Ayala is eminently qualified to write such a book, reviewer Joel W. Martin observes, especially because of his irenic attitude toward faith. The book is “well-written, accurate, and concise, and it covers the main points of biological evolution likely to be questioned by non-specialists,” although two of the questions Ayala addresses (What is DNA? and How Did Life Begin?) strike Martin as somewhat out of place.

Almost half a century after the publication of The Theory of Island Biogeography, the contributors to Losos and Ricklefs’s collection — including Wilson himself, with his retrospective essay “Island biogeography in the 1960s” — take a look back at MacArthur and Wilson’s seminal work and a look forward at new directions and dimensions for the field.

The latest and thoroughly updated edition of a classic textbook, which Edward J Miller describes as “an instructor–scientist’s dream: attractive, interesting, and questioning; full and broad; with superb graphics; and ranging from pre-historical to historical to today — including nowadays environmental issues.

Phylogeography is the discipline that traces the evolutionary history of genotypes through space. “John Avise is the acknowledged founder of the field that he has named ‘phylogeography,’” Svante Pääbo writes. “This book presents the intellectual underpinning of this novel focus of research. It is eminently accessible to students and researchers who approach this problem from a practical angle and are not well-versed in the quite complex mathematics that underline many of these approaches.