"A New Yorker Best Book of the Year" "Vellend delivers ingenious explanations of how evolution gave us not only todays flora and fauna but governments, legal systems, languages, machines, and religion." * Kirkus Reviews * "Vellend is skilled at explaining science to the nonspecialist. [ This book] is a fascinating primer on evolution's wide reach." * Publishers Weekly * "Ambitious. . . . Here, biological evolution is merely one instance of a more fundamental process that can be seen in any system in which 'new variants are produced, inherited, and moved around' and only some variants proliferate. Stepping away from living things, Vellend finds this dynamic at work in the development of violins and typewriters, in the technologies undergirding ChatGPT, and in the spread of cultural values like individualism." * The New Yorker * "[ Vellend] does a valuable job of reminding us how little fundamental physics explains, or ever will."---Philip Ball, The Guardian "[ Vellend provides] a novel approach that details how evolutionary concepts apply to a range of subject areas. This is a philosophical work crafted for the lay reader. A really understandable narrative style, combined with a few graphical illustrations, achieves this goal."---S. R. Fegley, Choice
