CREATURES OF ACCIDENT: The Rise of the Animal Kingdom
By Wallace Arthur, Ph.D.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux (September 2006)

The most important question in evolutionary theory today is how complex creatures like ourselves and our animal cousins arose from an earlier world in which all life-forms were bacteria. Yet, this hugely significant issue has been largely ignored in both professional and popular books on evolutionary theory. Professional evolutionary biologists have often focused on individual case studies - like the famous Darwin's Finches - but in doing so, they have lost sight of the big picture, as at the level of a small group of bird (or other) species, there are no increases in complexity; rather the species concerned are "just different." Writers of popular books on evolution have adopted various central themes - such as Stephen Jay Gould's historical contingency and Richard Dawkins' (opposing) pan-selectionism – but no recent popular book has championed the astonishing evolutionary ascent in the complexity of creatures that has taken place. In CREATURES OF ACCIDENT that is the central theme. And that makes the book unique. It also makes it controversial for two reasons: first, because focusing on increasing complexity suggests some creatures are more "advanced" than others - an idea regarded as heretical by the Politically Correct; and, second, because it refutes one of the central arguments of the "Intelligent Design" movement.

The audience for CREATURES OF ACCIDENT (80,000 words) consists of the same kind of people who read magazines like Natural History, Smithsonian, Discover and Scientific American, buy books by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldridge, Jacob Bronowski, Jared Diamond, Daniel C. Dennett and Stephen Pinker, and watch shows like Nova on PBS or cable networks such as The Discovery Channel. The book will also appeal to students and scientists in all areas of the biological (and other) sciences - and of course especially to those with an interest in evolutionary developmental biology (popularly known as "evo-devo"), one of the hottest topics in science today.

Wallace Arthur (Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology, Nottingham University) has been a member of academic staff in British and Irish universities for more than a quarter century and is currently Professor of Zoology (and Head of Department) at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He has written seven previous books, three of them "popular science" published by Penguin, Blackwell, and Cambridge. The most recent one was Biased Embryos and Evolution (Cambridge, 2004), which a recent review in Nature declared was "written with exemplary clarity and charm." The Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society of London, reviewing his The Origin of Animal Body Plans: A Study in Evolutionary Developmental Biology declared: "The elect are few. Stephen Jay Gould is joined by B.K. Hall and R.A. Raff. Wallace Arthur, though, scoops the pool." He has also published over 100 scientific articles and is European editor for the Blackwell journal Evolution & Development.