For those who like intellectual excitement, David Young invites his readers on a journey of adventure and discovery. This is the story of biological evolution and biological ideas and the people who propounded them. The journey begins in the seventeenth century, when even the most accomplished naturalists knew next to nothing of biology as we understand it today, but nevertheless set about enthusiastically categorizing the natural world around them. In particular, Dr. Young explores how early naturalists attempted to explain the great diversity of plants and animals and the fact that organisms are always well adapted to their particular way of life. The highpoint of this story may well be that by the middle of the nineteenth century Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace incorporated new evidence in a comprehensive theory of evolution, which has brought about a permanent advance in our understanding of the living world. Finally, the author Young moves to the twentieth century and picks out some of the main developments in research that have links to studies of evolution being carried out today. Read Less