedly makes statements that bespeak a deep lack of understanding of evolutionary biology (though one that is not, in my experience, unusual among developmental biologists). Evolutionary biologists will be astonished to learn, for example, that conventional explanations about natural selection are purely historical accounts logically equivalent to physicists offering explanations of the kind: “The earth goes round the sun in an elliptical orbit this year because that is what it did last year, and the year before that, and so on back to the origin of the planetary system, and nothing has happened to change it.” This kind of historical argument probably is common among palaeontologists (another group of biologists with a notoriously poor understanding of Darwin), but any evolutionary biologist who produced an argument of that kind would be ridiculed (and certainly wouldn’t deserve any research funding). Like Darwin before them, evolutionary biologists are trying to explain the variation we see in the natural world, the differences between individuals.

Goodwin’s book, then, like Eldredge’s, is an interesting account of one corner of biology. But for all their claims, theirs are not serious attacks on Darwinism. The reason is simply that neither of them really understands what Darwinism is all about. It’s depressing to find that we can train so many of our biologists without giving them any understanding of the one theory that gives their discipline unity and coherence. Would we train physicists without teaching them about Newton?

River Out of Eden

By Richard Dawkins

Weidenfeld Nicholson Pounds 9.99

0 297 81540 7

The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views on the Nature of Life.

By Natalie Angier

Little,Brown Pounds 17.50. 0 316 87663 1

Being Human: Putting People in an Evolutionary Perspective

By Mary amd John Gribbin

Dent Pounds 16.99. 0 460 86164 6

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

By Daniel C Dennett

Allen Lane Pounds 25. 0 713 99090 2

Reinventing Darwin:The Great Evolutionary Debate

By Niles Eldridge

Weidenfeld Nicholson Pounds 18.99

0 297 81603 9

How the Leopard Changed its Spots

By Brian Goodwin

Orion Books Pounds 9.99

0 297 81499 0

Robin Dunbar is Professor of Psychology at Liverpool University.