This volume by Depew and Weber constitutes an academic contribution of  the first rank. What the authors uncover about the past and propose for  the future is revolutionary, indeed! They do not pretend to have made a  watertight case for extending the Darwinian paradigm, but they certainly  lay before the reader a delightful narrative of the possibilities. -  Robert Ulanowicz, Chesapeake Biological Laboratory of the University of  Maryland    Darwinism Evolving examines the Darwinian research tradition in  evolutionary biology from its inception to its turbulent present,  arguing that recent advances in modeling the nonlinear dynamics of  complex systems may well catalyze the next major phase of Darwinian  evolutionism. While Darwinism has successfully resisted reduction to  physics, the authors point out that it has from the outset developed and  applied its core explanatory concept, natural selection, by borrowing  models from dynamics, a branch of physics. The recent development of  complex systems dynamics may afford Darwinism yet another occasion to  expand its explanatory power. Darwinism's use of dynamical models has  received insufficient attention from biologists, historians, and  philosophers who have concentrated instead on how evolutionary biology  has maintained its autonomy from physics. Yet, as Depew and Weber  observe, it is only by recovering Darwin's own relationship to Newtonian  models of systems dynamics, and genetical Darwinism's relationship to  statistical mechanics and probability theory, that insight can be gained  into how Darwinism can successfully meet the challenges it is currently  facing. Drawing on recent scholarship in the history of biology, Depew  and Weber bring the dynamical perspective to bear on a number of  important episodes in the history of the Darwinian research tradition:  Darwin's ''Newtonian'' Darwinism, the rise of ''developmentalist''  evolutionary theories and the eclipse of Darwinism at the turn of the  century, Darwinism's struggles to incorporate genetics, its eventual  regeneration in the modern evolutionary synthesis, challenges to that  synthesis that have been posed in recent decades by molecular genetics,  and recent proposals for meeting those challenges.  A Bradford  Book

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