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Nature 447, 533 (31 May 2007) | doi:10.1038/447533a; Published online 30 May 2007

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Selling evolution

Mark Pagel1

BOOK REVIEWEDEvolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives

by David Sloan Wilson

Delacorte Press: 2007. 400 pp. $24

Evolutionary biologists — those enthusiastic foot-soldiers of Darwin's grand notion that life evolves by a process of descent with modification — cannot understand why so many people reject the great man's theory, and often in favour of some form of creationist account of the existence and diversity of life on Earth. In the opening pages of David Sloan Wilson's new popular-science book, hopefully entitled Evolution for Everyone, we discover that 54% of adults in the United States prefer to believe that humans did not evolve from some earlier species.