David Sloan Wilson's first book for a general audience, Evolution for Everyone (Bantam Dell, $24), outlines the principles of evolution in language easily understood by non-experts. In it, Wilson makes a case for using evolution to understand all species, humans most definitely included.

Wilson uses straightforward language and compelling anecdotes drawn from scientific studies in a variety of disciplines to create a conversational tone in the book. He calls many other experts by their first names, lets the reader in on details of his personal life and clearly conveys the excitement he and other scientists feel at the moment of discovery, whether that discovery is momentous or relatively minute.

Wilson, a distinguished professor of biological sciences with a joint appointment in anthropology, founded the Evolutionary Studies program, or EvoS, to teach evolution in an integrated fashion at Binghamton University. The book is a distillation of his popular course of the same name.

Evolution for Everyone, which was released in spring 2007, has been well received by reviewers across the country.

Natalie Angier, writing in the New York Times' Sunday Book Review, said: "Wilson invites readers inside and shows them how Darwinism is done, and at lesson's end urges us to go ahead, feel free to try it at home. The result is a sprightly, absorbing and charmingly earnest book that manages a minor miracle, the near-complete emulsifying of science and the 'real world,' ingredients too often kept stubbornly, senselessly apart."

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