I received this email today:
Hi, I have a younger cousin who ran with a protestant fundamentalist crowd early in high school and as result started turning her nose at the notion of evolution, I thought she was a lost cause but now in her senior year she as mellowed (probably due to the mellowing of her crush on the fundie boy that drew her to this crowd in the first place) and I'd like to give her a book for Christmas that would relax whatever reflexive hang-ups she has acquired to studying evolution and biology. Since she's planning on going into engineering and has a real interest in the subject I wanted to get her a popular science text that highlights the design and engineering aspects of evolutionary adaptations. I remember The Blind Watchmaker delving into this stuff but I don't want any of Dawkins's jabs at religion to rub her the wrong the way. Know any other book that might work, not something too high-level but something that more specifically focuses on engineering parallels than just discussing evolution. Thanks for any suggestions.
The intersection between not high-level and focusing on engineering kind of made me scratch my head a bit. I went with these three in the response: Adaptation and Natural Selection, The Selfish Gene and The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. I know that the correspondent stipulated that the work not be high level, but I think you can get a lot out of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection without following all the details of how R.A. Fisher derives his formalisms; much of the math is accessible to an advanced high school student. Do readers have better suggests with the constraints imposed above? I'm actually curious for myself in terms of what texts might be best in spreading the Adaptive News. Note: It might actually be good for engineers to see how evolution is constrained by contingent conditions (e.g., phylogenetic or developmental constraint) in many cases.
