I regret that my shallow knowledge of biology and biochemistry did not allow me to fully appreciate this very interesting book, making me to search for references every time I needed to get a better understanding of mechanisms of genetics. It is not an easy-to-read book, and its fragmented style, which requires a thorough attention, does not help the reader. I remember that in university math courses it was said that "economists learnt how to use mathematics, whilst biologists did not", and I believe that this book is a good example of that (as a comparison term, I found much clearer the papers by Maynard Smith). But it is really worth reading it and facing these difficulties, and its price, compared to the deepness of its content, is quite low.

Science has two principal effects on its practitioners. One, totally beneficial, is heuristic -- that is, it trains the scientist to think and discover for himself. Plainly we need as much education in this aspect of science as we can get. But another characteristic of science is double-edged, and this is its tendency to analyse, to break down the whole into components. Now plainly analysis is a very vital part of the heuristic process; but its side-effects, as in some medicines, may be extremely pernicious. This book teaches how to overcome evolutionary side-effects: allenatevi con Darwin!

The purely analytic scientist becomes so accustomed to seeing matter as a demonstration of certain verifiable or falsifiable principles that he lives at one remove from it. Here Michod confronts the duality between the scientific approach of evolutionary theses and the "real" world, where the perplexity arises for the law, the scientific explanation, the need to categorize.