THE LIVING STREAM: Evolution and Man

Lectures in print have a tendency to sound like that, didactic and professorially redundant. Illustrations immediately become the slides that would have been shown. This bound version of Sir Alister Hardy's Gifford lectures in Natural Theology is no exception. However, the reader ought not to be put off by that, or fear that he will receive excessive doses of piety or religio-scientifico sophistry. Eight out of the ten lectures are excellent summaries of the rise of evolutionary ideas with many fine quotes from dozens of people who came before and after Wallace, Lamarck, and Darwin. Particularly good is the middle section in which Hardy introduces his ideas on the creative power of selection. Using fascinating examples of animal camouflage and mimicry he builds a persuasive case for the idea that behavior, a perceiving animal interacting with a dynamic environment, is a powerful evolutionary force. Throughout the book there is a strong underlying current of theism which culminates in the last two chapters with an enthusiastic and uncritical acceptance of telepathy, and a plea for a re-establishment of the idea of God as ""both a philosophical and a scientific reality.